The House is split 253 (Dems) to 178 (Reps), giving the Democrats a 75 vote advantage. EVERY vote the House does is controlled by a simply majority (there is no filibuster like in the Senate), meaning all you need is 218 votes to pass anything. The Democrats could afford to lose 35 of their members' votes and still pass it... yet, you're sitting there blaming the Republicans. Partisan much?
The GOP has absolutely no power in the House... none. The reason why NN was tabled BY THE DEMOCRATS, is because the term has a different meaning to everyone that uses it (some people mean that it implies no shaping or throttling can be done at all, some think it means that you can throttle and shape, others think it means that it'll give the government censorship powers, etc and some think that it'll be good for consumers, some think it'll be bad for consumers, some think it'll be good for the industry and some think it'll be bad). Further, the bill was so full of loopholes and compromises, it wasn't about just NN, it had dozens or even hundreds of unintended consequences in it that had yet to be fixed. There was even a group of 72 Dems that wrote to the FCC just about a year ago about some deep concerns about NN. But, don't let that get in the way of your "must be the GOP" bias either... I bet it's all Bush's fault.
Hmmm. Well they ARE empowered by people fearing republicans. You got me there.
It's not just simple fear, it's hyperbolic demagoguery promoted by Democrats. I've been around long enough to listen to the Dems tell you that Republicans just want you to die (Alan Grayson in the last year on health care), want to starve the children (modifications to the school lunch program in the 90s), think grandma should be relegated to eating cat food before dying in the street (any time Social Security reform is brought up), etc. I don't think many rational people can honestly say that is true of Republicans (and those that can are some fringe nuts), but needless to say, that's what the party will officially campaign on.
Is it reasonable to fear that the Republicans screwed up the current wars? You bet. Is it reasonable to fear that they screwed up the economy? You bet. Some fears are reasonable, but come the silly season of campaigning, the debate over some long championed idea, the defense of one's pet program, or virtually any debate at any time on an internet forum, neither side agrees to any reasonable bounds on rhetoric.
That's a big part of the problem today - we're all busy shouting at each other in unreasonable ways rather than actually debating to find some mutually shared ground. I guess you can argue we're at a crossroads, where there is little to no middle ground left, with the Democrat leadership wanting authoritative socialism and the Republican leadership wanting authoritative crony capitalism. Most of the little people are too busy playing blue team/red team to notice that they're the target of both teams.
Pare away all of the punditry, the smears, the people trying to assume control for their own benefit, etc... and that's really the underlying feeling with the whole tea party movement. That government has gotten so big, that it has become an "us versus them" mentality, us as in people like you and me, regardless of where our views may stand, and the ruling elite that continually seek more power over us. The left asks us where we were during GWB and I ask them where are they today during GWB2/Obama? Look at groups like Code Pink - vehemently anti-war under Bush, but willing to cozy up to Obama even though he's doing the exact same things Bush did, including surging/escalating. Their rhetoric was completely hollow, they were merely anti-Bush, not anti-war and too many people on the left have abandoned their "principled positions" once they gained power.
I think you missed by point. Managing people, shmoozing, and simply "holding authority" doesn't really benefit society. I mean, I'm really glad I'm not the one who has to babysit 5 engineers, but it's not that important of a job. When the skills you develop become less important then your ability to wine and dine clients, then you've stopped helping humanity and you're simply trying to live off of the fat of humanity. Marketing, for example, is all about fooling the customers into buying a product. Sure, it pays a lot, but it doesn't benefit society.
I think most management/bureaucracy is a waste... but you said most people making over a million are a waste. Not everyone making over $1 million are some useless PHB with a golden parachute and not every PHB makes anywhere near $1 million. Besides, generally speaking, what other people make has little to no effect on what you make or how much happiness you have... if it does, the problem isn't with the other guy for making more than he deserves, it's with you for envying him. Yeah, I think shit CEOs that get paid tens of millions to leave a company they ran into the ground is obscene, but unless you're a shareholder of that company, does it really matter to you? Why let it bother you, don't you have more important things to worry about and, if you don't, shouldn't you just be happy and content?
