Obama is a republican when it comes to his family, but wants us to live like democrats.

Reasons to agree:

1. Obams says how great public schools are, however he sent his own kids to private schools while he was in Chicago and DC, but he opposes vouchers that would allow us to choose were to send our kids, like he did.


2. Obama said that Rich people didn't pay enough taxes when Bush was president, but he is a millionare, and he didn't pay extra money to the government because he thought it was right. Infact he hardly gave any money to charity. From 2000 to 2006 he gave 1, .5, .4, 1.4, 1.2, 4.7, and then finnaly 6.1%. For 4 years in a row he gave less than 2%. Most average republicans give more than that, and most republicans that had as much as he had gave way more than him. Yet he goes on and on about great he was to work as a community organizer, when that was just a job to get him into politics.

Obama made the right decision for his kids but the wrong decision for our kids

Reasons to agree:

Obama was asked:
Q: Do you send your kids to public school or private school?
Obama said:
“A: My kids have gone to the University of Chicago Lab School, a private school, because I taught there, and it was five minutes from our house. So it was the best option for our kids. But the fact is that there are some terrific public schools in Chicago that they could be going to (notice latter why he brings this up). The problem is, is that we don’t have good schools, public schools, for all kids. A US senator can get his kid into a terrific public school (if this is true, why did he send his kids to a private school? He says that it was close, but you would think that if he doesn’t support vouchers, that he only wants us to send out kids to public schools, that he would go to the extra effort). That’s not the question (yes it is. The question you were asked is if you send your kids to public or private schools). The question is whether or not ordinary parents, who can’t work the system, are able to get their kids into a decent school, and that’s what I need to fight for and will fight for as president. “2007 YouTube Democratic Primary debate, Charleston SC Jul 23, 2007.

Obama said he wants to help make it so that “parents, who can’t work the system, are able to get their kids into a decent school”, but he doesn’t want them to have the choice he made ol sending them to a private school.
So all the talk about how great our public schools goes out the doors when he makes decisions about his own family.
We aren’t good enough to get vouchers so we can choose were to send out kids… For us, public schools are the best choice, but for him he is going to use a private school.
It goes to show that people are very democratic, when talking about others, but everyone becomes a republican and looks out for their best interest when it comes to their family.
Again Obama made millions of dollars, and always says how the rich need to give more of their share, but he didn’t make any extra donations to uncle Sam himself, so his words are not for him to live by, just others.
But that is the right decision. It shows he loves his kids.
Now he just needs to make the right decision and love our children and give them vouchers so we can make the same decision he made.

Probable interest (or motivation) of those who agree:

1. Republican Party Affiliation (40%)
2. They agree with the argument, outside of any interest or alterior motivation (30%)
   
3. Political laziness & issue crossover (15%)
   
4. The desire to see more competition in Education (20%).
   
5. Hope in the future.
6. Desire for equality, and better schools for minorities.
7. Racism (5%)
8. Dislike for unions (5%).
9. Preference for variety (many different approaches to education)
10. Despare. We have tried everything else, why not try vouchers.

Probable interest (or motivation) of those who disagree:

1. They agree with the argument, outside of any interest or alterior motivation (30%)
   
2. Democratic party groupism (40%)
3. Political laziness & issue crossover.
4. Solidarity with the teachers union.

Obama was wrong to have voted against Roberts

Reasons to agree:

1. People on both sides of the isle, say that he is very respectful, to those with whome he disagrees.


2. During his two year tenure on the D.C. Circuit, Roberts authored 49 opinions, eliciting only two dissents from other judges, and authoring only three dissents of his own. This shows that Roberts works well with others, and builds consensus.


3. Roberts is one of twelve Catholic justices — out of 110 justices total — in the history of the Supreme Court.^[37]


4. His wife is an attorney and a trustee (along with Clarence Thomas) at her alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He must be pretty cool to have got a smart girl like that to marry him.


5. Roberts graduated graduating with an A.B. in history summa cum laude in three years from Harvard.
   


6. Before attending Harvard Law School, was the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review,^[3] and graduated with his J.D. magna cum laude.^[5] If that was good enough reason for Obama to be president, I guess it is good enough reason for Roberts to be Chief Justice.
   


