2.      What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

  5.   You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

And anyone who thinks otherwise, SHAME ON YOU!!!

Now, to those that supported Obama, like I did, I suggest we take a real close look at his ‘teachings’ and ideals.  Are they going to work?  I don’t know.  I think we need and needed change, but I am cautiously pessimistic about his actions.  So, let’s see,    rick emmerich

He’s brilliant, and I resent the non-stop attacks he is getting.

I hate that he seems to be willing to take away freedoms and I have never been able to accept Pro Choice since coming out of the waters of baptism.

Health Care needs fixing and Corporate Greed permeates EVERY area of government and politics.  No one may have the strength to change that.  60 Minutes tonite talked about the Medicaid (or what it Medicare) inability to stop massive fraud. 

McCain seems somewhat gracious as the loser but I can’t imagine him as president.  Palin is a nut and I really would be fearful with her having massive influence in the government.  She seems fully suited…to be a Reality Show actress, but may feel that is below her now.  Pity, she obviously needs the money.

There’s no one else to discuss.  Saying that he is/was the lesser of two evils is too strong, but he’s not the huge favorite with me or the rest of the country anymore.

I think it’s imperative that we, as hard-working citizens in control of our own destiny, take charge of our lives and build our businesses and happily pay our taxes.

I guess that’s it for now, gotta get back to work,   rick

God will hold everyone accountable and that includes you, me and Obama. 
 

Just wondering what your thoughts are now that they have been in office for awhile and you can now see first hand the “change” that has been implemented in the country.  Would you vote for him again if you had the choice to do it over?  Just curious – I am not being factious.

This letter is racist and wrong.  Most of Obama’s education came from the prestigious private school called Punahou here in Honolulu.  The emphasis on the color of his mothers’ skin and father’s skin is a sick attempt to inflame racial hatred.

Obama is from the USA and has worshipped for 20 years at a Church of Christ.

When you say he’ll come from the East, do you mean Hawaii, or Chicago, or Kansas?  Which one of those is the East you are referring to?

Oh wait, he spent 2 years in a Catholic school.  He must secretly be a Catholic, right?  One could twist it that way, as well.

I am a Christian and what I see here is hogwash.  My NIV Bible does not say anything that can be interpreted in THIS way.

By the way, we are NOT at war with the Muslim Nation.  If we ever get to THAT we will lose.  The terrorists are a small group of radical Muslims amidst a very large number that are not.

I feel sorry for those that are easily misled, like sheep that simply and mindlessly forward this without questioning.  Those that are of more noble character, like the Bereans examine the Scriptures daily and make sure what they are told is true.

I will pray for those that are so easily misled.  It is sad that some are so paranoid.

I am a Christian who is for Barack even though I do not believe in everything he stands for.  He is NOT the one who has anger management issues and wants to drag out this terrible war and who stands for 4 or 8 more years of the same old same old.  He DOES stand for hope for millions of Americans who feel that their voices have not been heard.

I pray that you all will have the discernment to see through this hate-inspiring rhetoric.  I am not necessarily asking people to supoport Obama, just to have the decency to disregard this poorly disguised racial hatred.

Rick Emmerich 

What’s new with the  Democratic campaign?  Not a whole lot, it seems.  Obama’s opponent seems to continue on throwing rocks, and some have hit the mark.  The 3AM ad worked for her.

It would appear that this is headed into he convention in hot contention, without a candidate.  That means a split party, which will then put on the big happy face and try to make nice on TV coast to coast.  It means that the voters of Michigan and Florida, two different, and very key states will not have their voices heard in the Primary.  Do you think, party officials that you can get it right in four years?  It’s a little embarrassing, don’t you think?

It also means that it will be a while before we get into the Democrat vs Republican contest that is going to eventually start.

So here we are, waiting for Obama to hopefully get enough support in PA to remain constant.  And, since I much prefer him, it would be great if he won the majority of the remaining contests.  

Hillary scares me, and if she is on the ticket as the lead dog, I won’t vote for them….perhaps I won’t vote.  If he is the man, I don’t really see her submitting to being the VP candidate, but I would vote for that ticket.

Then there’s the issue of abortion.  I see that no one seems to be bringing it up.  I am Pro Life, by the way, but 16 out of the last 24 years we’ve had a Pro Life president, and nothing that I have observed has changed.  So I am no longer going to make a blanket Pro Life vote (which  results in thousands more of our young people dying in Irag and other bleak outposts.)

