The constitution is a charter of negative liberties?

Really Obama?  Every time I think, well it won\'t be so bad when he\'s President, something comes up that reminds me otherwise.  He truly believes that constitution should tell you what you can do as opposed to what the government can\'t do to you.  The constitution is there to protect us.

Oppress the people "o great one".  You\'ve gone beyond liberalism, this is radicalism.  This is a recipe for disaster, and I can\'t believe America wants this.

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/27/smells-like-socialist-spirit/

But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.

I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.

[clips]

When the gov\'t starts takin\' over farmland and snatchin\' up properties unlawfully then we need to worry.....until then...joe the plumber will recieve a tax cut under obama\'s plan and if you make $250,000 or more your taxes will increase...you\'re paranoid....the country has 9 million people out of work...2 million more than what is was last year, he\'s focusing on projects to give some relief to the folks that are hurting the most in this economy..the middle class.....Obama is not going to radicalize america.

He feels that that gov\'t should help out the people when they are suffering...period. Giving tax breaks to companies that do NOT ship jobs overseas makes sense right?,....meaning the said company\'s taxes will not go up...if you do send american jobs overseas you\'ll see a tax hike....while mccain favors giving these companies huge tax breaks whether or not they ship american jobs overseas.

The only redistribution of wealth is the kind that i\'ve mentioned above.(the rich will take a hit but it is in no way going to break them)..go look at both Obama\'s and mccains tax plan for the country...you\'ll notice that the middle class benefits in obama\'s plan are alot more than what is seen in mccains plan, what\'s more it\'s been stated that obama\'s plan will even end up being cheaper than mccains.

What? You missed the entire purpose of the article (you seem to have like 3 or 4 defense mechanisms that you pull at random).  He was stating that the courts are too conservative and don\'t do enough to redistribute wealth.  He is feels citizens are over protected by what he calls "negative liberties" which prevents the government from pursuing its agenda.

Essentially, he wants the power to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.  If your comfortable giving him that power that\'s fine, but I\'m not.  It very much goes against the constitution.

Just because Obama says something doesn\'t mean its true, politicians lie, you have to see beyond that.  He wanted to create a class war, and he has successfully done so.

[GmanJoe]

Obama = another Jimmy Carter

Let\'s not make that mistake again.

be calm, he could still win it

Man, I want your job.  If only I could sit around and read political articles all day while I\'m at work, and post threads on psx2central.
 
In any case, you have exaggerated what Obama said in the initial quotation, just as the author of this hotair.com aricle has exaggerated and filled in with reflections of his own preconceived notions.
 

What? You missed the entire purpose of the article (you seem to have like 3 or 4 defense mechanisms that you pull at random). He was stating that the courts are too conservative and don\'t do enough to redistribute wealth. He is feels citizens are over protected by what he calls "negative liberties" which prevents the government from pursuing its agenda.

This is not what he said.  Read it again, or listen to it again.  He\'s commenting on the history of the Warren court and he is most critical of the civil rights movement.  He didn\'t say the courts didn\'t do enough, and he didn\'t suggest they should have done anything else.
 

Essentially, he wants the power to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. If your comfortable giving him that power that\'s fine, but I\'m not. It very much goes against the constitution.

Never has he said this, or suggested it, and I have no idea where you\'re getting this.
 

Just because Obama says something doesn\'t mean its true, politicians lie, you have to see beyond that. He wanted to create a class war, and he has successfully done so.

I can see that you feel very strongly about protecting and accelerating the transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the US public to the upper 10% but not every voting american shares your views.  In fact, most are now coming to disagree:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27377873/

A substantial majority of Americans say the rich don\'t pay their fair share of taxes, opinion polls show. A growing number say the United States is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.
The public\'s concerns reflect a shifting dynamic in recent years, as an increasing share of the wealth has gone to people at the top of the income scale. The top tenth of U.S. households now earn an average of 11.2 times what those in the bottom tenth make, according to the Census Bureau. That\'s up from a ratio of 8.7 three decades ago.
...
A majority of Americans — 51 percent in a poll by Gallup this past April — said they support "heavy taxes" on the rich to redistribute wealth. That is significantly higher than when the same question was asked in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, when 35 percent agreed.