As far as sales and marketing goes, yeah, there's a LOT of sociopathic BS there, but the simple truth is, we need m
He's saying that the republican party base is ruled by fear, and the republican party is empowered by fear.
As opposed to the Democrat Party, which is ruled and empowered by fear. To use your examples, if you elect a Republican, Grandma is going to starve in the street and lets not forget those rednecks (isn't that bordering on racism, to declare the inferiority of a certain group of white people?) with guns.
BOTH parties rule by fear and you're playing right into their game. Combined, you get a ratchet effect where government power ever increases while our freedoms continually decrease.
Realizing that anyone making over a mill probably isn't that productive anymore, nor is anyone wearing a suit and tie.
A LOT of millionaires put in more hours in a given week than slashdotters do during crunch time. A lot of people are millionaires because they're workaholics, putting in 80 even 100 hours a week, every week for most of the year. I think you have a misconception that everyone with a significant income is a Paris Hilton... most millionaires are still self-made (IIRC, only 6% of millionaires inherited their wealth). The self-made tend to get their through their habits and personality - the money is part of the journey and not simply the final destination. They tend to enjoy what they do, though some end up relaxing as hard as they work, which may seem opulent to us, but they've earned it.
Also, EVERYONE should be able to enrich themselves. How else do you think people become productive?
You seem to think most people can't rise out of their bracket if there are too many "yacht salesmen"... The 1995 Annual Report from the Dallas Federal Reserve shows (page 8) that only 0.5% of the population stayed in the bottom 20% of incomes from 1975-1991. 25% of the bottom bracket moved up to the next bracket in 1976 and never fell back into it, while 75% of the bottom bracket moved into the top two brackets at some point during the study... and yet, there are more millionaires today than ever before, defying your logic.
But when I read it, I only matched the IRS as such a program. You know, since their sole purpose is to take your money. And that's not nearly the governments largest expenditure.
You do realize that Social Security and Medicare have their own line items on your income statements, right? Yes, those would be government agencies which exist solely and specifically to transfer money. And yes, they are the government's largest expenditures too, exceeding military spending (with the wars thrown in), and they have been since 1971 if you combine them ($79 billion in military versus $92 billion in entitlements in 1971, compared to $661 billion/$2156 billion today). And that's just the federal level, excluding what state and local governments spend on various forms of redistribution.
We can argue whether or not it is a positive thing, but it's very much correct to say that government these days is mostly in the wealth redistribution business.
Keeping grandma from starving in the street is important. Arguably more important than transferring your income to rednecks with guns out in the desert stirring up a big pot of bad karma. Or is the military beyond reproach?
What's wrong with grandma relying on her family to take care of her in her elder years? Even through Social Security, she is, since the program takes money from those paying in today to pay those collecting today... and even then, Grandma isn't just taking her family's money, she's taking money from people that aren't even related to her even if they need that money to, say, pay for their child's autism therapy.
As for your characterization of our fine people in the military being "rednecks with guns," I think you have a certain smug elitism about yourself, looking down on people that do
Are you saying we're dipping into income tax revenues to pay out social security checks? The program is supposedly solvent for about 20 more years.
Maybe you've noticed that your income tax and social security payments are separate items on your paycheck... A lot of people don't understand this whole "entitlement" thing. We've had politicians confusing Social Security with "welfare" for the past couple of months.
Social Security is already spending more than it takes in this year and until recently, was projected to do so beginning in 2018 anyway. They'll tell you that, at that point, they'll start taking money out of the Social Security Trust Fund, but the truth is, there is absolutely no money in trust. What there is, essentially, is a bunch of IOUs to be repaid from the general fund.
