Right-Wing Areas (College: house, rent, work)

[Glitch]

Originally Posted by User 2

Great sentence, speaking of drivel, ......like the KKK.

I'm glad you said that. Can I quote you in the political forum? Maybe the immigration forum? (or should I say the anti-Immigration forum?)

Have you forgotten that at one time in our history, Republicans were the liberals and what we call Democrats were the conservatives of their time?

You want to debate historical facts from another century? I study history as a hobby, I enjoy discussing historical fact with people who are sufficiently knowledgeable about it.

Yes, Byrd is reported to have been a member of the KKK at one time.

He also renounced the same. Said he made a very bad choice and has since become aware of how bad that decision was.

I'll leave you to prove who supports the KKK today. You're willing to make the statement, show us some sources to back up your contentions. Did you hear it on Rush's show or some other reliable source?


Compare apples to apples, Glitch. You'll look better than trying to compare apples to kumquats.

I don't know about 'no bigger bigots' being ascribed allegiance with current parties of either side of the aisle, I'm not in the habit of making unfounded accusations. I'll leave you to make your case.

Since history is your hobby, here are a few historical events you can read up on:

• May 1866: The Ku Klux Klan was formed in Pulaski, Tennessee by ex-confederate Democrats.
• July 30, 1866: New Orleans’ Democratic government ordered police to raid an integrated GOP meeting, killing 40 people and injuring 150. Also in 1866, 94 percent of GOP senators and 96 percent of GOP House members approved the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans equal protection of the law. Every congressional Democrat voted “No.”
• April 1867: Ex-confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest organizes the Men of Justice, the Pale Faces, the Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood, and the Order of the White Rose under the Ku Klux Klan and becomes the first Grand Wizard.
• April 20, 1871: The GOP Congress adopted the Ku Klux Klan Act, banning the pro-Democrat domestic terrorist group.
• Feb. 8, 1894: Democratic President Grover Cleveland and a Democratic Congress repealed the GOP’s Enforcement Act, thus denying black voters federal protection.
• Jan. 26, 1922: The House adopted a GOP bill to make lynching a federal crime. Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure.
• Aug. 17, 1937: Republicans opposed Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s Supreme Court nominee, Sen. Hugo Black, D-AL, a former Klansman who defended Klansmen against race-murder charges.
• Sept. 24, 1957: Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock’s government schools over the strenuous resistance of Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus.
• July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd’s 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 34% of Senate Democrat majority failed to scuttle the measure.
• Present Day: The Democrats’ Klan-coddling today is embodied by KKK alumnus Robert Byrd, West Virginia’s logorrheic senator.

The historical bigotry of the Democrats is long and sorted, and continues to this day with their ardent support for Affirmative Action. So your implication that Republicans are racist would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetically ignorant.

[Xa'at]

Originally Posted by HG_75

It's racist now for somebody to want to live in a community with people similar to them?

Nope. It's racist to want to live in a community with people only or mostly of the same ethnicity.

[rotorhead]

Xa'at "Nope. It's racist to want to live in a community with people only or mostly of the same ethnicity" Uhmm...not exactly....not even close...actually.

It's racist when you treat someone differently based on the color of their skin.

Wanting to live in a place where your own race is the overwhelming ethnicity isn't racist, merely narrow-minded and intolerant.

And regarding the comments about jerrymandering, it's well stated that BOTH current political parties in the US have an unfortunate history of such. It's the undeniable fact that every party with a workable majority seeks to extend its incumbency by any means, and redistricting is often the deciding factor.

Correct me if I'm wrong (yes, it happens occasionally) but isn't the original reason for the US Census apportionment of representatives in the House? The number of US Senators is limited to two per state, but the number of representatives in the House is based on each states population and changes every ten years or so according to the latest Census figures.

BTW, if you want to live in a totally white-bread state, try Iowa. Alaska might be a pretty solid "red state" politically, but it's a veritable rainbow coalition compared to most of the midwest when it comes to ethnicity.

[Xa'at]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

Xa'at "Nope. It's racist to want to live in a community with people only or mostly of the same ethnicity" Uhmm...not exactly....not even close...actually.

Well, we can certainly agree to disagree. Racism is a social construction, which stems from inequalities that are built into our society regarding access to resources... etc. That's Conflict Theory 101. Racism is a catch-all term that encompasses a wide variety of behaviors, actions, even thoughts. To consciously (or even unconsciously) want to avoid others solely because of their ethnicity, the color of their skin, even their sexual orientation, falls under the category of racism, even though traditionally racism has been linked to skin color.

