So why didn't the GOP reform health care before?

[TravisBickelsMohawk]

So Obama got elected because he's black? Who gives a fuck.

And a tired argument at best. Don't make me remind you of how Bush got "elected."

[vlad]

The whole "Obama got elected because he's Black" meme is so ridiculous.

Democrats, of any race race voted for him because he was...wait for it...the Democractic candidate.

Others that voted for him, further right on the spectrum, didn't suddenly dig the idea that a Black man could be President, but most probably because the GOP option was ridiculous or they were just sick of the Bush era.

Now, quite possibly, some did vote for him because he is Black (like some extra voter turnout..how much?)...of course otherwise, if he'd been White, they have voted for McCain?

The same can be siad, and has been said, that there was more voter turnout for McCain because Obama is Black....

I thought it was pretty cool that in a country where, when I was a child, the Black family in our church group wasn't allowed into the public pool (in the '70's ! )has come this far.

I also am amused that Bush, etc fucked up sooooooo bad, that 7 years after 9/11 we elected a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. (Though my spellchecker still doesn't recognise "Barack". )

[MasterOfMeatPuppets]

Recession over, economy rebounding finally, 'Government Motors' is heading for it's first profit in years, the 'government banks' have paid back all the cash they borrowed and we're not taking it in the ass from the insurance companies anymore Oh yeah, there's no more torture, secret prison camps and other crap usually associated with places like North Korea and Nazi Germany.

I see you didn't dispute more debt, more deficits, less jobs, higher taxes, more spending. Thanks for playing.

We had all that when Bush was president so nothing changed there.

Anything uncomfortable is torture in a whacked out liberals eyes. And Obama condones "torture" anyway:
U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/po ... ition.html

“The emphasis will be on ensuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees would be sent to countries known to conduct abusive interrogations.

Obama ends torture: http://waterboarding.org/node/43
As for torture:

Thomas Harrison called it the "water treatment".

On May 21, 1951, Lt Col Harrison's F-80 jet fighter was shot down over North Korea. Two years later, Harrison returned home to Clovis, New Mexico a broken man.

His Communist captors, he said, "would bend my head back, put a towel over my face and pour water over the towel. I could not breathe. This went on hour after hour, day after day. It was freezing cold. When I would pass out, they would shake me and begin again."

The treatment inflicted on downed airmen like Harrison spurred the Pentagon in the 1950s to study Communist torture. False confessions, it was discovered, were drawn by methods designed to elicit dependency and dread employing water, cold air, forced standing, isolation and humiliation. According to one 1956 CIA-sponsored report [PDF]:

The Communists do not look upon these assaults as 'torture'. Undoubtedly, they use the methods which they do in order to conform, in a typical legalistic manner to overt Communist principles which demand that 'no force or torture be used in extracting information from prisoners'. But these methods do, of course, constitute torture and physical coercion. All of them lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/po ... .html?_r=1
Is this guy a whacked out liberal or a war hero? Please tell us.

Tell me the Japanese didn't deserve to be hung for waterboarding US soldiers in WWII.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 70_pf.html

Tell me this is false:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/1 ... ure-perio/

3. If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives. The Small Wars Council had a spirited discussion about this earlier in the year, especially when former Marine Generals Krulak and Hoar rejected all arguments for torture.

Evan Wallach wrote a brilliant history of the use of waterboarding as a war crime and the open acceptance of it by the administration in an article for Columbia Journal for Transnational Law. In it he describes how the ideological Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo validated the current dilemma we find ourselves in by asserting that the President had powers above and beyond the Constitution and the Congress:

“Congress doesn’t have the power to tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique....It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.”

That is an astounding assertion. It reflects a basic disregard for the law of the United States, the Constitution and basic moral decency.

Another MSNBC commentator defended the administration and stated that waterboarding is "not a new phenomenon" and that it had "been pinned on President Bush … but this has been part of interrogation for years and years and years." He is correct, but only partially. The Washington Post reported in 2006 that it was mainly America’s enemies that used it as a principal interrogation method. After World War 2, Japanese waterboard team members were tried for war crimes. In Vietnam, service members were placed under investigation when a photo of a field-expedient waterboarding became publicly known.

Torture in captivity simulation training reveals there are ways an enemy can inflict punishment which will render the subject wholly helpless and which will generally overcome his willpower. The torturer will trigger within the subject a survival instinct, in this case the ability to breathe, which makes the victim instantly pliable and ready to comply. It is purely and simply a tool by which to deprive a human being of his ability to resist through physical humiliation. The very concept of an American Torturer is an anathema to our values.

I concur strongly with the opinions of professional interrogators like Colonel Stewart Herrington, and victims of torture like Senator John McCain. If you want consistent, accurate and reliable intelligence, be inquisitive, analytical, patient but most of all professional, amiable and compassionate.