To give a brief history of why Social Security is already borrowing from the general fund, we need to go back to the mid-60s. In 1965, Medicare/Medicaid passed... and the CBO's estimates for what they would cost were drastically low. Congress quickly found itself paying significantly more than what it was told they would cost. In addition, Vietnam began heating up. So, Congress's solution, was in 1967, to pass a law stating that any government trust which ran a surplus would allow the general fund to borrow the surplus with the promise to repay it later. Since 1967, we've been papering over our deficits with Social Security money to make it look like the federal government wasn't running even larger deficits. The politicians of that era, like all politicians, wanted to get re-elected, so the last thing they were about to do, was admit to their constituents that they had screwed up... so they put a bandaid on it and pushed the problem down the road for a future generation to have to deal with.
Most of those politicians aren't in office anymore, in fact, most of them are buried by now... But here we are, suddenly finding ourselves mortgaged to the hilt so they could be re-elected back in the day... and our only choices are solutions that nobody is going to like - tell recipients that they aren't going to get the benefits they were promised (retirement age, amounts, wealth/income qualifications, etc) and/or to increase the tax the currently working generation has to pay. No politician wants to touch it (it isn't called the third rail of American politics for nothing) because doing anything to fix it would be career suicide... so, instead, we seemed destined to continue to do nothing, waiting for us to smack into the brick wall ahead.
It's not like they're taxing you so they can pay me more when I retire. What I get back depends on what I put in. But I guess misrepresenting the whole thing is a whole lot more effective as stirring the more ignorant parts of the population to come vote for you, so certain politicians rant about "entitlement" as if it were a hand-out.
You'll get back far more than you paid in.... it only takes a couple years to recoup the investment you made over your lifetime, while most people that collect collect for years, even decades, beyond their break even point... and, as I said, since the Trust Fund is essentially empty, yes, you will have to tax me so you can get paid when you retire. Sad part, is the people that are going to have to pay for the baby boomers weren't the ones electing the politicians that screwed us over, that would be the baby boomers and their parents that did that... but here we are stuck holding the bag.
That Thomas Jefferson guy wrote pretty extensively about how immoral it would be for one generation to saddle future generations with debt, but, hey, we wouldn't want that to get in the way of the me generation. Truth is, the boomers and their parents handed today's generations a country worse off than what they were handed at their birth, but in their narcissism, they've convinced themselves that, not only is the country better off, but we owe them something on top of it for granting it to us.
Which makes me think...what would happen if abortion was brought up at a tea party rally? Would the religious extremists (who want the government to step in and enforce their morality) fight with the libertarians (who want the government to leave us all alone)?
Yes. I'm a tea party organizer and we have a selected panel of fellow tea party folks that met at our tea parties who sit down and plan future events together. Forget the national groups and figures trying to claim the mantle of the tea party, because there is no national party in the Democrat/Republican sense, it is a grassroots movement. Though some people want to champion it for their own ego (Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots, Palin, etc), we, frankly, don't give a crap about them and, in fact, would prefer they quit trying to say they speak for us. We also take no money from outside groups, paying all of the expenses ourselves (which amounts to a couple hundred dollars per event for permits, port-a-potties, equipment rentals, etc - all of our advertising is word of mouth and we pay nobody to speak).
Anyway, there are usually around a dozen people (out of about two dozen organizers total) per meeting (we generally meet monthly, but in the last month prior to an event, we meet weekly) and we constantly have to remind ourselves to focus on the things we agree on. We have the full range of opinions on the war (from lets do more, to support the troops, to do what it takes to win so we can get out, to we should pull out immediately and damn the consequences), abortion, religion (a couple devout catholics, some protestants, two jews, some evangelicals, a couple of atheists, a baptist, other people that don't mention their religion, two priests that I'm not sure of their denomination since they're grief counselors, etc), democrats/republicans/independents/libertarians/Independence (a NY third party), a former member of MoveOn, married people, single people, men, women, a transgendered person, blacks, whites, browns, etc.
