please explain the Tea Party to a canuck

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No there isn't. He has not publicly recited the Shahada, which is a basic requirement for being Muslim. He does not adhere to the five pillars of Islam. He publicly claims to worship a God other than Allah. Therefore, he is not Muslim.


Cite the supporting suras or hadiths, please. I know that apostasy is supposed to carry a death sentence, so I'll let that one go, but I need to see justification for the claims that Islam is inherited through patrilinear descent and that Muslims are permitted to lie to kaffirs.


You haven't even seen the left if you think Obama's a left-wing fanatic. His policies have all been relatively centrist. The Supreme Court will be more conservative at the end of his administration than it was at the beginning of it.

Uh huh, and I suppose this guy is just being paranoid...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/topstories ... 6768_x.htm

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,188364,00.html

I'm not currently at home to dig my copy of the Quran/Koran (whatever) out of the boxes where I keep old textbooks from prior college courses.

Oh it's even in wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam

Also, Orwell I know there are people further left than Obama like Michael Moore, it is my opinion he is a left-wing nut still. The argument that the supreme court will be more conservative after Obama is through with it is also a laugh (aside from the fact he managed to tick off the swing vote).

Last edited by Inuyasha on 02 Nov 2010, 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

More like center right partisan hack. He's about as left as a gay earring.

If he is center right, then Nancy Pelosi is a conservative and Even Bayh is as right-wing as Rush Limbaugh.

Well, she DID block impeachment hearings against George W. Bush.

She blocked it because it wouldn't go anywhere and didn't have the votes. You can't claim someone is so stupid he is as smart as a brick and claim he is an evil mastermind at the same time. It makes you look like an idiot. She's a far-let nut, that doesn't mean she can't figure out that odds were the impeachment would backfire proceedings would backfire. (Particularly when it came out that she had access to the same intel that Bush was getting)

To be fair here, the Tea party's ideas aren't all bad. I'd like to end corruption in government, reduce spending, reduce the deficit, make more accountability. These are not bad ideas to aim for.

But the issue is how they are going about it and what they are trying to accomplish through it.

Okay, so you want end corruption and the effects of special interest money? Campaign Finance Reform is a good place to start. Where's the Tea party's passion and outcry for bringing it back to the table? Do they even look at the campaign contributions to their own candidates to see if they are being bought by special interests? How about barring lobbyists from congress, ending revolving door policies, and conflicts of interests by hiring CEOs of major corporations into regulatory positions over their own businesses?

You want to reduce government spending? How are they planning to do that? Cut spending is the obvious answer, but what are they willing to cut? What I've been hearing is cutting into social benefits, welfare and social security. You can't cut into things that are many people's lifelines in the middle of the recession! Lets' look at pork barrel spending, earmarks, and unnecessary military expenditures first. What things can be made more efficient and where we can save some paperwork?

How are they going to reduce the deficit? The most obvious and straight forward solution is to cut spending like the above and RAISE taxes. But nobody with the slightest inclination of how numbers work is proposing such. Just cutting spending and cutting taxes at the same time is not going to put a dent in the deficit. And for that matter, don't support PERMANENT changes to the tax code, whether it's for more or less taxes. The tax codes should remain flexible as times change, if things get worse, or get better, etc.

How are the Tea party going to fix the economy? They want to create a weak and ineffective Federal Government with no ability to police the activities of national corporations and mega-banks. Why does anyone even think that is a good idea? How can you trust profit driven companies to act in your best interest? They often make the claim about small business owners suffering, but I hear the chief complaint of them is that banks won't lend them money to expand and hire. What are they going to do to make banks start lending again?

And enough with the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, gun rights, this is Christian nation hooey baloney nonsense. It just is NOT IMPORTANT right now and stop making them so important. If that's the aim of some Tea Partier's through the above, then they will NOT be getting my support.

If the Tea party is just supporting actions to bolster corporate profits and protect the wealth of the well-off at the expense of everyone else, then no, they won't be getting my support.

And for that matter, Obama is a centrist. Calling him a far left radical socialist just tells me such people have no clue what a political spectrum is. The real people on the far left are vastly displeased with Obama in that he has not been left enough. Obama has clearly been catering to the center left out of compromise and hitting center right so far. The country as a whole has been tilting to the right since the 80s and maybe that skews some people's perspective. Even Reagan would be considered leftist if he was around today. That's how much things have changed.

Problem was the method that people in Washington were going about it excluded some groups (and/or opened them up to be intimidated/harassed), well letting other groups keep funding. Particularly, unions like SEIU and other sources that contribute almost exclusively to Democrats.



I can see cutting social benefits to people that are here illegally. I do think the military needs to be looked at for waste. Sadly the problem has gotten so bad we may have to cut things that will end up hurting people. I could see cutting some of their staff vacations where they get massages too.



Raising taxes in a recession makes things worse. Best thing they can do is actually defund Obamacare.



The housing bubble was created because the Federal Government forced banks to make risky loans to people who couldn't pay them back.

You know who tried to fix the problem several times: Former President George W. Bush.



Many of the places in the US that had the highest crime rates also had the most restrictive gun laws.



I think many tea partiers are pro-small business not pro-mega corporations.



Taking over GM and violating law, rewarding political cronies like SEIU letting them get money that should have gone to investors and stockholders that put their money on the line by investing in GM isn't a centrist idea.

