Tuesday Night Open Mic for March 2, 2010

We reach open mic in what has been an interesting week of discussion thus far. This week we will be discussing, at least in my offerings, the ultra racists Farrakhan and his epiphany that those on the right want to make Obama a one term President. We will also discuss Pelosi and her call to ignore the voice of the people and do what the party says. We will throw in a little gun control discussion and I will re-hash the article that Mathius noted yesterday discussing the supposed link between political affiliation and an individual’s IQ score. I must say that I was a bit disappointed yesterday that no one attempted to find a solution to the problem. The tactic instead seemed to be to attempt to rule my analysis of the offending article as theatrics, as though I was the one calling for Congressional action. As we look forward to the upcoming series, the intent is to attempt to find solutions to the problems that are presented. Solutions that will work. I so often get accused of not often enough having discussions about how to fix the problems. Yet when I do, I find that I am treated like Republicans at a health care summit. My discussion about solutions is ignored and we instead focus on the messenger.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for January 12, 2010

Tuesday night open mic comes to us and I have found some interesting articles. I did intentionally avoid the “Sarah Palin coming to Fox” story. I prefer to wait that one out and see what she brings to the table before offering my opinion on the move. She may be great… she may be horrible. Time will tell. However, I do bring some global warming change to mini ice age, some “solutions” to unemployment, and the mortal threat of deer to our existence. Plus a little lapse of individual liberty from, of all places, Texas. I am sure you have all noticed that I have not written as much lately. I am sure you understand the holiday season for me and what made it so. I am also contemplating some changes to my writing schedule that would be more permanent. I will post my thoughts and get everyone’s opinion of them once I flesh them out in my own head. What I would like to do is get to a point where I have the time to be more active in the discussions again. I miss the debates!

Tuesday Night Open Mic for December 8, 2009

Another Tuesday is upon us already. And that means open mic. I will use my first topic to respond to Black Flag on his rant on the Iran being a threat article. This time of year I often struggle to find the time to dole out the responses at the appropriate times and with necessary detail. When I devote an entire article to one person’s point of view, I at least should ensure that I find the time to answer that person. Such is the case here. On top of this topic, there are some other compelling ones for tonight. We have more climate madness. We have the Senate Majority leader inserting foot into mouth quite well. We have the possible dropping of the public option altogether on the health care bill (including why I don’t think this is a good thing). And finally, we will have a quick hit on the fact that Obama’s poll numbers are now below 50% for the first time.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for December 1, 2009

We enter December, the time for Holiday cheer and Congress debating bills that will ensure future Christmas days will be filled with disappointed children with no presents because all the money was spent by the reckless federal government. Watching some of the debates in the Senate are literally sickening. Nothing like watching future prosperity being bickered away by two groups who are desperate to ensure their own financial futures. Tonight was the President’s speech on the plan for Afghanistan. I listened to what I could and will listen to the rest tomorrow. I am not happy with the speech thus far. Tonight’s speech and the whole issue of Afghanistan will be the topic for tomorrow night, as I have plenty to say and not near enough time to both review the speech and offer my thoughts tonight. As for the topics below, I will attempt to participate in the conversations today in between errands and I may offer an additional topic or two throughout the day. As always I encourage everyone else to add as well!

Tuesday Night Open Mic for November 10, 2009

Tuesday night comes to us again. Alas this is the last night that I will be writing this week (at least I think so, I may have the ability to write tomorrow night, but the articles for Thursday and Friday are already written). I have to let everyone know exactly how dedicated I am to writing this blog. All of my friends are playing the new Modern Warfare 2 game, and I left them high and dry to come and write tonight! I know it doesn’t mean much to many of you, but it was the biggest game release ever. Lines out the doors at retailers and all. The reality… gaming is fun, and a nice way to blow off steam, but political discourse is my passion. I love writing this blog. After a 30 minute walk with Doggie Weapon in the pouring rain, I am ready to begin the open mic articles. As you can all see I have written a second article this evening for Veterans Day. I wanted to take a moment and thank those who served. I have done so in the other article.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for October 27, 2009

Open Mic night once again rises. I have to admit that I feel a bit liberated this evening (which is WAY different than feeling liberal). I got an email from one of the readers on the site that was really nice and helped me to feel better about ignoring the petty claims against me. Basically pointing out that many will attempt to place me in a box that they can attack because they aren’t willing to discuss the merits of my arguments. I am sure there are some who will want to argue the point. You can make that USWeapon Topic #5 if you like. You know who you are who sent that email (and I will respond I promise), so I want to thank you for that. Tonight’s topics are quite varied, and I hope they will spur some vigorous debate. A little bit of disgust with American political figures, a little bit of disgust with further moves for government to control business, and a little bit of bullshit partisan politics on the Republican side. Release the Hounds!

