Edwards Paints a Bleak Picture

Interesting that John Edwards, a white man born in South Carolina, seems to be more in touch with the feelings of African Americans than does Barack Obama. Could it be because Barack is not really much of a black American, since his Mom was white, and his Dad was not an American black, but a Kenyan immigrant who abandoned his kid at age two to return to Kenya for work in the corrupt government of that nation.

One simple effective solution to reduce the prison population would be to stop the war on drugs being waged on every American even at the lowest level. About half of the people in our prisons are there for drug related charges. The use of diversion programs for nonviolent offenders is minimal and that could be vastly increased. The zero tolerance mentality uses the pretext of any traffic stop as an interrogation and investigation for drugs even for small/tiny amounts of marijuana, etc. Do you really want to put all these people through our expensive court system, prison, then parole? Do you want to spend all this money for ankle bracelets and real time monitoring of people's movements? I think we need to look at how our criminalizing of all sorts of even slightly unacceptable behavior of a few is costing our society a huge amount of money and lost self esteem and job prospects for those unfortunates caught up in it. Keeping people out of prison should be a priority because it will ruin them for sure. Prison does far more damage than a small quantity of a drug. We need to rethink what we are doing and stop taking direction from "experts" paid by and working for our growing legal system. We just have to stop condemning such a large part of our population.

If you wanted a man that does not take the worker in this country for granted, Edwards would look good on the surface. He is certainly head and shoulders better then poor worthly W. He is strongly on the people's side instead of corporate government pimps as we have now. However, he has a major flaw which he shares with every other Democratic candidate. He will not follow an immigration policy of capture, punish and expel. No one that fails on that issue is acceptable. Period.

Spock

Things have changed since LBJ pushed the civil rights bill. And don't forget that Kennedy (JFK and RFK) both pushed for civil rights.

Democrats want our public schools to be improved. That's why they're against vouchers. They take money away from the public school system. A voucher program will result in the demise of public education, to be replaced by private schools. But the republicans don't want money put into the public schools, because they want business to take over education. That will eventually lead to no free education for anyone, and minorities will suffer, most of all.

So don't go mischaracterizing what the Democrats want. What you said is a lie, and you know it.

Eric - A little history for you - The Dems fought on the side of the south during the civil war, The Republicans (Lincoln was one) fought for the North.
Pre Johnson when he went to pass the civil rights bill he had to go to the Republicans because the Dems refused led by Byrd and Gore SR.

First to solve the issue is education, the dem do not want to do it because they are in with the unions

Vouchers for the poor would allow parents to send their kids to better schools.

But the dems do not want them to learn. They want to keep minorities down. Why was it not solved during Clintons first 8 years??

What do we expect? We tore Africans from their homeland, enslaved them for generations, then "set them free" while segregating them. We finally passed civil rights legislation and the Republicans are doing everything they can to destroy that. Are we surprised that there are people that have come from this background, filled with poverty, distrust and resentment, that aren't doing well?