Anyway, every meeting, at some point or another, we all get distracted by the things that divide us, and we have to steer things back to what we're united on. Politicians love dividing us with those wedge issues since, as long as we're busy fighting with each other, we aren't paying attention to what the ruling class is doing to us. We pick an overall theme for our rally (the transgressions of our liberty, the breakdown of federalism, etc), inform the people that want to give speeches what our theme is, make sure the speakers aren't duplicating the same subject, and let them do their thing. We don't screen the speeches and sometimes, a speaker will say something that's worth a facepalm, but they're regular people, not professional speakers or politicians (in fact, while politicians are welcome to attend to listen, we refuse to give them a platform to speak), so they're going to make the occasional mistake, but even that is few and far between. The only time we felt we had to say something to reprimand a speaker, was when the guy that was supposed to offer a prayer didn't show up, but a minister (a black southern baptist guy if you want to know) that some outsider sent did, and then he proceeded to "damn the homosexuals" as part of his "blessing." Even the social/religious conservatives in the crowd cringed at that.
There's a LOT of misinformation about the tea party movement being offered by those that flat out oppose it, those that don't understand it and those that don't want to understand it, a lot of which could be cleared up if people actually got off their asses to attend one instead of simply taking their favorite pundit or editorial page's opinion of them. Truth is, a lot of people don't care to understand what the tea party movement is really about, including a lot of slashdotters, so they dishonestly paint it with whatever brush it is they choose to tar it with. That's their right, but they should at least admit to themselves that they're intellectually dishonest. Of cou
No, not "cronyism". We all have cronies, have you ever tried to get any money out of them? Friends are friends but business is BUSINESS...
Checked the bottom lines of the newspaper and news magazine companies lately? You too can have your own magazine franchise or big city newspaper for $1.
Ads may generate some day to day revenue if you've got a single big scoop, but political favors generate access, which in turn gets you future exclusives and leaks to make even more revenue off of, not to mention the prestige points in the press pool based on your seating, access and whatnot. That's not to even get into the extortion potential - imagine the power you could have if you had dirt on the President, a governor or Congressman. All of that leverage is gone if you run the story... and as for proving extortion, well, you haven't run it yet since you were triple checking the facts because of the importance.
If all else fails and you go bankrupt, you simply ask for a newspaper bailout to save you from your deliberate failure to provide a check on the very powers that you cozied up to. Oh, and if you're lucky, you even get special protections, a "shield" if you will, to keep you from having to rat out the very cronies that passed the law to protect them from being prosecuted for the leaks they provided you.
I'm sorry, folks, I gave the Tea Party people as much slack and excuses as I could, but they're totally incoherent and nonsensical, complaining about stuff that doesn't exist or about, um, taxes, while at the same time pretending to be against the deficit. But pro-war, don't forget that.
The Tea Party isn't a movement, it's a label corporations have slapped on the Republican base and distributed nonsense to. There's no consistency at all except, possibly, xenophobia and absurd beliefs in objectively wrong facts.
That's because the Tea Party isn't a political party, it's a series of local movements. There is no national leader, though some people or groups try to pretend they're the leader(s). The tea parties I've helped to organize were put together by a dozen or so local people of all different stripes (libertarians, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and even a former member of MoveOn, and there were males and females (about 50/50), whites, blacks and browns) and we funded it completely out of our own pockets, passing a hat around the table.
At the core of our tea parties, is economic freedom and freedom from government encroachment on our liberty. We've agreed to unite on the things we agree upon rather than be divided by the wedge issues politicians love to get us to disagree on. So, we make no endorsement of or condemnation of homosexuality and/or gay marriage. If anything, most of us believe government should get out of the business of marriage entirely.
Don't assume that Beck speaks for the Tea Party Movement - he has absolutely nothing to do with the TPM and while his Beckbots, er, We Surround Them project may have some commonalities with the TPM, locally, the Beckbots have chosen to do their own thing and don't want anything to do with public advocacy anymore. Likewise, Palin doesn't speak for us, Ron Paul doesn't speak for us, the Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots or whatever "national" group doesn't speak for us.
