So sorry about reviving this thread...I just saw the Harper video and thought it was funny. I didn't know that all you Americans felt so strongly about politics. My conversations about politics with my friends went something like this:
"What party are you guys voting for?"
"Conservatives"
"Liberals"
"NDPs"
"Cool, we almost have one of each party here!"
Maybe you guys can pick up a little of that attitude "up North" and stay friends, eh? Condoleeza Rice is very inspiring because she can manage to maintain a high skill level and prepare for performances even with such a hectic career.

Well YOU were the one to dismiss it all with 'Another Liberal fantasy'. You have nothing to back that up, you indiscriminately believe everything the US government tells you. After all, God loves the US, so what else is there to say? So typical of Red State mentality.

I moved here for entirely different reasons than any love of the ridiculous state of American politics, and folks in the Bible Belt who vocally oppose abortion, yet gladly embrace Capital Punishment. Aside from Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the US is the only developed country on that list.

Europe figured that out long ago, but conservatives in the US oppose it, as they do everything progressive, they are frightened of the US becoming enlightened because then they will loose their power to frighten Americans.

A month before I turned 28 I made the BIGGEST decision in my life to leave London and move to the US. You haven't a damned clue about what I went through, nor what a nightmare my existence in London had become. I can't even believe it myself, I went to Paddington station with two suitcases, took the train to Heathrow, then a direct British Airways flight to Seattle.

I am very happy here. Seattle is utterly awesome. Very liberal.

The fifth post in this thread was another snide remark ,from YOU, about politics. I guess it is just so automatic for you that you don't even notice it. At least you like Liszt!

P.S. I don't believe in god.

I notice it quite well. I disagree with your knee-jerk and naive conservatism, I will always fight against what I think is wrong, unfair and nasty in this world. (Do you ever read anything except conservative publications? You would never feel that way if you bothered to experiment a bit, but you are utterly the most hopelessly blinded American I have ever encountered.)

I love Winston Churchill, he says it for me vis-a-vis conservatives and their agenda, though we need to make adjustments:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

I will NEVER surrender to a conservative.

I'm going out dancing this evening, a lovely diversion. I will feel better after a shower.

Jason's words about conservative thought:



Jason's words about Winston Churchill:



Winston Churchill's words about Liberal thought and Conservative thought:

Well, since Churchill was a hard-core Conservative during his teens and twenties, joined the Liberal Party at 30, and didn't rejoin the Conservatives until he was about 60, by his own admission, he had neither brains nor heart.

Now, in all fairness to Winston, he never actually made that remark. Certainly he was astute enough to realize that if he ever said anything so fatuous, his political enemies would have pointed out the above, and laughed him off the face of the earth.

That quote is widely credited to him. What is your proof that it is not his?

It's attributed to about 20 different people.

Whether or not he said it, that wouldn't tell us if he originated it.
I mean, what the heck.....I've said it.

Well, I stand corrected. Thanks, Mark.

Regardless of its source, that quote pretty much sums up my political journey.

A, because there's absolutely no actual documentary or other corroborative evidence linking him to it, and B, as his own political history proves, it makes absolutely no sense coming from him, unless you want to argue that he was a blithering imbecile.

The terms "liberal" and "conservative" in Canada and England do not have precisely the same definitions and socio-political ramifications evident in the United States.

I don't know what generalizations and stereotypes, if any, can be made between musicians and artists who are politically liberal versus conservative (by American definitions). In other words, do liberals shape phrases differently than conservatives, or are more or less likely to overuse the sustain pedal? The idea seems silly, and I would not venture to speculate on that...

In the U.S. there are, broadly speaking, two are at least two major groups of
conservatives: 1)religious conservatives, 2) economic conservatives.

Some economic conservatives may actually be somewhat liberal on social hot-button issues such as abortion or gay rights. They are generally fiercely pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation (including health codes or environmental protections that might chew into corporate profits).

Religious conservatives, on the other hand, are uncompromisingly against sex education, abortion, gay rights, and favor teaching the Bible in public schools. They are more likely to be hostile to racial groups different form their own, and reject any science based research that might challenge the Creation story.

The Republican party has been very effective in united these two conservative bases under one banner. The so-called Tea Party is now trying to co-op this union to create a Republican party more reactionary, war-happy, racially divisive, and anti-intellectual than ever. Sarah Palin is their diva and they swoon to her arias of hate.


By-the-way, Ms. Rice is a cold and mechanical player: rather like her personality - perky but heartless. Piano-players like that are a penny a zillion, unfortunately. I wish I could say nicer things about her public 'service' but it actually goes down hill fast from there...

There is, by the way, an interesting and enlightening article in the New Yorker about where a good deal of funding and background impetus for the Tea Party is coming from - oil billionaires.

If I hadn't left the board to go out and enjoy myself last night -which I did, btw- I would have also hopped in on that 'supposed' quote from Churchill.

WR,

Ah yes, the mad-cap Koch brothers, what a demonic pair. They have been attempting to purchase their way into respectability by buying their way onto the boards of art institutions here in NYC, such as the American Ballet Theater and the Metropolitan Museum.Never-the-less they, along with Rubert Murdoch, are the creators of the Tea Party, which is about as authentically 'grass-roots' as Astroturf (another Koch business).

When Condoleeza "Mushroom Clouds" Rice is finally and rightfully sent to prison for war crimes (along with W., Cheney, Powell, and Wolfowitz) for lying to promote a trumped up war-for-profit in Iraq, we can set up a fund-raiser here to send her a piano to practice on behind bars.

Not a real piano, of course, but one of those 2-octave toys one finds at Walmart. Just to show that there are no hard feelings all around, I will even agree to visit her and give her lessons.

How did George get left off of the bus trip to the pokey? Just curious.

*Deleted by moderator*

I referred to Bush by his middle initial "W" - one letter is all I can manage type on his behalf.

Ah, I missed it. See it now. Good for you.

Oh, do send me the deletion. =p

"I had other priorities in the sixties than military service."



–On his five draft deferments, April 5, 1989

Well, I got drafted in 1966.

As a veteran, I hold it against nobody for doing whatever they could to get out of the draft/army during that era.

That includes Cheney, Bill Clinton, (funny how he never gets mentioned in these discussions...oh, he's a lib...of course) and any and all the draft dodgers who went to Canada, Etc.

So if you did not live through that era, and/or you did not serve or get drafted, or you are not from this country, you have nothing credible to say, so don't cowardly hide behind your computer and handle and lob insults.

You don't have to serve in the military to have an opinion about it. I served. Big deal. Lots of people did. But I'm pretty sure Cheney had some help getting out of service. Call it a hunch. Yet he had no problem sending others to die in a war that was fabricated from the get go.

Nice guy.

I am not trying to defend Cheney, and I am not a historian, but I will always defend the truth.

From what I have read, Dick Cheney was not politically connected during the Vietnam era, and received his deferments by attending college, as many did, not by who he knew.

I would have done the same, if I could have.

My mother did. She was a pot smoking hippy, but also a woman of incredible intelligence and integrity, which is why she is a MAJOR accountant in London for some bigwigs whose names you might recognize.

Obviously she was never drafted, but she always opposed that war -and raised me to feel the same way- and by golly she was right.

This thread has lost whatever tenuous relationship it had to the piano so it's time to close it.