7. He represented 18 states in United States v. Microsoft. How cool is that?
   


8. All of his maternal great-grandparents were from Czechoslovakia. Roberts understands immigration.
   


9. He was captain of his football team and was a Regional Champion in wrestling. That is pretty cool.

Probable interest (or motivation) of those who agree:

1. Republican Party Affiliation (40%)


2. They agree with the argument, outside of any interest or alterior motivation (30%)
   


3. Political laziness & issue crossover (15%)
   


4. The desire to have more conservative judges on issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc.


5. The desire to strengthen presidential power and weaken legislative power (not encouraging the legislature to vote against people they don't like, instead of "bad" people)
   

Probable interest (or motivation) of those who disagree:

1. They agree with the argument, outside of any interest or alterior motivation (30%)
   


2. Democratic party groupism (40%)


3. Political laziness & issue crossover.


4. The desire to have less conservative judges on issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc.
   


5. The desire to limit presidential power and strengthen legislative power (letting the legislature vote against people they don't like, instead of "bad" people)
   

Obama is right about anti-intellectualism

Reasons to agree:

1. People hate smart kids.


2. Americans are way over-fascinated with calling smart people nerds, and geeks. This is not done so much in other cultures.

Background: “I try to avoid an either/or approach to solving the problems of this country. There are questions of individual responsibility and questions of societal responsibility to be dealt with. The best example is an education. I’m going to insist that we’ve got decent funding, enough teachers, and computers in the classroom, but unless you turn off the television set and get over a certain anti-intellectualism that I think pervades some low-income communities, our children are not going to achieve.” ~ Meet The Press, NBC News Jul 25, 2004

Obama is right about evolution

 Q: If one of your daughters asked you, “Daddy, did God really create the world in 6 days?” What would you say?

A: What I believe is that God created the universe, and that the 6 days in the Bible may not be 6 days as we understand it. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth, that is fundamentally true. Now whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible, that I don’t presume to know. But one last point--I do believe in evolution. I don’t think that is incompatible with Christian faith. Just as I don’t think science generally is incompatible with Christian faith. There are those who suggest that if you have a scientific bent of mind, then somehow you should reject religion. And I fundamentally disagree with that. In fact, the more I learn about the world, the more I know about science, the more I’m amazed about the mystery of this planet and this universe. And it strengthens my faith as opposed to weakens it.

Source: 2008 Democratic Compassion Forum at Messiah College Apr 13, 2008

Obama is right on Merit Pay

Reasons to agree:

1. We should reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. 
   


2. 
   “ Teachers are extraordinarily frustrated about how their performance is assessed. And not just their own performance, but the school’s performance generally. So they’re teaching to the tests all the time. What I have said is that we should be able to get buy-in from teachers in terms of how to measure progress. Every teacher I think wants to succeed. And if we give them a pathway to professional development, where we’re creating master teachers, they are helping with apprenticeships for young new teachers, they are involved in a variety of other activities, that are really adding value to the schools, then we should be able to give them more money for it. But we should only do it if the teachers themselves have some buy-in in terms of how they’re measured. They can’t be judged simply on standardized tests that don’t take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not.” ~ Barack Obama, 2007 Democratic primary debate on “This Week” Aug 19, 2007
   
   

Background

Q: As president, can you name a hot-button issue where you would be willing to buck the Democratic Party line & say, “You know what? Republicans have a better idea here?”

A: I think that on issues of education, I’ve been very clear about the fact--and sometimes I’ve gotten in trouble with the teachers’ union on this--that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers.

Q: You mean merit pay?

A: Well, merit pay, the way it’s been designed, I think, is based on just a single standardized test--I think is a big mistake, because the way we measure performance may be skewed by whether or not the kids are coming into school already 3 years or 4 years behind. But I think that having assessment tools and then saying, “You know what? Teachers who are on career paths to become better teachers, developing themselves professionally--that we should pay excellence more.” I think that’s a good idea.

Source: 2008 Fox News interview: presidential series Apr 27, 2008

Obama is wrong when he says: "We need to fix and improve our public schools, not throw our hands up and walk away from them"

Reasons to agree:

1. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We have spent more and more money per student in public schools over the past 30 years, and our performance has only gotten worse.
   

Background: “We’ll make sure that every child in this country gets a world-class education from the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college. What McCain is offering amounts to little more than the same tired rhetoric about vouchers. We need to move beyond the same debate we’ve been having for the past 30 years when we haven’t gotten anything done. We need to fix & improve our public schools, not throw our hands up and walk away from them. We need to uphold the ideal of public education, but we also need reform. That’s why I’ve introduced a comprehensive strategy to recruit an army of new quality teachers to our communities--and to pay them more & give them more support. We’ll invest in early childhood education programs so that our kids don’t begin the race of life behind the starting line and offer a $4,000 tax credit to make college affordable for anyone who wants to go. Because as the NAACP knows better than anyone, the fight for social justice and economic justice begins in the classroom.” McCain-Obama speeches at 99th NAACP Convention Jul 12, 2008