Seizing control of the Federal Student Loan program isn't a centrist stance.

Thinking Government can solve everything isn't a centrist stance, it is a left-wing stance.

Reagan wouldn't be considered left wing today.

OK? That was the one thing I agreed with you on, that Islam imposes the death penalty for apostasy. What of your other claims? No support for them?

The Koran is easily available online.

Yeah, there are people much further left than Moore, who isn't anything other than a sensationalist hack. As to Obama being a left-wing nut, name me some of his policies that are "far-left." There isn't much Obama has done that Republicans have not proposed at some point, so I don't see where you get the idea that he's some kind of radical.

The Supreme Court is going to be more conservative after Obama leaves office. There have been a number of mainstream news articles to that effect; I recall first reading it in the BBC. The justices retiring during Obama's term were the most liberal on the court, and he replaced them with center-left justices in the spirit of bipartisanship and compromise (and also because there is no chance in hell the Republicans would have allowed him to appoint a leftist judge). So where before the court had far-right, center-right, centrist, center-left, and far-left represented, it will now only go out to center-left, while retaining the far-right appointees of the Bush years. The overall balance thus ends up leaning to center-right.

Seizing control of the "Federal" Student Loan program? Sounds a lot like "get your government hands off my Medicare."

Direct federal control over those programs was a good idea. Under the previous system, it was the federal government loaning money to students using private loan sharks as a middleman, and those private organizations took a generous share for themselves off the top without accepting any of the risk since the government guaranteed repayment of the loans. The new system cuts government expenditures and lessens the hassles students face. I thought smaller government, reducing waste, and scaling back bureaucratic inefficiency were conservative positions?

Incidentally, my congressman has a long history of supporting predatory lending. If you are a student, or were one recently, you might be interested to know that House Minority Leader John Boehner was the one who made it possible for Sallie Mae and other lenders to double the interest rates on student loans. If you are a student, a vote for the GOP is a vote against your direct financial interests in favor of corporate avarice.


Oh really? The man who signed the biggest peacetime tax hike in American history would not be considered leftwing? The man who granted blanket amnesty (not a pathway to citizenship, mind, just outright amnesty) to illegal immigrants would not be considered leftwing? Who raised taxes 12 different times in his administration?

Reagan cultists really are completely ignorant of the man's record. When did he ever cut the federal budget deficit?

This is the process of history being re-written. Like I've already said, this country's two parties are center-right or far right. As such, history will be re-written and revised to fit a politically right leaning perspective.

It's a great tactic: cry about someone else doing the revising and calling them revisionist while you do the actual revising and re-writing of history.

The Federal Student Loan Program was originally handled by private companies and was to enable people to go to college. There is a good reason why it wasn't under direct control of the Federal Government, and that is to try to keep it from being used as a political tool.



Problem is, usually when the Federal Government takes over you end up with more corruption than you had to start with. Fannae Mae and Freddie Mac are good examples. Another example is forcing banks to make risky loans to people whom probably couldn't pay the loan back.



I will respond a vote for Dems is a vote for the same people that caused the financial collapse.



From a net standpoint of increases and decreases Reagan actually lowered taxes when you factor everything into account. He supported that one time amnesty decision because the immigration situation was so messed up it was completely ridiculous. He did so with the understanding that something would be done about the border situation. Which it wasn't.

Also a lot of Conservatives admire Reagan for defeating the Soviet Union, by causing them to spend themselves to death.

You think he is an muslim and a left wing fanatic?

Do you really not realize how irreconcilable the two are? Islam is opposed to gay marriage, abortion, and most things that a lefty stands for. Doublethink much?

1) I never said that all Americans that disapprove of Obama are conservatives. However, the Obama administration has an even more polarizing effect on American society than even the Bush administration did, and there are a whole lot of swing voters that are unhappy with the job performance of the democratic party as a whole.

2) Obama did try to mend the rift between democrats and republicans by getting the republicans feedback on hotly contested issues, but the feedback he got was not compatible with his private agenda so it was disregarded. Because the republicans were disregarded, relations between the two parties are too far gone for reconciliation at this point.

You are correct that there was originally a private middleman in the Federal Student Loan Program. However, that is all they were: a middleman. The government was still providing the actual funds.

In what way has the student loan program been used as a political tool, or in what way(s) could it be used as such?


Not in this case. The federal government was already involved, the only difference now is that you no longer have private businesses scamming money out of the system.


Um... when was the financial collapse? 2008, wasn't it? At the end of eight years of Republican governance?

I dunno, perhaps I've just suffered amnesia or something. Usually my memory's pretty reliable, but I must have forgotten that the Democrats were actually in charge from 2000-2008.


Right, they do admire him for that, but just like all of Reagan's other "accomplishments" this is a complete myth. The Soviet Union was moribund well before Reagan took office. They had a fundamentally untenable economic and political system, and you can only hold such an artifice together for so long before it collapses.

Agreed, there are polls out now that Bush is practically as popular if not more popular than Obama now.



I must disagree with you on the idea that Obama even tried to mend fences. He pretty much has spat in the face of anyone who disagrees with him. He's made Richard Nixon look like a saint. His justice department dismissed a clear cut case of voter intimidation where there was video evidence. He is basically Chicago gone to Washington personified.