Obama has a plan to bring our servicemen and women home and I believe him.  I don’t believe his opponent, who seems to have taken vast sums of money from lobbyists.  She also voted for the war at the beginning.  She also is the establishment, at least to me.

So there I have it kids.  I guess its important to mull it over, and we’ll all find out soon enough what happens.  What if John Edwards is the VP candidate and he brings over his small, but rowdy band of earned delegates?  Just a thought…. 

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This talks about Obama’s upbringing at Punahou school, where my wife also attended…..Enjoy

GRACE WITH RACE Sunday, February 03, 2008
MICHAEL BAUGHMAN

In 1971, at age 10, Barack Obama moved from Indonesia to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. Soon he enrolled at Punahou School , where he became known as “Barry.” In his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” his grandfather visits the Punahou campus with him. “Hell, Bar,” the grandfather says, “this isn’t a school. This is heaven. You just might get me to go back to school with you.”

In 1948, at age 10, I moved to Hawaii from western Pennsylvania and enrolled at Punahou. Before the move I attended a dingy public elementary school in a suburb of Pittsburgh , an area once described by H.L. Mencken as the ugliest place on earth. I too was taken at first sight with the beauty of Punahou’s Manoa Valley campus, its spacious fields and palm-lined roads, the steep backdrop of green mountains.

Obama and I earned good grades, participated in athletics, remained at Punahou through graduation, then left to attend college on the East Coast. Obama’s father was Kenyan, his white mother a native of Kansas . My father was Pennsylvania Dutch, my mother a direct descendant of Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, who fought against the Americans during the Revolutionary War.

I can’t pretend to know Obama’s mind, nor can I be certain of his political motivations; but we have fundamental things in common. The formative teenage years are a difficult and vital time of life, and because Hawaii is such a unique place I feel secure in assuming that he went through a process of maturation that must have been similar to mine.

Hawaii is an exceedingly complex stew of cultural and ethnic feuds and alliances. Newcomers, particularly newcomers who can’t readily be labeled, are bound to have a difficult time fitting in.

Punahou itself contributed significantly to the complexity and confusion. The school has long been regarded by the local population as a place where privileged rich people send their children. In Obama’s words, “Punahou had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites.”

The school was founded in 1841 by the missionary families who, in 1893, stole the islands from the natives through an act they called “annexation.”

Many generations of the “elite” missionary families have attended Punahou, and continue to attend. As a result there are understandable reasons for the animosity regarding the school. In 1953 and 1954 I played for Punahou teams that won Interscholastic League football championships. When 30,000 fans packed the old Honolulu Stadium for the deciding games those years, at least 29,000 of them cheered mightily against us.

Several descendants of the Americans principally responsible for the arrest of Queen Liliuokalani and the overthrow of the monarchy became friends of mine during my Punahou years. One of them occasionally traveled to South America , with his horses, for weekend polo matches. All of them eventually inherited huge sums of money, vast tracts of land, or both.

But I learned early on that these people weren’t necessarily to be envied. During visits to the homes of my wealthy friends in Manoa and Nuuanu Valleys and Kahala, I glimpsed the same kinds of revealing scenes that Obama records — a reclusive mother sneaking a drink of gin in the kitchen at lunchtime, a red-faced father muttering vile obscenities into a telephone.

The gulf between rich and poor is exaggerated in Hawaii , and, for many residents, Punahou has always symbolized rich haoles and always will. But poor boys and girls, most often athletes in my day, also attend the school. Though some angry fans called us haoles (Hawaiian slang for whites) when we ran onto the stadium football field, we had a Samoan running back, a Filipino quarterback, Hawaiian tackles and Japanese guards — and me, at right end, beside my best Hawaiian friend, Curtis Iaukea.

Off campus, during the teenage years, bad things sometimes happened to me in Honolulu , most often when I drank too much beer. Downtown one night, a friend and I were beaten bloody and unconscious by a gang of Japanese boys. We had been dumb enough to tell them we went to Punahou. I had several late-night fights in the parking lot at Kau Kau Korner, the popular Waikiki drive-in of the day.