Tuesday Night Open Mic for October 13, 2009

The first night of my busy week comes and here I am on time to post open mic! I am pleased to be able to do so! It has been quite a week of news this week. We had the Senate beginning debate on the health care bill being offered by Senator Baucus. We had the White House declare war on Fox News (for the record this bothers me to no end, because now it seems that every time I flip over to Fox hoping to find news, they are doing nothing more than whining about the White House coming after them). We have had the continued wait for an answer on the next step in Afghanistan. And above all else, we had a President that won the Nobel Peace Prize while having not done a single thing to have earned it, even by his own admission (thus finally relegating the Nobel committee as useless to any American who didn’t already think so after they awarded it to Al Gore or Yasar Arafat). But here are some other topics for your perusal. I look forward to your topics as well.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for September 15, 2009

Lots and lots of stuff floating around out there these days. The news cycles are constantly running and it puts out so much information to wade through that I could literally do nothing but work on the blog 24 hours a day and still not cover it all. But I will try to hit some of the bigger stuff that I am seeing in the news today, or at least some of the more interesting stuff. I appreciate those of you who are offering up your own topics as well. It helps me to understand the types of things that you all want to talk about. In the upcoming days we have another contribution to the health care series and a discussion about the relevance and importance and legitimacy of the ACORN group. But for today, I have some interesting topics as well. I am especially interested in hearing any ideas on how we can deal with topic #1. Because it really, really annoys me, no matter which side does dumb stuff like this.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for September 8, 2009

We reach another Tuesday Night Open Mic on the heels of part one of the health care series. Some interesting stuff put out there yesterday. Interestingly I saw very little in the way of support for the current plan, even from our resident left leaning folks. I do not think, however, that my good fortune will continue as we continue down the path. Finding a solution or really figuring out what is going on is going to be a true test of everyone’s ability to put aside the rhetoric and have honest discussions about what is right and what is not right. I look forward to the challenges that await us. But tonight we tackle open mic! For those new folks with us, this is the day where you can post any topic at all for discussion and we will all weigh in and discuss it. I offer a few different topics to get things started, but don’t feel like we have to stick with them. Fire away with topics that YOU want to talk about.

Open Mic Continuing Conversations… September 2, 2009

Another Open Mic Night with a ton of conversation. About 500 comments in the open mic thread as I write this. I read through many of them and found that many discussions were still going on. So I have decided to start a new thread spot over here. Instead of scrolling through 500 comments over and over as you debate, you can copy the comment you want to reply to, paste it as a comment over here, and then reply and begin the conversation over here. It should make it easier to continue the discussions today and give you all kind of a clean pallet to begin with as the new days comes upon us. As I offered this last week as well, I assume that everyone is aware of how to use this thread. So continue the conversations, but don’t forget about the article that was actually posted for today! I think the discussion on that article should be good as well, because we all care about the education system, even if we don’t have children in it.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for September 1, 2009

Tuesday night open mic. I cannot even begin to tell you how glad I am to be here. A night that doesn’t require as much of me. The last couple nights have been tough with lots of reading and research. The health care series, which I plan on posting the first part of either tomorrow night or the next (I planned for tomorrow but it may have gotten bumped a day to discuss the “czars”, especially the whack jobs that want to fine bloggers) has been a lot of work. And I am only nearly finished with the first article! And last night’s socialism article was also much more time consuming than I thought it would be when I started it. But boy did it result in some classic discussions. I appreciate that what I have read thus far was respectful, but man was there some nonsense flowing from all directions. But we have reached the night where I only offer a few suggestions and allow you to choose the topics. So let me not dilly dally here any longer and get on to gettin on. Let the Open Mic begin…

Tuesday Night Open Mic for August 25, 2009

Well, I have to say that the article on “the Greater Good” yesterday certainly drew some interesting responses. To be honest I found myself sitting and reading the responses from Mathius and Chris, thinking, “This has to be some kind of joke. No person is really this clueless to the moral ramifications of what they are espousing.” I honestly thought they were joking at first in order to get a rise out of folks. It appears that is not the case. So topic number one will be dedicated to some continuation of that topic. I realize of course there will still be discussions continuing on yesterday’s article as well. There is certainly plenty of big news out there to discuss. I want to reiterate what some new readers may not realize. Open Mic is the chance for everyone else to offer topics that they want to discuss. It helps cut down on “hi-jacking” on other days. So if there is something you want to discuss, start a thread and discuss it!

Tuesday Night Open Mic for August 4, 2009

Here we are at another Tuesday night open mic. I was looking through the different news sites that I regularly peruse and I found some interesting stuff out there. I always feel so out of the loop when I am out of town. Being down here with my gram is difficult because I don’t have the regular internet access that I would normally have. I am shocked that she had internet access at all! So things move slow and it becomes a bit of a pain to look stuff up and navigate the way I am used to doing. But I have to admit the long loading time I endured on the first topic was well worth the wait to read about politicians being booed and jeered by their constituents. Remember, with these open mic nights, any or all of you can submit topics by simply talking about them in a new comment. I want to make sure we are all discussing the things that you want to talk about too!

