Comments on: Detain McCain!

By: Al

Al — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:01:21 +0000

Amen to that, Steve. I just published your comment as our latest post, for greater exposure to our audience of trillions.

By: Steve Alber

Steve Alber — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:41:27 +0000

Whether or not John McCain has the right to run for president is really a point, which, though moot, has already been decided in his favor, but I’m not sure by whom. The composition of his family, his formative years, his residence in Malaysia, etc. so doesn’t matter it’s not even funny. What does matter is whether or not he supports and defends the Constitution … which you actually have to swear to do before you can get an American passport. I assume McCain has a passport, but he may have misspoken himself when he agreed to that admittedly minor stipulation. (What the passport folks really care about is getting your hundred bucks and making sure both your ears are visible in your passport picture.) Anyway, it’s hard to see how someone can claim to support the Constitution when he says “Amen!” to assholes like Alberto Gonzales who actually claim before a congressional committee that Americans have no right to habeas corpus. (This would be of no consequence if Gonzales were just some Texas yahoo who didn’t happen to be the Attorney General of the United States when he said, basically, “Fuck the Constitution. What George Bush wants is what’s important. At least that’s what Cheney told me to say.”) I’ll bet you if you pushed McCain, he’d also claim that the 10th Amendment trumps the rest of the Constitution, but that’s another issue. One can only hope that with the nonsense of people’s family history out of the way, we may have a civil debate about the issues. Yeah, right.

Steve Alber

By: mike

mike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:59:14 +0000

The above excerpt is from an article in SFGate titled
Could Obama be the first Asian American president?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/07/30/apop.DTL&hw=obama+asian&sn=001&sc=1000
Show Obama has some strange origins himself

By: Al

Al — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:19:23 +0000

PS
We cross-posted this piece on DailyKos and got 57 comments, the last of which (straightening out another comment which had misunderstood the post) was this:

“It seems to me that the intent of this diary was to point out that the Bush administration’s bizarre claim that the Constitution doesn’t apply at US bases overseas might have some unintended consequences.”

That and a few other bizarre anti-American, unconstitutional claims made by the outgoing Republicans.

By: Al

Al — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:04:20 +0000

But he (Obama) believes most of what you believe. McCain believes most of what George Bush believes — an alien set of values in every sense of the word alien.

By: mike

mike — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:41:00 +0000

He was born and raised in Hawaii, the only majority-Asian state in the union; he spent four formative years in Jakarta, the home of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, where he attended local schools and learned passable Bahasa Indonesia. The family with whom he’s closest â€” half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and her Chinese Canadian husband, Konrad Ng â€” are Asian American. So, too, are the most senior members of his congressional team â€” his Senate chief of staff Pete Rouse, whose mother is Japanese American, and his legislative director Chris Lu, whose parents hail from Taiwan.
I’m ready to vote for Trent Lott at this point
Evidence for Obama’s affinity with the Asian American experience runs true even as one delves deeper into his history. “A lot of aspects of the senator’s story will be recognizable to many Asian Americans,” says Lu, a Harvard Law School classmate of the senator’s who joined the team in 2005. “He talks about feeling like somewhat of an outsider; about coming to terms with his self-identity; about figuring out how to reconcile the values from his unique heritage with those of larger U.S. society. These are tensions and conflicts that play out in the lives of all children of immigrants.”