Obama is right to want higher teaching standards

Reasons to agree:

1. Those students in Education departments across the country have had worse ACT, and SAT grades than other college departments. They even have worse grades than Criminal Justice departments (cops). It is sad that cops can know math, geography, history, and science, better than those that we put in charge of teaching our children. We need higher standards for teachers, if we are going to pay them more. I'm not saying every teacher is stupid. If you are a teacher, and you are offended, than you prove my point. You are stupid. The facts are the facts, and if you get mad because of the facts, than you are stupid. I'm from Idaho. I'm not offended when you say bad things about people from Idaho, in general, because I know that you are not talking about me specifically. Of course their are a lot of very smart people who are teachers. I thought about going into teaching. My father, whom I love and respect very much is a teacher. My mother in law is also a very good teacher. Two of my 3 brothers got degrees in teaching. Their is nothing wrong with teachers, with colleges of education, etc, we just need to raise their standards if we want our students to do better. 

"I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, pay them higher salaries and give them more support. In exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability." ~ Barack Obama speech at 2008 Democratic National Convention Aug 27, 2008.

Obama is right that quitting high school is quitting on your country

Reasons to agree:

1. "In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity--it is a prerequisite. And yet, we have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation. And half of the students who begin college never finish. This is a prescription for economic decline. So tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country. That's why we will provide the support necessary for all young Americans to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."  Source: 2009 State of the Union address Feb 24, 2009

Obama is melodramatic

Reasons to agree:

1. Obama said, "I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind.” People do things for a lot of reasons. To say that he used drugs for one reason, because he was having problems with his racial identity, seems to be playing the melodramatic race card. I'm not saying that it might have been part of the reason that he used drugs, but to fully blame all his drug use with racial identity problems, like he did in his book, seems a little melodramatic.

2. Melodrama involves an oversimplified hero. Obama seems to see himself as a hero, in a very simplistic way. He wrote two or three autobiographies about himself, before he was even un unaccomplished senator. Now that he is president, he can write a few autobiogaphies, but he has already written two or three.

Obama is wrong on drugs

Reasons to agree:

1. When Obama said, “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack though" (Dreams from My Father), he thought he would reach those who had used drugs and convence them to go straight. However he will have reached more straight kids and convinced them to use drugs, by making it sound cool, showing that he was able to beat it, and using their street names, as though he is still trying to have "street cred". 

Reasons to agree:

1. Obama is right that selling 15 tablets of Ecstasy should not be in the same class of felony as raping a woman at knifepoint.
   

Obama is right that selling 15 tablets of Ecstasy should not be in the same class of felony as raping a woman at knifepoint

Reasons to agree:

1.  The person who is buying the ecstasy wants to buy it.

Reasons to disagree:

Obama was wrong to vote no on mandatory death sentences for gang members who kill cops

Reasons to agree with Obama:

1. If you get killed because you made someone mad, or they want to steal your car, or because you were in the wrong place in the wrong time, that is one thing. But gangs are specifically targetting cops. We need them to be un-afraid of going into dangerous places. If they are not safe, than none of us are safe. It should be worse to kill cops, because they stand in the place of all of us in keeping our society together, and all that thin-blue-line stuff.

Background:

Q: On mandatory death sentences for gang members who kill cops you voted no. Would you explain?

OBAMA: [The proposed legislation] was entirely unnecessary and unconstitutional. It suggested that I could kill a police officer but because I’m not a gang member, I would be treated differently. I think both cases should be death penalty eligible.

KEYES: Senator Obama does not think it superfluous to have hate crimes legislation that adds a special animus to certain acts of violence already penalized against the law. But in order to convey against those certain acts a special category of deviation from society. The law provides a special message aimed at discouraging things considered especially harmful to a society and a community.

Source: Illinois Senate Debate #3: Barack Obama vs. Alan Keyes Oct 21, 2004

Obama was wrong to restrict police entry rules into dangerous places

Reasons to agree:

1. Q: On the right to let cops go into dangerous places with search warrants without knocking, you voted no as well. Would you explain?

   OBAMA: With respect to the potential for police officers not to knock when they go in, there’s an issue of search and seizures and there must be some parameters for law enforcement to protect our civil liberties.

