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"I'd bet that's the rare exception"

In 2013, 59% of all mortgages were sold to third parties. See Chart 2: http://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp...

"The poor benefit handsomely..."

Oh yes, the sweet, sweet luxuries of being poor! I never realized how nice it must be to need SNAP to feed your hungry child and file EITC so you can barely afford both a shitty apartment AND clothes. They just don't realize how good they have it, those ungrateful poor bastards, that they aren't starving and homeless. The nerve...

"The poor get outright handouts at tax time and mostly end up paying no federal taxes at all."

BECAUSE THEY'RE POOR. What would you have them do, pay 15% of their not-enough-to-eat wages so they can "feel the burden" even more than they already do? Would you kick a man who's down because he didn't have the foresight to not be on the floor, or would you offer him a hand? Ah, the very best of "I got mine, Jack!".

"I think someone should read up on the "Earned Income Tax Credit"."

And I think someone should read up on ALL of the tax expenditures, including those that accrue to the middle-class and wealthy, before claiming that assistance to the poor is too much. The largest tax expenditures clearly benefit the middle-class and wealthy, not the poor. Tax preferences for employer-provided health care, lowered capital gains rates, retirement savings deductions, and mortgage interest deduction, all cost MUCH more than SNAP, TANF, and the EITC.

Source Material to Start Reading:

http://bipartisanpolicy.org/bl...

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org...

https://www.jct.gov/publicatio... , starting at page 47

Doesn't change the facts I posted. Low voter turnout means no one liked either candidate, and Obama was one of those in 2012.
Link despite 8 million more voters in 2012, 5 million less voted than in 2008.
Thats right, Obama got significantly less voters in 2012 than 2008, so bringing up his reelection is a dud argument.

Reading through his recent comments, it does look like he's conservative, but you're presenting a false dichotomy. Saying "The Obama administration is doing this" doesn't mean "You should have voted for McCain and Romney."

It's worth pointing out that McCain seems to be more critical of the NSA than Obama does. I don't doubt that if McCain got elected president, the roles would be reversed, but Obama IS standing up more for the NSA spying program than McCain is, that much is clear.

I agree with you that both parties are to blame, but I think "fuck them both" isn't the only way out of this situation. I personally think that if we all bothered to vote in the primaries, in EITHER primary, many political problems attributed to the two party system would vanish quickly. SEVENTEEN PERCENT of eligible voters nominated the candidates last time. For some reason, it's only the whackos that bother voting in the primaries. The tea partiers are the only ones participating, and then the rest of us can't figure out why they're being taken seriously by washington. It's certainly not because they have such good ideas, it's because they vote in the primaries. The anti-NSA crowd could and should do the same thing. Vote in the primaries, nominate candidates to both parties who oppose the NSA. It's not genetically encoded into either party to be in favor of big brother.

Also, I'd like to add that in the 2012 election, a third party could have claimed up to 42.5% of the total vote without taking a single vote from any other party, since your two favorite parties agree that turnout was somewhere around 57.5%.

To be sure, Republicans claim the Treasury can just "prioritise" interest payments to avoid a default. Read the meticulous analysis that Jay Powell of the Bipartisan Policy Center did of the Treasuryâ(TM)s cash flows in August for a sense of how risky that is. Among his findings:

        For example, on Aug. 3, we project that the government will have about $12 billion in receipts and $32 billion in committed payments, including a $23 billion Social Security payment. And Aug. 15 presents a triple threat: a $19 billion daily deficit, a $29 billion interest payment and a quarterly refunding auction to pay off a maturing $27 billion bond.

Even assuming that Treasury manages to remain current on its debt, the firestorm that arises when vendors, pensioners and soldiers stop getting paid will be unprecedented. As the nonpartisan analysts at ISI Group note, the failure of TARP to pass on the first try in the fall of 2008 may not do justice. The main fallout then was the plunge in the stock market. This time, it will not be just financial market turmoil but âoevoter outrage associated with the prospect of an immediate 44% cut in federal spending that would instantaneously overwhelm the Capitol Hill switch boardâ. Both parties will be blamed, but Republicans more. After all, some, such as Michele Bachmann, have opposed raising the ceiling precisely to induce cuts on such a scale.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/06/republicans-and-debt-ceiling

So just stopping spending isn't that simple, and if you do manage to do it without defaulting on debt payments, you'll disrupt many lives.

The Wall Street Journal writes of "Battling the Cyber Warmongers". The big event in this area seems to have been the Cyber Shock Wave TV special, in which various former senior Federal officials participated in a simulation of a "cyber attack" on the power and phone system. Big names were involved: Michael Chertoff (former head of Homeland Security) and John Negroponte (former acting CIA director).

The show was embarrassing. It was clear that the participants not only had no clue what to do, they didn't know who to call who did. The person representing Energy kept harping on the thousands of energy companies there are in the US, and how they needed more authority over them. The level of cluelessness makes it clear how Hurricane Katrina (for which they had three days warning, and which happened on the watch of many of the participants) was botched.

In reality, the US power grid is divided operationally into seven regional grids, each with a control center and a backup control center. The supervisors at those control centers are the ones who really run things. If someone in the U.S. Government is dealing with an attack on the power grid, they need to have those supervisors on speed dial. In an emergency, the best thing representatives of the Government can do is call up each one and ask "What do you need right now". They're likely to get an answer like "We need troops protecting these key substations", or "We need a heavy-lift helicopter to move a spare transformer." Actions that would help fix the problem. One of the listed duties of the shift supervisor at the PJM Interconnect is to talk to Government officials.

The Government officials in that simulated emergency didn't have that basic info. They didn't know that there were seven people who were really running things. But they wanted to be in charge. That's the problem.

Few high government officials have a background as first responders or in incident management. If anything, the military officers are more likely to have a clue; their training teaches them to prioritize in a crisis and to deal with confusing, conflicting information.