I\'m sorry you\'re on the wrong side of public sentiment on this issue, but you can\'t always have it your way.  These things shift through the decades based on economic conditions.  No matter how far it goes in one direction, there will always be a correction.

[clips]

What? You missed the entire purpose of the article (you seem to have like 3 or 4 defense mechanisms that you pull at random).  He was stating that the courts are too conservative and don\'t do enough to redistribute wealth.  He is feels citizens are over protected by what he calls "negative liberties" which prevents the government from pursuing its agenda.

Essentially, he wants the power to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.  If your comfortable giving him that power that\'s fine, but I\'m not.  It very much goes against the constitution.

Just because Obama says something doesn\'t mean its true, politicians lie, you have to see beyond that.  He wanted to create a class war, and he has successfully done so.

I get what you\'re saying, but i don\'t believe Obama will pursue an agenda to the point to where his presidency is like a dictatorship where the gov\'t controls everything...even if he plans to expand gov\'t, that might not be a bad thing, as long as it\'s doing what it\'s supposed to do for the people....and that does not mean giving folks a free ride or free tax cuts as some would like to believe.

Man, I want your job.  If only I could sit around and read political articles all day while I\'m at work, and post threads on psx2central.

It\'s what I do in my down time.  I\'m not a member of many online communities, this happens to be one of them.
 

In any case, you have exaggerated what Obama said in the initial quotation, just as the author of this hotair.com aricle has exaggerated and filled in with reflections of his own preconceived notions.

I didn\'t exaggerate anything.  Obama called the Warren court "conservative".  God bless you and your Obama kool-aid, you clearly can\'t see the truth.
 

This is not what he said.  Read it again, or listen to it again.  He\'s commenting on the history of the Warren court and he is most critical of the civil rights movement.  He didn\'t say the courts didn\'t do enough, and he didn\'t suggest they should have done anything else.

It\'s all I\'ve been listening to all day.  It further and further re-establishes his stance on socialism.  We didn\'t do enough to redistribute wealth, almost a verbatim quote from the clip.  Did you skip over the part of the clip on redistribution of wealth and slamming the constitution as a "charter of negative liberties"?  Obviously you did, because you don\'t see any problem with what he said.  This man will tear apart this country, how can you not see that?
 

Never has he said this, or suggested it, and I have no idea where you\'re getting this.

Where did I get it?  Right from the horses mouth!  Obama - "RESDISTRIBUTE WEALTH", there did you hear that?  Probably not.  He\'s not a socialist, he\'s just a really nice person.
 

I can see that you feel very strongly about protecting and accelerating the transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the US public to the upper 10% but not every voting american shares your views.  In fact, most are now coming to disagree:

I\'m sorry, how much taxes are the lower classes paying to the wealthy??? Oh that\'s right none.  They just want to bring down the upper class.  A third of the country doesn\'t even pay taxes, and you have the balls to say its a transfer of wealth to the rich?  You call it trickle down prosperity, I call it trickle up poverty.  The best part about this country is the freedom to create your own success.  You on the other hand would like to see trillions of dollars go to government handouts to whatever cause Obama deems worthy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27377873/

Have you not realized yet that the media is in the tank for Obama?  Nope, you see it as fair reporting.

I\'m sorry you\'re on the wrong side of public sentiment on this issue, but you can\'t always have it your way.  These things shift through the decades based on economic conditions.  No matter how far it goes in one direction, there will always be a correction.

That\'s right I\'m on the wrong side of public opinion.  Lets go over the last handful of elections:

1968 - Republican
1972 - Republican
1976 - Democrat (The dreaded Jimmy Carter presidency)
1980 - Republican
1984 - Republican
1988 - Republican
1992 - Democrat
1996 - Democrat
2000 - Republican
2004 - Republican

That\'s a rough score card for the past forty years.  But yeah, glad to see your on the winning team.  Can we really afford Jimmy Carter II?

Keep drinking the koolaid buddy, when Obama screws you over, don\'t say I didn\'t tell you so.

I get what you\'re saying, but i don\'t believe Obama will pursue an agenda to the point to where his presidency is like a dictatorship where the gov\'t controls everything...even if he plans to expand gov\'t, that might not be a bad thing, as long as it\'s doing what it\'s supposed to do for the people....and that does not mean giving folks a free ride or free tax cuts as some would like to believe.