   Source: Illinois Senate Debate #3: Barack Obama vs. Alan Keyes Oct 21, 2004

Obama is right that some heinous crimes justify the ultimate punishment

Reasons to agree:

1. “While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes--mass murder, the rape and murder of a child--so heinous that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment. On the other hand, the way capital cases were tried in Illinois at the time was so rife with error, questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddy lawyering, that 13 death row inmates had been exonerated” The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama, p. 58 Oct 1, 2006

Obama is right about videotape all capital interrogations

Reasons to agree:

1. “Obama had a 2002 bill to stop police abuse. Chicago had become infamous for use of torture by police to help frame innocent people. Thirteen innocent men on Death Row were exonerated and released, some of them victims of these tortured confessions. Illinois desperately needed some action to restore confidence in the police. Obama’s proposal was to require videotaping of interrogations of suspects in capital cases. When Obama began, the idea of a bill was opposed by police, prosecutors, most of the senate and the governor. The governor was determined not to appear soft on crime, and had promised to veto any proposal for mandatory tapings. By the time Obama finished his work, the police and prosecutors embraced the bill, it passed in the Illinois Senate by a vote of 58-0. The governor took the unusual step of reversing himself to sign it, and Illinois became the first state to require such tapings.” ~ The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson, p.145 Oct 30, 2007. I think Obama is right, however from this paragraph it seems like some people were desperately trying to exaggerate his involvement. But none of that matters in 2012. He does not have to inflate his Resume any more.

Obama passed on stupid urban legends that exaggerated racial problems.

Reasons to agree:

1. “I don’t want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college.” ~ Barack Obama, fund-raiser in Harlem, NY, Nov. 29, 2007.

   “Simply untrue, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There may be a case for arguing, as some Obama supporters have done, that the total number of black prisoners is slightly higher than the total number of black students. But I can only fact check the comparison the candidate actually made, which was between young black men in prison and in college. Rather than acknowledge the error, the Obama campaign declined to provide statistical support.” Source: GovWatch on 2008 Pinocchio Awards for Biggest Fib of 2007 Jan 1, 2008. As GovWatch points out, there are more black men in prison (age 18 to 100 years old) than there are “young  black men” in college. However Obama said there were more young black men in prison than in college, which is far from true.

Obama is right about the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine

Reasons to agree:

1. Rich people use cocain. Poor people use crack. It is wrong to punish the poor people more.

Obama is right to try to ban racial profiling

"Obama will work to ban racial profiling" ~ Campaign booklet, “Blueprint for Change”, p. 48-49 Feb 2, 2008

Reasons to agree:

1. Race should only be considered when it is used to describe a specific suspect in a specific crime and only when used in a manner like other physical descriptions (e.g., hair color, weight, distinguishing marks). This is often referred to as the "be on the lookout" (B.O.L.O.) exception.
   


2. “If we know that in our criminal justice system, African-Americans and whites, for the same crime, receive--are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, receive very different sentences. That is something that we have to talk about. But that’s a substantive issue and it has to do with how do we pursue racial justice. If I am president, I will have a civil rights division that is working with local law enforcement so that they are enforcing laws fairly and justly. But I would expect a white president or a woman president should want to do the same thing, because I believe the pursuit of racial equality, of the perfection of this union, is not just a particular special interest issue of the African-American community. That is how all of us are going to move forward. And to the extent that we don’t deal with those issues, those longstanding, deep-seated issues, we will continue to be hampered. We will be competing with the world with one hand tied behind our backs.” 2008 Congressional Black Caucus Democratic debate Jan 21, 2008
   


3. 
   Q: In the last decade, whites were 70% of persons arrested, but only 40% of inmates. Why?
   
   
   
   A: The criminal justice system is not color blind. It does not work for all people equally, and that is why it’s critical to have a president who sends a signal that we are going to have a system of justice that is not just us, but is everybody. I passed racial profiling legislation at the state level. It requires some political courage, because oftentimes you are accused of being soft on crime.
   
   
   
   Source: 2007 Democratic Primary Debate at Howard University Jun 28, 2007
   
   

Obama made stupd campaign pledges

Reasons to agree:

1. 
   An Obama campaign booklet, “Blueprint for Change”, p. 42 Feb 2, 2008 said: “Obama will work to ensure that ex-offenders have access to job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling, and employment opportunities. Obama will also create a prison-to-work incentive program and reduce barriers to employment.” There is no specific plan, just a promiced outcome. No real-world analasis of trying to figure out how much things will cost, or how they will force people to hire ex-cons... It is nice to say that you want ex-cons to be able to get jobs, but it is stupid to just say your going to do it, without saying how, looking at how much it will cost, or trying to figure out if you even have the money to do it. For instance should the Federal Government be spending tax money collected from New York, and California, to pay ex-cons from Idaho, to go to a jobs program in Pennsylvania? The federal government shouldn't be doing crap lack that. They should have limited social programs.