[rotorhead]

Whatever definition you use, it's ugly and unfortunate, regardless.

Note that by this I specifically include the institutionalized inequality of quota hiring and "racial set-asides" that constitute "affirmative action". It's always been my opinion that two wrongs do not make a right, and you cannot make up for past injustices by instituting policies that discriminate in the present.

I also stand by my statement that if you want to live in a caucasian monoculture, try Iowa. Alaska is not even close to that.

[User 2]

Originally Posted by Glitch

your implication that Republicans are racist would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetically ignorant

My implication?

I need not imply anything, let alone worry about what you say I said, especially when I know what I said, and it wasn't what you said I said.

And your history? Seems to confirm what I told you before, go back a ways and the Repubicans were what we today call liberals or progressives, and the Democrats of that day were what we call today's conservatives.

Go back far enough, and they were both the same party.

No doubt being a history buff yourself, you remember the Democratic-Republican Party, those guys who did in the Federalist Party?

Maybe not, your bullet points start where you build a small snapshot of history that you think will support your argument, it wouldn't do to show those parts of history that don't support that, eh?

Anyway, back to our story...

The Democratic-Republican Party broke up, and the what remained formed what they called the Democratic Party, they dropped the Republican part of the name.

In another several years the Democratic Party split again, with those from the northern states, the anti-slavery guys, they split with the southern states, the pro-slavery guys. So now you have two seperate mindsets vieing for power to sloganeer under the 'Democratic' banner.


(...these guys didn't have Madison Avenue consultants, they werent' very creative with names, just kept using the same ones over and over.)



That split, allowed another new party to form, and they took the name of the Republican Party again. That was Lincoln's party. And Lincoln, against some of the wishes of his new party, freed the slaves.


Well then, there's a period where there wasn't any more splits and renaming for a while, the South and the North were at a standoff. Suffice it to say that reconstruction and the war still was less than a generation back and folks were a bit touchy still.

The Depression ended up causing what the talking pointers would call a flip-flop. The Democrats started to go the other way and started being more liberal, more liberal than the Republicans.

Then we had some real weird politics for a while.

The flip flopping and the mixed camps in both partys, segregation, anti-segragation, the Dixie-crats still trying to rally southern states. Some smaller independent partys formed and fell away.

Well, the upshot is the Dixie-crats broke away and ended up being assimilated into the Republican Party. So now we have pro-slavery Southerners, who used to be called Democrats, but now they're called Republicans.

( again, we only have the two names thing)

So, now the old Democratic Party Southerners, the Dixie-crats are Republicans and they continue to consolidate their power and with the help of some southern states, attempt to swing the Republican Party to an even more conservative segregationist stance. Strom Thurmond ring a bell?

George Wallace, another southern segregationist who left the Democratic Party because they were becoming anti-segregationist, tried so start a segregationist party of his own.

So, during this time, there's lot's of infighting in both camps.

That infighting in both camps led to a period where neither party, and neither the liberal factions or the conservative factions were able to swing things their way. Kind of an oddly bipartisan split right up the middle of both partys.

But, we all know that didn't last.

The Republican Party figured out a southern strategy and the Democratic Party figured out how to go after the evangelical vote. (I know, they both later flip-flopped again and reversed roles on that one)

Back to the saga, now the Democrats, on the born again vote, make inroads in the south again. But they don't hold it, the Republicans go after the born again vote and go back after the southern white vote and now the Republicans are solidly conservative and the Democrats are solidly liberal.

This bring us into the right wing, left wing partisan politics we know today.

But you have to remember, while the partys were slugging it out and flopping back and forth between conservative and liberal, back and forth and every which way, that all played out in terms of presidential limits of terms, the Congress, with their much longer terms, really had a mixed up bag of what used to be one side, finding their party changed out from under them on both sides of the aisle, well, they did their own flopping back and forth, only there was that built in lag time because of the longer terms of office.

So, in Congress, you had, for instance, conservative Democrats, who were elected while their party was conservative, still in office while their party changed to a liberal party. And on the Republican side, the opposite was true.

It wasn't until just the last generation, that both, the partys and the Congressional candidates, were firmly in the grasp of either liberals or conservatives.

And today, there can be no mistake, the liberal or progressive anti segregationists control the Democratic Party, and the segregationist conservative Republican are their opposite.

So the next time someone tells you that the Democrats are one thing, and the Republicans are the other.

Make sure they're comparing today to today.

Cause if you look back in history, you can say all kinds of things, and you won't necessarily be telling an untruth, but it won't bear much on matters today, and it won't tell you if the party in question was under whose control, or whether they were the conservatives of their day or the liberals of their day.


