I just wanted to take a moment to express my disappointment in two fellow TriLUG members, Phillip Rhodes and Warren Myers. I have read plenty of intelligent posts from both of them, so their recent anti-Obama posts (posted after the election and syndicated on planet.trilug.org) have been a bit of a surprise.
Phil decried Obama’s call for expanded community service programs for middle and high school students and a tax incentive for college students who do community service. Phil reads the word “mandatory” into text that simply doesn’t support it. I understand you don’t want mandatory service requirements, Phil. Now please understand that Obama is not pushing for mandatory service requirements.
Warren has a 404′d link to change.gov that he claims proves Obama lied about gun control. Here’s a tip: if you want to make an argument, please make a real argument instead of repeating an outlandish NRA talking point. Oh, and it helps to cite something that’s not 404′d. I read the entire NRA post, Warren: it in no way provides evidence that Obama was anything less than forthright and honest.
I know both of these TriLUG folks are not mean or unintelligent people, which is why it makes me sad to see them buying into the paranoia about Obama. If you really want to have an impact on his administration, construct honest and full arguments for reasonable and rational positions. Believe me: his administration will actually listen. If you decide to spend his administration tilting at windmills, I’m fairly confident you’ll do more damage to your own credibility than his.
You don’t want to end up being the enactment of this comedy:
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As you did correctly point out, the link was 404′d by the time you got to it. That has been fixed. The page was taken down, so in order to see what was there, you’ll need to look a cached version, such as this PDF generated from the Google Cache: http://www.nraila.org/pdfs/obamaurbanpolicy.pdf.
From what I’ve read from and about the man, it does in fact contradict several things he said on the campaign trail.
I consider anyone – regardless of party (and that includes our current president) who says one thing and does another to be worthy of calling to the floor. Of the available folks running this year, Ron Paul was probably the closest to what I was looking for. With a second of Mike Huckabee. I’m a conservative libertarian (yes they can exist), and want the government to get out of the business of meddling with every little thing.
The recent bailouts from Congress and the Federal Reserve are horrid ideas – made worse by our President saying they were necessary. It used to be that if you made bad investment or purchasing decisions, and they turned sour, you took your losses and liquidated. Lots of businesses do this every year – certainly folks have seen “Going Out Of Business” sales at stores that just can’t stay in business any more.
I’m a firm believer that that should have been allowed to happen here, too.
I’m not paranoid about Senator Obama – I’m merely reporting things that he’s doing that are out of line with what he claimed to stand for during the campaign.
If you’re serious about reporting things that are “out of line with what he claimed to stand for” then you need to say specifically what he said before and what he’s doing now. You only linked to a page showing the after. You called him a liar and linked to the NRA. You have to do better than that if you want to be taken seriously. You still haven’t provided me with evidence that he was even misleading, much less lying.
have a look at the verbiage here. I think it matches exactly the verbiage that the NRA website was attacking, and guess what? It’s on the the campaign website, i.e. from before the election. Please tell me how using the exact same language to articulate the exact same policy stance before and after the election constitutes lying.