Quote Originally Posted by birdgirl73
I do believe her. That's been on the chief complaints about the Bush-Cheney White House, their strong belief that the Executive Branch should be above the other governmental branches, judicial and legislative. Bush, and particularly Cheney, believe in the Executive branch having a lot more power than it needs to. This belief has been the basis for this war action in Iraq and also the motivation for the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, among other things. Executive power needs to be balanced by the other two branches and its actions far less secretive, too. I'm counting on that from the next new administration.

I wish more people here watched "Frontline" on PBS. You could learn so much about this stuff. There was a really good piece on Cheney's views on executive power just the other night. His attorney David Addington and Karl Rove have also played huge roles in these policies and actions. Bush mostly has just gone with the flow. There was another very interesting "Frontline" on tonight about the situation with Iran and how it has deteriorated in the last five years.
I agree, BirdGirl. Quality in the world is slipping further behind quantity every day. Articles written by Yahoo! News can hardly be taken seriously when there are so many other real news outlets available. That is the problem I see on many online forums: So many people base their political views on articles written by those who are not even journalists.
It is extremely sad to see the masses (many of whom consider themselves the greatest of patriots) who simply refuse to seek out the broader spectrum of real journalism available. Instead, there are all of these threads on many different web forums linking to garbage news sites, so we end up with the public debate having no real foundation or quality. This is why we are gifted with the leaders we have--bad journalism versus more bad journalism, compounded by readers who believe everything that is printed/online is necessarily true or includes all of the facts...these kind of articles are not news or journalism. They are blame-focused, inflammatory scribbles written on digital sticky notes by interns with communications degrees and are not worth taking seriously.
It is all very similar to the presidential debates. So much time is spent on one-liner rebuttals, and attempts to perform clever, scripted jokes negating the opposition. More energy is spent on defeating one's opponent than on being a good candidate. It must drive people like Kucinich and Paul nuts to have to sit in the wings, barely getting a chance to speak, while the top tier candidates spend the whole time discrediting their opponents.
There are people people running who I am convinced want to win in order to do a good and help the world (Kucinich, Paul, Edwards) and then there is most everybody else who I am convinced just wants to win for the sake of winning. This sort of behavior is mirrored in the attitudes of the voters themselves.
Hillary Clinton (come on folks, at least hide your latent sexism and use her last name as with the other candidates) is in the third category of "not sure," and is my fourth choice...at the moment, but all of this may change. We still have a year of debates and world happenings ahead of us. She is a bulldog, and she has a good heart at the same time...and what...oh yes, SHE IS ACTUALLY well-informed: so I like her, and there is no Republican candidate that is worthy of the office besides Ron Paul. I have no way of knowing if she or anybody else is telling the truth at any given moment. I wish I had access to the lie detector machine reports that everybody else has.
It is all right there in the Karate Kid for Christ sakes. There are the physically powerful, like Cobra Kai who just want to get to the top no matter what it takes, then there is the smaller, but more spiritually powerful Mr. Miyagi school. What a crazy world.:1baa: