Why I left the GOP.. Good article

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Finally someone gets it and apparently is bothering to tell others.. I know most won't bother to read it, but pass it along to people you know who still cling to the failed GOP world view..Maybe one or two will catch it..

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/10/why_i_left_the_gop/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

[Munch]

Good read, an example of how just like religion, political views cuts people off from reality and what's happening over the fence.

[Atheon]

Good read. I find it interesting that the stuff he realized in his 30s is stuff I understood in my teens, despite being white and growing up in a middle-middle-class family.

Probably has something to do with living in areas and communities that were liberal politically, and conversations about such topics were common at home, at school and in the outside world. I lived in areas where there was great diversity of racial, social and economic diversity, and my parents were liberals. Many of the issues discussed by the article's author were things we discussed in class and that I read about in the newspapers. It was later nailed home to me when I tried starting out living on my own, vowing to depend completely on myself, an failing. I encountered so many obstacles that I could only overcome by succumbing and asking my parents for money (rent, security deposit, car, insurance, car repairs, etc. etc.). I saw how banks charge money for low balances, a practice that is punitive to the poor. All of this drove home to me how hard it would be if my parents didn't have money to help you me get started out.

[stromboli]

Good article. It still boggles my mind that Republicans are so hard headed and basically blind to what has transpired and what should be obvious in Republican discretionary activities.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I suppose growing up with my parents made a huge difference in my life politically. I can remember food drives and going door to door collecting money for various reasons to help families who came on hard times.. When I was about 9 a neighbor kid and I went door to door all afternoon and filled a 5 lb coffee can with loose change. At some point our 9 year old brains thought it was a good idea to keep the money and spend it on candy and other crap until the fateful moment when Chris, my friend at the time pushed his luck and knocked on the cub scout leader's door..
It went roughly like this:
We're collecting for the poor! (big shit eating grin)
Oh really? Just who are these poor? (at that moment I knew we were sunk and our nefarious plot had taken a life altering turn)
We were taken to a shelter in town where it really were "the poor" where kids really were wearing rags and covered with sores and so on and had to fork over the money. Now though it had a profound impact on me Chris on the other hand did nothing but whine about losing out on "a sure thing".. I was actually proud of giving that money to the shelter, but to my disgrace we never confessed to the plot.. Good ol' Chris went on a few years later to the penitentiary for strong arm robbery of a neighborhood paperboy..
I sometimes wonder just how much of a beating I might have gotten if my folks knew about our plot at the time.. I don't suspect it would have been pleasant..

[stromboli]

Lol. I could start an "I was so poor" thread if I wanted to.

I was a good Republican Mormon BITD,  but had a sea change with Jimmy Carter. The man had all the right ideas, but was unable to carry them out. Reagan sealed the deal for me. What a phony. When you work for the DOD- I was an aircraft welder then, just finished getting my degree- you see where the money goes. We built Star Wars-related crap that probably wound up in the junk yard. There was so much waste under Reagan that people don't know about. Our shop bought a $10,000 laser welder and booth no one was qualified to use based on future projects, and it ended up in a warehouse someplace.

[Savior2006]

The line about "if you are a liberal over 30 you have no brain," is an often abused quote from Churchill. The European perception of conservative is said to be not that much different from a mainstream liberal. I imagine Europeans look at the Christian Wrong in America and think most of them belong in mental institutions.