The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

As always, Bob Cesca pens a brilliant post. Once a week, Huffington Post’s best poster sheds light on the darkness of our political discourse with humor that makes truth telling bearable…

Except this time I’m not laughing. (Sorry Bob.) This week I’ve seen numerous people who I feel ought to be more reasonable, and knowledgeable, passing along flat out lies picked up from the mainstream media. I’ve heard so called conservatives, with no stake in the elections whatsoever, excoriate our President for doing a less harmful version of what their former champion (Bush II) did, and I have finally had enough with dishonesty and deliberate disingenuousness.

These rich creeps whining on television about “revolution” need to get a grip. Here’s a nice IRS table showing tax rates over the years: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/02inpetr.pdf.

Have a look at key dates:

(If that chart doesn’t show up well, look on page 5 of the link).

The point being – the whiners are complaining about a tax hike that brings them no where near as high as the highest tax bracket during the majority of the Reagan years – and the one year when Reagan cut taxes down to 28%, he left George the First with having to break a promise and raise taxes (thereby likely costing the republicans their run).
Whiners. They want a revolution? While millions of Americans are LOSING THEIR HOMES and their JOBS and their HEALTH CARE… they want a revolution because they are going to lose less than 2% income to taxes – taxes to help get the country they claim to love out of its bind?

They want a revolution? They want to foster an environment where MY President is threatened by their reckless, selfish chatter about birth certificates and tea parties? Oh really? BRING IT.

They might get more than they bargained for.

QT
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Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Here in the United States, the nation is embroiled in the political season as we gear up for presidential elections on the first Tuesday in November 2008.  We’re winding down on the primary season, and will immediately pivot into the general election campaign thereafter.  It is likely that Barack Obama will be one of the candidates for president.  As a result of the primary campaign, a number of disturbing trends have come to light – these include racism, sexism, religious intolerance, anti-intellectualism, classism, and a complete lack of unity.   The Obama Project is an effort to address this in the spirit of what WindonWater.net is all about… namely producing small ripples to push against the current…

What:  The Obama Project will be a series of posts focussed on presenting factual information about candidate Barack Obama that negates misinformation about him – but with the specific goal of NOT promoting the candidate, but rather, promoting the eradication of racism, sexism, classism, religious intolerance, and anti-intellectualism.  Of course, I hope that focussing on these things will yield more unity in place of divisiveness.

How: The mission statement of WindonWater.net is “conversation for a better world, and a happy soul.”   The idea is that by changing the way we talk about stuff, we turn the tide on cynicism and negativity.  How necessary is THAT these days?

Why: Why Barack Obama?  Well, largely because his candidacy has called all of this stuff to the forefront of public discourse.  With this candidate, we have room to talk about racism, and religious intolerance.  We have room to talk about the meaning of love of country (patriotism).  We have room to talk about classism, and sexism.  And of course, the candidate has given a groundbreaking speech on race, that gives us a starting place.

As a Baha’i, I’ve been hesitant to start this effort.  Baha’is are not supposed to engage in partisan politics, but rather, are supposed to simply vote their consciences.  I’ve fallen short of that mark often this cycle, because of being so very partisanly in support of candidate Barack Obama.  Notwithstanding, I have concluded that this is something that I can do, and even should do, and I do believe it is doable without trending toward partisanship (at least I hope it is).

Anyway – as a woman and as an African-American, I’ve been sucked in to the process because the issues are very real to me.  And I do feel a personal need to have a direct response to these issues, and a need to do so in a way that avoids the persistent negativity that has dominated the blogosphere.  I hope others will join the conversation, and lend thoughts and ideas – especially out of the box, especially with a spiritual perspective, as we work through these tough issues.

My goal is to produce one post a week – that’s ambitious perhaps – that pushes against the wind.  Everyone is welcome to continue the conversation – and of course to start topics of interest throughout the thread.  The front page will be adjusted every week to promote the latest Obama Project post.

We’ll see how it goes!

Finally – since it really is more of a blogging project than a forum effort, I’m blogging here, instead of on my main forum site.  I’ll try to RSS to WindonWater.net, just the same.

QT