Another Muslim country with interesting ideas

Funny you say that because I do not consider myself to be a gung ho Republican. Out of the two major parties, I do consider myself to be more of a Republican than a Democrat because I support more of what Republicans stand for. I support the ideas of low taxes, small government, strong military, etc. Plus, in terms of values, I consider myself to be conservative, and that aligns more with Republicans than with Democrats. For example, I am very pro-life.

However, when voting, I have always considered the candidate over the party. For example, I was a staunch Bush supporter in 2000, but I voted for Kerry in 2004. I do not like the direction our country has gone over the last 4 years. I think that the Republicans are gradually shifting to the extreme right-wing, and in my opinion, that is extremely dangerous. The party of Reagan united America whereas the party of Bush segments and divides.
The ability to dissent is one of our greatest assets as Americans and the GOP of today is taking away from that. If that continues, then I might be voting Democrat in 2008.

So I really do not think that I am a staunch supporter of the GOP. I support them more times than not, but I do not think it is a blanket statement. However, one tends not to see his own traits and faults. Maybe I am a gung ho Republican and I just do not know it

 

He wasn't exactly poor. "Country rich" is more like it. Johnson City is named after his grandfather, most think it was named after LBJ, their family did quite well for the area.

 

Actually hostility towards the Chinese in Indonesia far predates globalization. The Chinese have for centuries dominated the merchant class of most SE Asian countries and have bred resentment from the locals, some have likened this to the situation that Jews have faced in Europe. At the same time the Chinese haven't always carried themselves very humbly. Every now and then there's been an outbreak of ethnic tension involving the killings of Chinese. Its happened in Indonesia recently because of all of the turbulence that countries been going through and often the Chinese are targets when things go bad but its also happened in Malaysia, the Phillipines, Vietnam and even Singapore.

Thanks for your concern. My family owns a house at a resort on an Indonesian island near Singapore but its pretty secure there so don't expect much trouble. In general as an American of Chinese ancestry I try to be friendly as possible to the locals, not that I wouldn't do that anyway but it never hurts to throw a little water on a potential fire.

 

Johnson City was actually named after a cousin. LBJ, like many people, came from a family that had it's ups and downs. Here's some background I found doing a quick search, from American President.org:



Lyndon Baines Johnson was pure Texan. His family included some of the earliest settlers of the Lone Star State. They had been cattlemen, cotton farmers, and soldiers for the Confederacy. Lyndon was born in 1908 to Sam and Rebekah Baines Johnson, the first of their five children. His mother was reserved and genteel while his father was a talker and a dreamer, a man cut out for more than farming. Sam Johnson won election to the Texas legislature when he was twenty-seven. He served five terms before he switched careers and failed to make a living solely as a farmer on the family land seventy miles west of Austin.



Education and Teaching Career

In 1913, the Johnsons abandoned the farm and moved to nearby Johnson City. The family house, while comfortable by the standards of the rural South at the time, had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. Lyndon, like his father, wanted more for his future. In fact, when he was twelve, he told classmates, "You know, someday I'm going to be president of the United States." Later in life, Johnson would remember: "When I was fourteen years old I decided I was not going to be the victim of a system which would allow the price of a commodity like cotton to drop from forty cents to six cents and destroy the homes of people like my own family." The climb out of the Texas Hill Country, however, would be a steep one. School, at first, was a one-room, one-teacher enterprise. Johnson City High School was a three-mile mule ride away from home. Lyndon graduated in 1924, president of his six-member senior class.

Sam Johnson's financial troubles took a toll on his health and his family. The Johnsons scrimped to send Lyndon to summer courses at Southwest Texas State Teachers College to supplement his meager rural education. But the boy did not do well, and he was not allowed into the college after finishing high school. This led to a "lost" period in Lyndon's life, during which he drifted about. With five friends, he bought a car and drove to California, where he did odd jobs and briefly worked in a cousin's law office. Lyndon then hitchhiked back to Texas and performed manual labor on a road crew. He fell into fights and drinking that eventually led to his arrest. In 1927, he refocused his energies on a teaching career and was accepted to Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

Johnson was an indifferent student, but he eagerly pursued extracurricular activities such as journalism, student government, and debating. He excelled in his student teaching and was assigned to a tiny Hispanic school in a deeply impoverished area. Johnson literally took over the school in Cotulla, pushing the long-neglected students and giving them a shred of hope and pride in their achievements. He earned glowing references. When Johnson graduated in 1930, however, America was just entering the Great Depression. His first teaching job paid $1,530 -- for the year. Johnson again did an exemplary job, but the unpaid political work he had been doing in his free time had fueled other ambitions. Not surprisingly, his teaching career was brief.

Tirelessly, he helped a political friend of his father in some local campaigns, and by late 1931, he had won a job as an aide to U.S. Congressman Richard Kleberg of Corpus Christi. In Washington, Johnson's work ethic was astounding. He poured over every detail of congressional protocol. No mail from Kleberg's constituents went unanswered. He was, in short, a model assistant. His drive, ambition, and competence made him stand out among the young people in Washington at that time. When he returned to Texas in 1934 to visit family, he met a twenty-one-year-old woman named Claudia Alta Taylor, a recent University of Texas graduate and a member of a wealthy East Texas family. They married three months later.

http://www.americanpresident.org/hi...iography/lifebeforethepresidency.common.shtml


Poor is a relative term. His family had been a pretty prominent one in the past, and that counts for a lot in Texas, especially rural Texas, but Johnson himself was unlucky enough, early in life, to have missed the "money" part of the family history. His success, it seems to me, was fueled by raw ambition, his intelligence, and luck. And he could be ruthless, that's for sure. But he certainly understood the poverty that pervaded Central Texas as he was growing up, experienced it, and acted to do what he could to better the lives of those less fortunate when he got the chance. JFK had many ideas that LBJ saw through to fruition, but LBJ had a much deeper appreciation of poverty, prejudice, and it's impact on the human spirit, in my opinion. He did more to address those things than anyone had a right to expect. JFK was a brilliant intellectual. LBJ was a doer, with a deep understanding of just what needed to be done, at least in the social sphere.



Keep D&D Civil!!

 

Would that law apply even if it was two hot women kissing?