Now, Glitch (glitch seems apt somehow)

There were actually 3 Enforcement Acts and you might want to read up on US vs Cruikshank. Because whatever you were making out of conservative Democrats of that day, and who are now the Republicans and the current legacy holders of that action, the last word wasn't either party, it was the US Supreme Court. The Congress of the day was only performing bookwork to clean up the statutes and confirm what the Supreme Court decided before that.

As to your last point, Byrd is not coddling the Klan today, he's just not and you can produce no current documentation that he does.

Besides, even if he did, he's maybe the oldest living Congressman, one of the last of all those flip-floppers you conveniently left out of your little bullet point 'presentation'.

You want to nitpick the above, go ahead, it's a nickel version, far from detailed, but it's true to what the history was in the way of showing that the Republicans of today are very much different than the Republicans of yesteryear. And the same goes for what the Democratic Party is today.

See ya, keep studying your history.

(learn it all, and maybe you'll quit trying to cherry pick it.)

[User 2]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

It's racist when you treat someone differently based on the color of their skin.

rotorhead,

Look up the word, sound it out, racism is about race. It's often misused, but it's not color of skin. Often people of different races have different colors of skin, but there's racism between people who have the same skin color. It's race based, it's in the root form of the word itself.

You are not in any way incorrect in one sense, though,

...it is also narrow minded, and intolerant.

Bigotry means a feeling of superiority over, or intolerance of another, again doesn't say race or skin.

Prejudice means you hold a preconceived notion not based on reason or actual experience.

If one is xenophobic, they're ultranationalistic, jingoistic and all of the above.

I can't think of a word that has a definition based on skin color bias. People use the other words above, but none of them have skin color in their definition.

All those words get tossed around and mixed up. All those words are charged with emotion, especially when misused.

Yet another reason to try to use the right word.

Originally Posted by rotorhead

isn't the original reason for the US Census apportionment of representatives in the House? The number of US Senators is limited to two per state, but the number of representatives in the House is based on each states population and changes every ten years or so according to the latest Census figures.

Your first question seems to be incomplete or misworded somehow, but I think you're asking if the Census apportionment was to establish the number of representatives? And does it change that number with subsequent findings of each successive Census?

It started with Article 1 of the Consitution. The whole process is complicated, look here:

Congressional Apportionment--Historical Perspective

We didn't start out electing Senators. Senators were not intended to be voted on, that only came about in the early 1900's, 1912 or 1913, can't recall the exact date. It used to be that state legislatures picked your Senators. (and there were some other odd ways before we got to where we are today, I'm not versed on all the changes and how it's gone from there to today. In the end, the 17th Amendment set it the way it is today.

[Xa'at]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

Whatever definition you use, it's ugly and unfortunate, regardless.

Indeed. I'm not sure I agree with you about affirmative action, but I don't really have a strong opinion either way so it could be said that I really don't care.

[rotorhead]

I've long thought that we need more parties, in more than one way.

Referring specifically to political parties, I think the US could easily support a half-dozen more with good results. Everyone's so used to the "Bi-Partisan" system when we have a MULTI-party system. It's just that the big money corporations and the incumbents don't want anything to change and disrupt their sweet deal. About the only thing that the Democrats and the Republicans can ALWAYS agree on is that they'll both do their best to make sure that theres not going to be a "third choice" out there. I could see a system where a coalition government would be necessary, with the ever-shifting alliances and constant changing balance of power that we don't have now. I think it generally leads to more centrist legislation and fewer abuses of the party system, among other advantages. When you look at US history, you see that the current two-party setup is actually a fairly recent phase, and hasn't always been the case despite what we're used to seeing.

I'd love to see a congress and house divided into eight or ten squabbling, back-stabbing, contentious parties. Not only would it upset the comfortable little apple cart carrying along the fat cats of the right AND the left, but it would be vastly more entertaining than our current system (see Italy for example). Not only would it make for much more interesting politics, but it would limit the amount of overall legislation that gets passed due to the constant infighting and distraction.

The mundane day-to-day operation of government isn't done by congress, but by the huge and growing corps of civil servants. They're gonna keep doing what they do no matter who's technically in charge. In my opinion the less they get done on the hill in DC, the better off the rest of us are.

[c.adam]

I personally think the way it's done in every other Democracy is much better. You have temporary Alliances between the various parties that change every year. So in essence you have the People deciding the issues, not the Parties. People are more loyal to their Parties than their Country.