So, if the Tea Party Movement seems disjointed to you, it's because it is... precisely because it's a real grassroots movement and not some sham astroturf like the "Coffee Party" groups. We're entirely bottom up, not top down, despite the consternation of those that want to call themselves leaders... only the left hasn't quite seemed to figure that out yet since they're too busy listening to people spouting sexual innuendo, cropping pictures of black people holding guns accusing them of being white, etc.
Suddenly, dissent went from the highest form of patriotism to "paid astroturf" if it is something the former protestors disagree with.
And, pissing me off personally, they've tried to steal the American revolution, was about a government denying civil rights, not about taxes.
Read the Declaration of Independence... you don't see any parallels in there to today?
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good - Presidents, governors, Congressmen, police, etc don't consider themselves above the law?
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. - The federal government issues mandates outside its jurisdiction, like drinking laws, seat belt laws, schooling issues, etc... and unless those jurisdictions surrender their control, the federal government denies them funding and access.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. - 16,000 new IRS agents in the Health Care bill alone... not to mention dozens of new bureaucracies to support it... and that's just ONE law from one recent President. How about the TSA and everything that happened under Bush too?
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Conse
Burger King is just down the road, across the street with the drive through window facing the general direction of the hydrogen station... working the drive through, she probably had some concussive ear pain from the force of the explosion channeling into the drive through "tunnel."
What dickspills like you don't seem to realise is that "the market" didn't magically reduce discrimination, poverty and so on when it was allowed to operate without government interference in the Nineteenth Century. All it did was create the seeds of violent revolution, which was avoided in places like the UK by slowly introducing such things as anti-Child labour laws, health and safety legislation, and so on.
Government endorsement and maintenance of slavery isn't interfering the market? The Northerners demanding higher tariffs to protect their industries while driving the South further into the poor house wasn't interfering in the market?
Did you know that, in 1832, South Carolina used its nullification power to overturn a newly imposed federal tariff (yeah, states have nullification powers too, even though we never hear about it anymore). Did you know that the constant introduction of tariffs through the federal government by the North was one of the contributing factors that led to the Civil War (not just slavery) and that some NORTHERNERS wanted to secede had the south not? You realize that the Emancipation Proclamation was given in September 1862, a year and a half after the Civil War started, not immediately after the South seceded, right? It was meant to demoralize the South since the South was winning at that point, not so much to free the slaves.
And yeah, every other country in the western hemisphere eliminated slavery through peaceful means except us. As for the labor laws, those came in piece by piece here as well.
As for your opening remark, I'm glad to see you're so mature... it really bolsters your arguments.
First of all, the Declaration of Independence is not law in the United States and never has been. It has only sentimental and symbolic influence on our laws. The law has never followed these documents, and in fact for nearly a hundred years after the republic was formed the government did have the power to enslave people. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal,
The Declaration of Independence is a declaration of the rights of ALL man, the foundation from which we declared out power to cede from our previous government with the goal of governing ourselves. Had you paid attention to what I wrote, I said that. I also said that the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were implementations of self-governance that obviously didn't live up to the declaration of rights itself.
but the Constitution said for nearly a hundred years that slaves were 3/5 of a person. And then for a hundred years after that was repealed, the law said that blacks were not allowed to have the same opportunities as whites. This is not something that some shadowy force "the government" forced on the people. This was the common will of the people, as expressed through the laws made by their representatives.
And why was it the will of the people, do you know? It's for the same reason that the "life, liberty and property" were changed to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Northerners knew that counting slaves in the apportionment of Congress would give the south a secure advantage in the House of Representatives. Counting a slave as a full apportionment allotment, although the slaves had no right to vote, meant that the slave owners in the south would have an undue advantage in the House. Presciently, Ben Franklin warned that the South would further declare the slaves to be property, which is why the wording was changed in the Declaration of Independence, to help bolster the notion that people had the right to self-determination, that they were not the property of anyone else.