Expanding government is always a bad thing, it goes against the constitution.

Conservatives love to cry "socialism" when someone proposes public policy which reverses the decades-long trend of reducing taxes on the rich.
 
IN REALITY, we have a long long way to go before we reach the socialist nightmare conservatives love to cite in their examples:  Sweden
 
http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/07/p3-unequal-america.html

One widely used measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, named for Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who first articulated the concept in 1912. The coefficient measures income distribution on a scale from zero (where income is perfectly equally distributed among all members of a society) to one (where a single person possesses all the income). For the United States, the Gini coefficient has risen from .35 in 1965 to .44 today. On the per-capita GDP scale, our neighbors are Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.; on the Gini scale, our neighbors include Sri Lanka, Mali, and Russia. (Even with this basic measure of inequality, it is difficult to get comparable data for all countries, and some other sources find a much wider gap between the United States and Russia. For instance, the Luxembourg Income Study ranks Russia at .43 and the United States at .37, and does not even list Sri Lanka and Mali.)
 
The recent increase in inequality reflects a migration of money upward as salaries have ballooned at the top. In 1965, the average salary for a CEO of a major U.S. company was 25 times the salary of the average worker. Today, the average CEO’s pay is more than 250 times the average worker’s. At the same time, the government is doing less to redistribute income than it has at times in the past. The current top marginal tax rate—35 percent—is not the lowest it’s been—there was no federal income tax at all until 1913—but it is far lower than the 91-percent tax levied on top earners from 1951 to 1963. Meanwhile, forces such as immigration and trade policy have put pressure on wages at the bottom.

That\'s great, economic inequality.  Life isn\'t fair.  What did these people we\'re redistributing wealth do to earn this money?

How could you argue that Obama is NOT a socialist after his constant "redistribution of wealth" comments?

By taxing the wealthy even more, you\'re not making the poor any richer, you\'re just making the wealthy poorer, and you\'re driving people away from the work force and rewarding laziness.  Not everyone was born into wealth, in fact, most weren\'t, they made their own wealth, why can\'t you?

You\'ve avoided the two main points of this thread.  His calling the constitution of "charter of negative liberties" and criticizing the courts for not doing enough to redistribute wealth.  Stop having selective listening.

The point I was trying to make with the table and the article above is that we\'re NOT a socialist country, and a politician is NOT a socialist just because he proposes one tiny step back from the course we\'ve been following for the last 50 years.  
 
"the Gini coefficient has risen from .35 in 1965 to .44 today"  If we continue on this course, our country will become more and more polarized.  The rich will own almost everything and the rest of will be paying them rent.  Do you want to see us reach the wealth concentration levels of Haiti and Namibia before acknowleding that something might be going wrong?  Going too far in that direction is a sure recipie for destruction.  
 
You can stick to your simplified high minded principles, but when it comes to public policy in the real world, we need to find a stable middle ground.

1.
What you said:
"Essentially, he wants the power to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants."
What I said:
"Never has he said this, or suggested it, and I have no idea where you\'re getting this."
 
2.

You\'ve avoided the two main points of this thread. His calling the constitution of "charter of negative liberties" and criticizing the courts for not doing enough to redistribute wealth. Stop having selective listening.

He did not criticize the courts for not doing enough.  He NOTED that they didn\'t do these things.  He wasn\'t saying they should have.  But I already stated that above.

3 counterpoints -

The poor don\'t pay for the rich, the rich pay for the poor.  

A third of the country doesn\'t pay taxes (you still haven\'t addressed this one).

We are not a socialist country, but Obama is a socialist, he\'s not seeking a "tiny step back", he\'s proposing radical change.  Read his policies.

1.
What you said:
"Essentially, he wants the power to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants."
What I said:
"Never has he said this, or suggested it, and I have no idea where you\'re getting this."
 
2.
He did not criticize the courts for not doing enough.  He NOTED that they didn\'t do these things.  He wasn\'t saying they should have.  But I already stated that above.

The spin doctor is out in full force tonight.  I clearly sensed anger and resentment in that interview towards the courts.  

But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

Listen to how he says those lines.  There is definite anger there.