Are the local schools running the Obama speech to US students next week?
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I agree with you T Jamz on the name thing, i think i understood what Ichi meant, but it did sound bad the way it was worded. As for the pledge, locally it may still be true that the pledge is alive, But look to bigger citys and more liberal areas, it is happening, they are either not saying the pledge or rewording it. I lived in NY for a while when i was younger and they were bickering about it then. It really shouldn't matter, "One nation under God" I see no problem with it cause weather it is a Muslim, Christian, Jehovah's Witness, Ect, it says God, not any specific god, whatever god you believe in is up to you. Now if you don't agree with the pledge, don't fu**ing recite it! Stand (or sit) respectfully and quietly till it is over. Too many people think they are entitled to force their opinions or beliefs on everyone else. Obama is stuck on the idea that everybody is entitled to the same wealth's as their neighbor. Well Bullshit! i am nowhere near rich, i have a piss poor paying crap job, but I'm not whining for handouts, If you are wealthy because you had a great idea, good education, were born into it, so be it! That doesn't give me the right to make you support me cause I'm not rich, and if you are a lazy no job bum, same thing applies then you only have the right to the fruits of your own labor, NOTHING! Now there are cases where people can't support themselves due to illnesses ect, they may truly need the support, and that's a different story.
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[warning: long-ass thrash posting ahead]
Quick Fun Fact: "Under God" didn't show up in the Pledge of Allegience until the 1950s. You're right when you're talking about people wanting to force their views on others, and it works both ways: it took a substantial lobbying/favor effort to get Under God added to the pledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance#Addition_of_the_words_.22under_God.22
I agree with you on one point though: some people simply get too bent out of shape about any mention of religion anywhere.
Now, regarding the pledge of allegience: I have a interesting [to me] story to relate. I went to the Fargo Tea Party a while back and they started the evening with the Pledge.
I hadn't said it in years and as it was announced that we were going to start it, I paniced. The question that ran through my mind was, "Do I really beleive these words? Is this an Oath I should be taking?"
This isn't the America that the stars and stripes were raised over; this isn't the America we liberated from the British, this isn't the America governed by the first and finest negative-liberties constitution anywhere in the world. This land.. this place that shares a geographic footprint with where America started and faded away.. is something else.
In our nation of today, we have adopted all of the platform planks of the (unsuccessful, unelected) Socialist Party of America of the early 1900s.
Our money is owned and controlled by a semi-private national bank -- the creation of which is not only unconstitutional, but is so shadowy that no name is attached to the final draft of the legislation creating it (the Federal Reserve Act).
The purchasing power of today's dollar is less than 3% of what it was 100 years ago. You can surmise that any money you save today will lose more than 70% of its value in the next 50 years. For most of you, that means saving money to retire today is pointless: money of today will be worthless by the time you want to use it.
Our own armed forces, deployed on our own soil in peace time, have forcefully disarmed and confiscated weapons from our own law abiding citizens. (NOLA, post Katrina). The last time "our" government threatened to do this, the revolutionary war happened.
The US federal government, instead of being the small government envisioned by our founders, is now the largest employer on the entire planet.
Our founders -- who had just gotten finished defeating the strongest military in the entire world -- expected us to NOT have a standing army! We were to have no entangling alliances with other nations, and we were to not meddle in the affairs of others.
Instead, we have soldiers stationed in 130 foreign countries and active non-wars on two continents. I call them non-wars because the congress, the only body allowed to make a declaration of war, never declared a war, and yet still our soldiers are being killed just the same.
Our constitution says that the government must be restrained, so that the intrinsic rights of man -- his life, liberty, and property -- may be kept safe from the violence of governors. Instead, our government ignores these rights, so that it can steal from us to create false rights -- the right to a job, the right to shelter, the right to a good meal, and now the right to health insurance?. But these positive rights can only be created by destroying our real rights -- the right to keep our property, and ultimately, the right to keep our lives.
Our federal government has detained a US citizen, on US soil, and held him in a federal prison for multiple years without ever filing charges against him.
Earlier in our history, the government was happy to go through the pretense of caring by amending the constitution to grant itself power -- the 16th amendment stripped away all previous limitations on the nature of taxation, and led to the creation of the Income tax and many other subsequent taxes. But at least they acknowledged that to have such taxes, they'd need to change what the law allowed them to do.