So no, the 3/5ths clause has nothing to do with thinking of blacks as less than human, and everything to do with making sure that the North would eventually be able to use their greater representation to eventually push for an end to slavery. Read the works of Frederick Douglass (a summary of how his views changed from your position)
You seem to have a really strange concept of government as an outside force acting on the people. The government is just a concept of the societal rules which we impose on each other by common consensus. There is no such thing as *more* or *less* government in a democracy. There is *more* or *less* regulation, *more* or *fewer* laws, but the government is just a rigidly defined system for enforcing the collective will of the people. There is no difference between "the people" and "the government." You cannot break apart the concept like that. "The Government" is simply the system we have for enacting the will of the people.
The government just passed a health care law that 75% of the population didn't support and even the Speaker of the House said that they had to pass the bill before we could find out what is in it. THAT is "enacting the will of the people?"
The US Federal government is limited to the nineteen powers enumerated to it in the Constitution and no more. An overstep of those powers, an encroachment on power not granted to it, IS, by definition, more government, and an unlawful government at that since it erodes your natural rights (which were further ensured by the oft neglected Ninth and Tenth Amendments). Now, there can be more or less regulation created for a power granted to the government. It doesn't matter if the immigration law is 1 page or 1500 pages, since that is within the scope of Congress to legislate. More regulation has negative effects as well, e
* The Constitution (Article IV, Section 2) and Fugitive Slave Acts granted government the power to return people to slavery
* Dred Scott was freed by the Circuit Court, only to be returned to slavery by the Supreme Court.
* During Reconstitution, the North basically told the South what they had to do, mandating that the South pass segregation laws similar to the ones already existing in the North, particularly in the Northeast, Indiana and Wisconsin (yeah, that doesn't get taught much in history classes today). They also declared that the southern states no longer had the right to representation in Congress.
* Plessy v Furgenson upheld racial segregation with "separate but equal".
Now, if you consider the Declaration of Independence and the arguments within it to be the foundation of our beliefs, with the original Articles of Confederation and later Constitution being an implementation of those beliefs, you can see that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, that they have inherent inalienable rights, including the right to be free and determine their own lives, and that they have the right and duty to throw off the chains of despotism, you'll see that government has NO power to enslave you to itself or to someone else. Government allowed, even supported, slavery, black codes and segregation, so naturally it would take a further act of government, or the overthrow of the government, to remove those injustices.
Your argument that only more government can end injustice ignores the very fact that those injustices were created, sanctioned and supported by the government. Deny the government those powers, that is, rescind the government's unjust assumption power, and it can no longer do those things.
Now, as for private business discriminating, the government has no business interfering in that business' operations. Any business which is willing to discriminate is ensuring that it will run at a suboptimal efficiency, allowing competitors to either take business (they serve blacks and whites) or hire more suitable candidates (a minority's abilities blow away his peers, but since the discriminator won't hire him, he loses productivity). Let the market punish them naturally, they'll find themselves out of business quickly enough, especially when tough times hit, and that will force them to re-evaluate their opinions. On the other hand, forcing them to meet hiring quotas (stated or not) or to serve people they don't wish to serve only generates MORE animosity, furthering the divide between people, preventing people from being forced to reconsider their views. I think anyone willing to discriminate is an idiot, but I'd rather they openly be an idiot so that they and others can learn from their mistake, rather than to brood a contempt that runs deep under the surface, which will only get worse, not better.
After Brown v BOE, Zora Neale Hurston remarked unethusiastically that it was "a court order for somebody to associate me with who does not wish me near them" and that the court's basis, that all-black schools were inherently inferior to other schools, and that blacks could only succeed with the help of whites was "insulting rather than honoring."
So, as you advocate the "success" of bigger government, remember, what the government gives, the government can also take away... and that's the difference between the core foundations of America and Europe, Locke and Hobbes, whether you believe you derive your own rights by your mere existence, or whether you believe rights derive from and are granted by the government.