Who will complain about the new world-wide embrace of torture? America has justified it legally at the highest levels of government. Even worse, the administration has selectively leaked supposed successes of the water board such as the alleged Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessions. However, in the same breath the CIA sources for the Washington Post noted that in Mohammed’s case they got information but "not all of it reliable." Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

According to the President, this is not a torture, so future torturers in other countries now have an American legal basis to perform the acts. Every hostile intelligence agency and terrorist in the world will consider it a viable tool, which can be used with impunity. It has been turned into perfectly acceptable behavior for information finding.

A torture victim can be made to say anything by an evil nation that does not abide by humanity, morality, treaties or rule of law. Today we are on the verge of becoming that nation. Is it possible that September 11 hurt us so much that we have decided to gladly adopt the tools of KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the Nazi Gestapo, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans and the Burmese Junta?

What next if the waterboarding on a critical the captive doesn’t work and you have a timetable to stop the “ticking bomb” scenario? Electric shock to the genitals? Taking a pregnant woman and electrocuting the fetus inside her? Executing a captive’s children in front of him? Dropping live people from an airplane over the ocean? It has all been done by governments seeking information. All claimed the same need to stop the ticking bomb. It is not a far leap from torture to murder, especially if the subject is defiant. Are we willing to trade our nation’s soul for tactical intelligence?

[tin00can]

I think that is a valid point that gets overlooked. If we are saying it is acceptable for the US to do it, aren't we also, at least tacitly, saying is is acceptable for it to be done to us? If not, why not? Right or wrong isn't a consideration in this; the other side thinks they are in the right. Who determines what is right?

So, I think it is a legit question: for those who don't think waterboarding is torture, do you think it is acceptable for it to be done to captured American troops?

[JakeYonkel]

And no one voted for McCain just because he was white? Besides that, Obama campaigned on HCR. Please stfu, and gtfo.

Of course some people voted for McCain because he was white, but we weren't talking about him. Pay attention dildo. I know he campaigned on health care. I said so. Since you couldn't read my post, I'll try again and type it slower for you. The average Obama supporter didn't care about health care. All they cared about was that he was cool, read off a teleprompter well, and for a lot of them, that he was black.

A lot of people voted for him because we couldn't afford 4 more years of Republican incompetence. Jake Yonkel is a prime example.

You've got that wrong.

I thought McCain ran a woefully poor campaign, he was far too moderate on some issues, and his running mate sucked.

The best thing for the Republicans would be to let the Democrats take the wheel for a couple years and remind the country while both parties may be incompetent, the Republicans ultimately do a better job.

[Hames Jetfield]

Ahh, so Jake Yonkel's vote was a sacrificial lamb to make the Republican Party "wake up." That's just as stupid as voting for a president based on race, or the fact that it's a "historical moment." In fact, I'd say it's just as stupid.

[JakeYonkel]

No, I wasn't going to reward a piss poor campaign.

Hate on Obama all you want but his campaign was GREAT. He inspired millions. This isn't debatable.

I didn't vote against "four more years of Republican incompetence." McCain was NOT going to be a third term of Bush, despite what the liberals said. He was far more moderate.

He was a shitty candidate to begin with, but then by taking somebody like Palin as a running mate rather than Romney or Huckabee he effectively killed ANY chance he had, if he had a chance at all.

Obama managed to pull tons of blacks out of the woodwork that had never voted before as well as people who were too caught up in 'history' to realize or care who and what they were voting for.

You want to say I cast an ignorant vote, go right ahead. But I KNEW Barry wasn't going to pay my mortgage.

[Hames Jetfield]

No, I wasn't going to reward a piss poor campaign.

Hate on Obama all you want but his campaign was GREAT. He inspired millions. This isn't debatable.

I didn't vote against "four more years of Republican incompetence." McCain was NOT going to be a third term of Bush, despite what the liberals said. He was far more moderate.

He was a shitty candidate to begin with, but then by taking somebody like Palin as a running mate rather than Romney or Huckabee he effectively killed ANY chance he had, if he had a chance at all.

Obama managed to pull tons of blacks out of the woodwork that had never voted before as well as people who were too caught up in 'history' to realize or care who and what they were voting for.

You want to say I cast an ignorant vote, go right ahead. But I KNEW Barry wasn't going to pay my mortgage.

So now you're saying you reward campaigns with your vote, instead of voting for the person who is more close to your ideals, even if they aren't conservative enough for you? You do know that there is usually a third choice that you can vote for, if for nothing else than to not reward either party, right? I still think your reasoning of voting for Obama is stupid but then again it helped to elect him...so what do I know.

[JakeYonkel]

Voting third party is throwing your vote away. Yeah, I know, if everyone who felt that way actually voted for the third party it wouldn't be, but that's not going to change.

If I lived in a state that was extremely red or blue I could see myself doing that, since my vote wouldn't really matter anyway. But living in a major swing state I think it's important that my vote counts.

Neither candidate was close to my ideals. I guess McCain moreso than Obama, obviously, but I sure as hell didn't choose him in the primary - he probably wouldn't have even made my top 5 Republican candidates.