But now, the government doesn't even bother. Take every item in the bill of rights, and ask yourself if the federal government respects and follows it, or merely pays it lip service and does whatever they please.
So as I stood there saying the words, I decided what I really meant: I pledge my Allegience to the *Idea *of America, and to any Americans that similarly support that idea.
But I don't know where they all went, and I don't know where that America is today, and I don't know how to do my part to actually act on my oath to support it.
Is "The United States of America" only a name attached to a geographic location? When nobody was "from here", what made us "Americans" was the ideology that we shared -- the idea of a limited government that stayed out of our way, so that each of us could lead our lives as we chose.
If that meaning is gone, if being "American" simply means you were born south of Canada and north of Mexico -- then I can't pledge allegience to that any more than I could promise never to live on the other side of the Mississippi or the other side of town. It's a meaningless promise, spoken by someone with no convictions or no understanding. And I'm afraid that those are entirely the types of people we're left with. The men who've destroyed the ideas and the realization this nation were founded on have nothing more to their credit than being born in a particular spot. The shame of it all is not only what we've lost, but who we've lost it to.
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EXCELLENT post thrash!
Starting first with the pledge of allegiance: IF you were an atheist, would you REALLY want to pledge your allegiance to a country if within that pledge you have to state that you followed God? Isn't that part of why America parted ways with the British in the first place and why pilgrims (early settlers, etc...) came over here to avoid religious prosecution? Yet so many of us get bent out of shape when someone is of a different faith than the general populous.
Excluding the postal service, our gov't had 1,774,000 people on the payroll in 2007 according to the US Dept of Labor. In 2008 walmart edged them out (slightly) with an estimated 2,100,000 employees. Given all the federal jobs added in the past 2 years I'm willing to bet they have now overtaken walmart.
What this country truly needs is a revolution...not a war with the US gov't, but a political overthrowing with people willing to work for the good of the people running it and the reforming of the government "of the people, by the people, for the people". A good start would be term limits for every federal elected official.
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holy balls. Nice post Thrash.
But, about the standing army, Congress decided that we would need a standing army, and attempted to put a 5,000 troop limit on it. In response to this idea, George Washington said, " That will work fine, as long as we can also pass a law to limit invading armies to 3,000 troops"
Every thing else i agree with. I feel like we need as a nation no longer have a clear identity. What defines an American? Our time of open borders, and everyone can be on our team needs to stop. We cannot give aid to everyone, we cannot accomodate everyone. This has worked fine in the past, but it is taking its toll on our nation. There needs to be laws to govern who can, and cannot enter our nation, and benefit from our society. I realize that in the past our population was a strength, but that was when factories required thousands of workers, and jobs were abound, this time has passed, and we have to be smart about how many, and who is a citizen of our nation. I do not think it is a bad thing to say, we are us, and you are them, we do our thing, and you can do your own.
Don't get me wrong, i offer no plan or idea how to do this, but i know that it must be done.
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ichibankilla;287067 wrote:
*Only in America would the people be so dumb that they would elect a man with "Hussein" for a middle name after being at war in the middle east because of a tyrant whose last name is "Hussein".- I'm almost ashamed to call my self an American, but I'll stick to my guns and hopefully ride this wave of shit out to what I hope is a good ending.
ichibankilla;287139 wrote:
I should have worded my post better. I just thought the name issue was kind of ironic because elections, not necessarily presidential, have been won and lost in the past based on a candidates name. I was simply making an observation.No, you were clearly making a statement that you feel the American people are idiots for voting the way they did because of a "middle name" and that you clearly don't want to associate yourself with them because of that.
Then you tried for political cover by saying you meant something else.
Not buying it. Sorry.
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Apparently, the prepared speech from the Whitehouse (http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/) is as follows:
Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School EventArlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.
I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.
I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.
Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."
So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.
Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.
I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.
I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.
I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.
But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.
Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.
Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.
And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.
And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.
Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.
I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.
So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.
But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.
Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying. -
Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.
That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.
Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.
I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.
And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.
Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.
That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.
Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.
That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.
It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?
Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America. -
Seems to me he intends to speak to them about responsibility and the importance of bright minds to work hard to develop the skills needed to survive.
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I kind of disagree on the immigration problem. We should encourage immigration as much as possible -- as long as its the right kind of immigration.