You collect your pop bottles/cans, it's pointless to take back just one or two at a time, dealing with the hassle of messing with a machine that may or may not work (it's broken because someone put the wrong container in there, it's full, it's out of paper, it can't read the barcode on your bottle or rejects it even though it is valid, etc), then you get a flimsy ticket printed on thermal paper that you either take to the service desk (and wait in line to get your cash back) or check out with. So, you leave a bunch of bottles and cans sitting around taking up space, consolidating it into a single trip... and you wash out the cans/bottles (wasting water) for sanitary reasons, even though they'll be washed again at the recycling plant. Then, to top it off, some people will make a special trip just to return their bottles, burning who knows how much gas on the way.
OR you can have the truck that comes around once a week anyway, which is mandated to pick up recyclables left at the curb, take them... conserving gas, water, space, etc. But instead, we put that nickel deposit on them, forcing everyone to be environmentally wasteful, potentially unsanitary and encouraging them to buy more space than they need to store something which they want to discard anyway (and yes, I've seen garages half full of pop/beer bottles hat people intend to take back "one of these days").
Meanwhile, under the deposit system, the state (deposits collected but not paid out plus any interest generated on the fund/interest not have to be paid if they "borrow" the money for the general fund since we run deficits like there's no tomorrow), Tomra and the store (both of whom get paid per recyclable returned, 2 cents per bottle combined IIRC) make a fortune. But by all means, question the motives of the people that don't support the wasteful deposit system...
It doesn't cut both ways, as the idea that you've advanced is more complicated than the alternatives. Rapists don't generally commit crimes when they know that they're being watched, for the simple reason that they don't want to go to prison. Consequently, it would require added complexities to buy into that particular hypothesis.
People do all kinds of stupid stuff when they know they're being watched, especially if their ego is a little too inflated. Look at the aforementioned Charlie Rangel, who has been under investigation for at least two years for improperly filing his taxes and reports to Congress, possessing more rent controlled apartments than allowed under law and using them in unlawful ways, etc... and he continued to do it because he was bigger than everyone else. Look at Newt Gingrich having an affair in the midst of Clinton's impeachment era despite Larry Flynn and others openly investigating Congress members. Look at Terry Childs withdrawing a ton of money even though he knew he was facing indictment (large money withdrawal being one of those "intent to flee" signals that will get you locked up, often without bail, right away) or Hans Reiser buying books on murder investigations shortly after his wife's disappearance. Bernie Madoff continued his schemes right up until his arrest despite numerous close calls on investigations, only surviving as long as he did because of an inept/lazy SEC. Look at Mark Hurd's behavior despite the recent actions at the top of HP - he had to know the board would be watching. How about Lindsey Lohan drinking and skipping AA meetings despite having an alcohol monitor and probation officer to report to?
Sociopaths and narcissists think the law either doesn't apply to them or they're too smart to get caught. Their own reckless abandon is what tends to do them in eventually. So, it's perfectly reasonable that someone that knows they're being watched will commit a crime, especially if they're of a certain mindset.
But, it did come out that the warrant has been withdrawn, whether it was an attempted conspiracy, attempted extortion or just an accident is going to be tough to say.
Nobody wants to see false charges... ok, maybe a few people that would rather not get exposed themselves salivated at watching Assange get falsely charged. I'm glad the warrant was dropped before it ruined his life, despite my own strong disagreements with how he runs wikileaks.
The razor cuts the other way just as simply too... sometimes people with too much power, fame or ego think the rules of society no longer apply to them and they can get away with anything they want. Pick your favorite politician embroiled in a scandal - Charlie Rangel (who was the head of the committee that writes the tax laws) not paying his taxes, Ted Stevens getting work done on his home by lobbyists and not reporting it, Rod Blagojevic trying to sell Obama's former Senate seat, Mark Foley targetting Congressional pages, etc.
Assange doesn't seem like the type to be humble about the way he's gone after the US military... all of his tv appearances would say otherwise. Perhaps the power that comes with knocking down such a powerful institution and the fame he's generated with it have gone to his head. In fact, we already know that he thinks the rules don't apply to him - while he demands the transparency of other organizations, he does his best to disclose as little as possible about his own.