Irrational conflict can be as instructive as formal schooling. Somehow, by the time I was ready to graduate, ethnic and economic differences had become almost meaningless. The change occurred so gradually I was barely aware of it. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama puts what I’m getting at this way: “A year passes and you know you feel differently; but you’re not sure what or why or how. . . .” What I do know is that every class at Punahou, every walk down a Honolulu street, every ride on a city bus, every team I played for was multiracial. I had my problems, my insecurities, my fights, and I finally ended up with friends of every imaginable ethnicity and, thankfully, became virtually blind to their differences, if indeed there are any.

When I left Hawaii after my senior year, on my way to Boston University on a football scholarship, I spent the summer in Detroit with an aunt and uncle. There I was exposed to genuine racism. After Hawaii it came as a shock. The N-word was used often and venomously by almost everybody I spoke to in the working-class neighborhood. I spent a lot of my afternoons at Briggs Stadium watching the Tigers play. I sat in the cheapest seats in centerfield, with blacks, and felt very much at home among the people my aunt and uncle and their neighbors feared.

A few years later I traveled extensively through the segregated South, then served a tour as an enlisted man in the Army. I learned more about ignorance and prejudice, and I realized that Hawaii , though by no means without its serious social flaws and grave economic problems, surely comes as close as anywhere on Earth to achieving racial tolerance.

In June 2005, my Punahou class celebrated a weeklong 50th reunion. One of my memories is an early morning meeting at Waikiki Beach with two old friends. Curtis Iaukea, after a career in professional football and then professional wrestling, operates a rental stand at Waikiki , and when I arrived he was already there, sitting on the beach wall by the old concrete pier. Ed Jensen, a Portland resident and the retired CEO of Visa International, showed up soon afterward. There we were, a former wrestler, a liberal professor and a high-powered capitalist — and we got along just fine. Even though I don’t know exactly how or why it happens, that, I believe, is the fortunate result of living one’s formative years in Hawaii.

So I believe Hawaii has to be one large reason why Barack Obama is a man so clearly comfortable in his own skin. Hawaii is why I believe him when he says he wants to move from self-serving partisanship toward productive inclusiveness. I believe he might even be able to make good on his promise to transform the red and blue states into the United States . I certainly think he can take us to a better place than we’ve been occupying as a country now for a good long while. If all of it happens, if any of it does, we should probably thank Hawaii .

Michael Baughman lives in Ashland with his extended family. He is an emeritus English professor at Southern Oregon University and the author of several books.

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I’ll admit, I did not think Obama was for real, about three months ago.  I watched him at the time he campaigned with Oprah and felt, he’s overmatched with HER.  If she were the VP cnadidate, and Oprah herself the presidential option, now that would be something.

Then, when I wasn’t watching, he matured or grew.

I heard from my sister and bro-in-law from South Carolina who really burned the candle at both ends helping him out in the primary.  They mentioned words like passion, caring, intelligence.

There’s always the issue of abortion for me, but I can’t deny his smarts. his charisma, his charm, confidence and he doesn’t seem afraid of Mrs. Clinton or that Republican guy.

I’m wondering how this last group of important primary states will shake out.  Well, last night, my wife and I did our civic duty and voted in the Primary.  It was interesting and sure took a long time for us to wind our way up to the front in line.  When we got there we saw an old firend, and our landlord.  (Not the same guy.)

Through the line experience we shared with people who and why.  All of our little group was voting for Obama, and I kidded my wife that she had made her decision becuase she and Obama both went to Punahou School, though at different times.

The general consensus was that he was for REAL change (we’ve had 24 years of Bush and Clinton family members, and how has THAT worked for us?)  Also he is very intelligent, refreshing and now really appears strong.

I mentioned that at first my Obama vote was really an anti-Hillary vote, and we laughed.  She reminds me of the Lord of the Rings.  In the movie, the elf-queen Galladriel predicts the horror of how she would appear if Frodo would give her the ONE ring of power.  He was quite shocked, and I think Hillary’s anger and strength will would actually work against her.

I understand that all the candidates have a temper and there are times that that comes out.

It seems that Obama is appearing more, well, presidential these days.  He seems like a confident leader that is ready to take on the world.  He doesn’t seem like that guy that fumbled a little when he shared the stage with the Oprah.  Of course, it won’t be easy.

How about if he says “I’m giving you all a car!”  That’s a heck of a lot better than the chicken in every pot promise.  And not bad for Detroit, either.  

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