Tuesday Night Open Mic for July 28, 2009

Well, I enter the regular Tuesday Night Open Mic weathered and worn. A teenage son that actually wants to hang out with and do things with his dad is a beautiful, albeit tiring endeavor. Add to that work and a blog, and I sometimes feel I am burning the candle at both ends! Add to that more character attacks to defend against, and I am downright worn out. But it’s all good, folks, that’s what I signed up for when I began writing this blog many months ago (Hard to believe I have been at this for 9 months already). Lots of stuff going on out there. I am finding that I tend to tackle things in the open mic that I don’t want to dedicate an entire article on. It is like Open Mic allows for the distracting stuff, so that we don’t let it get in the way of the important stuff the rest of the week. And that is a nice freedom to have during at least one night of the week. So without delay, I offer my Open Mic Topics and look forward to yours!

Tuesday Night Open Mic for July 21, 2009

Tuesday night looms yet again. After driving all day to Pennsylvania and back again (about twelve hours total) and dealing with Capital Beltway Traffic (I can’t believe I used to live there and put up with that daily) I am quite exhausted so I am fairly pleased to have an easy night tonight for writing. I will dedicate Topic number one to answering Ray, as he seems hell bent on attempting to prove something, although I am not sure what quite yet! But there are plenty of topics out there in the news, what with Congress attempting to put the screws to us and Hillary out there talking to other nations and California swiping city monies and calling their state budget “fixed”.  I can see tensions are running a bit high here lately. I urge everyone to remain calm and not panic. There is a lot going on. But we are FAR from being sunk yet. There is a lot of baseball yet to be played in this game. There are bad things happening, but remember that the American public may be slow, but they figure it out eventually. And it won’t be “too late”….

Tuesday Night Open Mic for July 14, 2009

It felt good to get back to the political discussions yesterday. I can’t tell you how much it pained me to not be able to participate in the discussions over the last week and a half. But I certainly cannot complain about the vacation that made that happen. It was a nice relaxing time where I didn’t have to worry about much of anything. I only regretted that I was not able to pre-write articles as I had intended so that you would all still get something new each night. Ah, but lessons learned. Here we are again at a Tuesday night open mic. I missed being a part of last week’s which ended up with an astounding almost 900 responses. I certainly realize that was helped by no new articles for several days afterwards. But it was good to see so much discussion and participation happening. I have been out of the loop for a bit, so I am looking forward to discussing the massive amounts of catching up I have been doing while reading news the last two days.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for Jun 30, 2009

Another Tuesday night Open Mic. We have had some interesting discussions already this week. Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor seemed to be a topic that got some people fired up and the ABC infomercial seemed to be a hot topic for everyone. But there are plenty of other topics out there that we have not yet touched on this week. So we will do the open mic thing, but I also wanted to let all of you know how the next couple of weeks are going to play out here at Stand Up For America. I know that many of you are eager to get back to the “Building a Foundation” series, and I promise that we are soon going to be getting back to that. The past couple of weeks have seen us covering some topics with each of you having the ability to apply what we discussed earlier in the series. And there will be some more of that coming soon.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for June 23

Wooo Hoooo. Flying through the week, we are. And a fun filled week it has shaped up to be thus far. Denouncing those who think the world should change so they don’t get their feelings hurt. Discussing the brewing issues happening in Iran right now. I saw a couple of other issues jump into those discussions so I will attempt to pull them into this thread so that they can be discussed. I appreciate everyone doing their best to keep the issues on topic within the threads and waiting to address different topics. There should be some interesting topics this week as my perusing the news out there reveals a lot of things that I have not covered. So let’s get this started….

Tuesday Night Open Mic for June 17

We come to another Open Mic day as it is already Tuesday night again! We had some interesting discussions again yesterday around the curriculum in today’s public schools and the day before on the current tactic on the left of linking psychopaths to the right in order to discredit their opinions. But today we open up the discussion board so that we can discuss all of the different topics that are out there that I have not been covering (I am, after all, just one man). I think that we will have some good topics this week. I have been watching the news boards and there are some interesting happenings in the world and in the USA. I am getting used to the open mic idea and now find that I see articles or things out there throughout the week and I make a note to add them into the open mic forum! So what topics are on the minds of my astute readers?

Tuesday Night… Open Mic Nights

Well, I was struggling with what night would become the official “open mic” night. It seems to me that Tuesday night is the perfect night for it. Middle of the week so that people are settled into the week. Two posts from me before it, and two posts after it leading up to guest commentary (which I am again running thin on!). So the idea here, just so that anyone who wasn’t part of the discussions leading up to open mic night, is that instead of throwing articles that are off topic into the discussions on other days, we save them for posting on this day. I know some of you read a lot and want to discuss a lot of different topics that I am not covering. This is the time for that. So jump in and discuss what people throw up here. And if there is an article or topic that you want to discuss, start a thread for it by replying to the main article. I look forward to the topics that you guys contribute!

Nothing New, But Important Questions Here

At the request of several of the folks who read here regularly, I am not going to offer a new topic this evening. The most recent philosophy post from Just A Citizen is a lot to digest and there are plenty of discussions that still are taking place on that article. It is important that we take the time to hash them all out before we move on. So that is what we are going to do. Additionally, the “Liberal Trap” article requires my attention as well, as I have committed to answering all the questions that are posed there so that we can address and move forward in a positive way. But there have been a few points brought up in that “Liberal Trap” article that I want to address here and get everyone’s opinion on. After all this site is nothing without readers, so I want to go forward with your opinions counted.