This is a nation of immigrants, after all, and as I mentioned, what makes us "Americans" historically is our ideas about politics and hard work, not where we were born and what languages we speak natively.
I think we have to figure out how to disincentivize coming to america for the wrong reasons, and those reasons mostly have to do with the large blanket of public services offered to people, no questions asked.
I am worried about making an air tight border for a few reasons
- it will be really expensive
- it won't work
- it will be just as effective for keeping us IN as it will be for keeping others out.
This last point may sound paranoid, but the Berlin wall fell only about 20 years ago. In the past few years it has become much harder to enter/leave the US, even if you are a US citizen, and in an effort to try and get more money any way it can, the US government has been trying to change tax and accounting rules left and right to keep foreign money from US citizens back int he US, and to try and tax money from former Americans who have left. Don't think that the idea of Uncle Sam not wanting us to leave is completely unthinkable.
Basically, to "Fix" any immigration problems we have, we'd need to unroll much of the "progressive" agenda of the last 80 years. This country makes it very hard to work: you cannot work without a tax ID, you cannot agree to work for less than minimum wage, soon you won't be able to work unless you can find someone willing to give you health insurance as well. Also, your employer can't fire you without fear of breaking the law, so they are very gunshy about hiring people.
In effect, our current labor and welfare laws make it easier to be on the dole than to get a job in many cases.
Even though I am in the software industry, and the H1-B program amounts to protectionism for my line of work, I think it should be scrapped, and we should let in all of the Indians and Chinese folks that want to do software/IT/technology work. These are people that want to come here to work, with jobs already lined up. They pay our taxes but don't get our citizen ship rights. Why wouldn't we jump on that with as much haste as possible?
Because "our" lawmakers are trying to "protect" American jobs.
Well, I don't want protection in this form. I want every one in this country to have to compete based on their value/worth. That includes me. An "American Job" is one where the employed puts money into the American economy, and competes on their merit, not where they were born.
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and yet over a million illegal aliens are working today in the US, not paying taxes.
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Well, i don't know the exact employment/tax arrangements of illegal aliens, but they are certainly paying some taxes: sales tax on what they buy, fuel tax on the fuel they use, etc. And they are pumping value into the economy if they are holding down jobs.
I'm a bit surprised by this argument though: everytime I hear about "the little guy" dodging taxes, I think "good man, good man". But that's because I'm generally not a fan of taxes and especially not a fan of what that money usually gets spent on.
And more concretely: there are many millions more "Americans" who do not file income taxes and who unlike illegal immogrants, do not work at all and provide NO value to the US economy (and questionable value to their fellow man).
IOW, if you are talking about drain on the economy, the non-working birth-right citizens are a much bigger problem than the possible-income-tax-evading illegal aliens that work 18 hour days. Personally, I want to kick the first group out and give the second group some legal safeguards.
The summary is: the problem is with the laws of America, not its border security. The things you don't like about the illegal alien population happen in the citizen population as well, and unlike illegals, the citzens have and continue to vote themselves a larger share of YOUR wealth, whereas the aliens generally work their ass off.
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How about the immigrants who come here and live off the gov't money? Seems like these people are the ones driving the nice cars, have big screen TV's, and all the cool stuff a lot of us wish we could afford.
Where is this money coming from and why do they deserve it?
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Grr;287297 wrote:
wow that was a really good speech, im actually impressed with him for once.I should almost put that in my signature Gary....
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i wouldnt get used to that kind of response from me. In fact, did you hear him at the union gathering over the weekend?? Holy shit what a fucking nutjob, giving all this power and praise the the AFL-CIO and SEIU, 2 of the groups that are most instrumental in destroying this country
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PSiedTSi;287305 wrote:
It is nice to hear something from one of our leaders that didn't include propaganda or any other political agenda.They removed that part from the speech. Thats what all the hullabaloo was about earlier last week.
DaveH
'94 Supra- 7.77 @ 176mph -
Link;287303 wrote:
How about the immigrants who come here and live off the gov't money? Seems like these people are the ones driving the nice cars, have big screen TV's, and all the cool stuff a lot of us wish we could afford.Where is this money coming from and why do they deserve it?
I don't like them any more or any less than people born here who live off of government money.
The laws are written such that there are incentives to do nothing and have babies, no matter where you are born. *That's *the problem. If we stop foreigners from coming here and living off of government money, we will have stopped at most 10% of the problem.
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