A house of cards

April 04
A house of cards

The Stanford Daily


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S.F. mayor campaigns in Palo Alto

AGUSTIN RAMIREZ/The Stanford Daily

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom discussed state policies at a town hall meeting in Palo Alto Wednesday evening. Newsom is running to replace Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010.

By: Devin Banerjee
Published: April 2, 2009
Newsom aims to target youth through social networking

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom continued his statewide tour of town halls Wednesday evening, discussing a variety of state issues in a packed Palo Alto High School gymnasium. The mayor opened a gubernatorial exploratory committee in July of last year, 28 months ahead of the 2010 election that will replace incumbent California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The audience was diverse — from business suits to high school sweatshirts — as were the questions on the table, which attendees submitted on index cards. State health care, education and water management dominated the hour-long session, along with same-sex marriage rights and the proposed high-speed rail system.
While Newsom has become known for hard-left stances — most notably his forceful campaign against the recent ban on same-sex marriage — he continually emphasized on Wednesday that he is not strictly ideological, but instead "open to evidence" that contradicts his own beliefs.

"I don't want to cast aspersions on people that disagree," Newsom said specifically of the gay marriage debate. "Good people disagree."

Newsom, a supporter of Hillary Clinton who backed Barack Obama for President after Clinton bowed out of last year's race...............

A house of cards
Saturday Apr 4th, 2009
Obama clearly sees that the American system has failed in some ways, and has fallen far short of where it should be in others, and he wants to shake things up and change things. Yet he has not fully realized how difficult it is to change the course in which the U.S. is going, and how time-consuming it will be.
Obama is no exception. He knows the Lord, although he does not place a high priority on his relationship with Him. It's not that he considers it unimportant; it's just that he considers politics one thing and his religious life quite another, and he is often more motivated by practical considerations and influenced by his counselors than he is by the Lord. They tell themselves many things in many situations to justify their little compromises or deals, and after a while, compromising becomes a habit, what they consider a necessary evil.
He also governs a nation that is reaping what it has sown for many years. It oppressed other nations economically, robbing the poor to care for the rich, and now its own economic system is in deep trouble. It built its finances like a house of cards, and those cards are now collapsing. It bought and consumed and chased after wealth, making mammon and greed its gods, and now its gods have failed it. It has overextended itself financially and militarily, and now finds itself in trouble in many areas, and disliked in many countries. Obama comes into office bearing more, because America must reap what it has sown. The nation that has sown poverty, injustice and destruction abroad will taste the same at home