James J. Hill would disagree with you. You'll note that the Great Northern took no federal subsidies, got no land through eminent domain or land grants, and was only one of a handful of railroads that didn't fail in the Panic of 1893 (a run on banks caused by overexpansion of railroads, similar to the bubble caused by overexpansion of housing we're currently experiencing - kind of odd that federal subsidization are core to both, but, well, who needs history to avoid repeating things?).
It's also worth noting that The Pacific Railway Act was horribly inefficient, encouraging the railroads to build shoddy track and in the most inefficient routes possible. A good chunk of the transcontinental railroad had to be rebuilt before it was even usable and despite all the subsidies, both the Central Pacific (entirely leased out in 1885 to avoid bankruptcy proper) and Union Pacific (1880 and 1893) railroads went bankrupt shortly after finishing.
Just a little history that most people are never taught these days.
and how long does it take to rebuild an essential bridge that the trains must travel over if someone decides to take it out? If we become highly dependent on trains, we can be crippled by terrorists taking out a few key targets. Cars and planes can route around the damage, train tracks are much harder, more expensive and slower to do so. Just look at how ridiculously bogged down reconstruction projects like the World Trade Center. In fact, Michael Barone has an article this week talking about how big government forgot how to build big projects.
While there are clearly religious based laws on the books (like blue laws), I tend to look at religion as the codification of society's standards and solutions to existing problems at the time of the creation of religion. Do we have laws against stealing because it's frowned upon in the bible, or is there a commandment against stealing because taking other people's stuff causes strife and contributes to a decay of society? Likewise for adultery, screwing around with someone else's spouse is going to cause problems. Ditto for murder.
I think George Carlin nailed it pretty well with his thoughts on the Ten Commandments, that there should only be two and we can pretty much all agree on them "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie" and "Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you." And for those, you don't really need a religion, in fact, religion is superfluous if you already have a decent existing government, which will have created laws against murder, stealing, etc regardless of the religion or lack thereof of its members.
Now, I'm off to worship the sun and pray to Joe Pesci.
Like a minor child? Damn those 5 year olds blowing into the tube when daddy tells them to... I mean, they even think it's a game with the beeping and everything else. Yeah! Those 5 year olds deserve a fiery death because of their parent's irresponsibility! Or if a 5 year old is too over the top for you because of the smaller lung capacity, how about 14 year old wanting a ride to their friend's house so they don't have to deal with their drunk parent for the night? A lot of children of alcoholic parents will do anything to escape their situation for a while, including getting into a car with the drunk parent since a 5 minute ride is "safer" than a night at home.
As for a driver using the device, what about diabetics, who can test positive for alcohol on a blow test due to ketoacidosis despite not drinking a thing? Ditto for someone on a low carb diet in ketosis. A blood or urine test can confirm that it is acetone in their blood rather than alcohol, but we're talking about breathalyzers in these cars... and barring an immediate blood test, you know the assumption will be that the driver was drinking. Or if there is going to be a general waiver given to diabetics, what's to stop them from abusing that waiver anyway, and wouldn't that give non-diabetics an Equal Protection argument to overturn the statute?
Did you see the coverage post-Katrina, where they were accusing Bush of being a racist? Did you listen to Air America where fascist was about the best thing they had to say about Bush? Didn't the left wing talking heads accuse Bush of exchanging blood for oil in Iraq? Bush was implicated as more or less performing the acts at Abu Ghrab. Fake stories like flushed Qurans were made up to tar the military and by extension Bush for ordering them to act that way. The media so hated Bush, that the term "Bush Derangement Syndrome" was coined because they could never find a good thing to say about him.
Please don't make me defend Bush by ignoring the things people in the media said about him during his term, I feel dirty enough already. It's called confirmation bias - only the things you disagree with stick out as noteworthy to you and, since you probably had a great distaste for Bush, you didn't make note of how vitriolic the attacks were on him (and his kids for that matter - Chelsea Clinton was mostly treated hands off by the media while their father was in office, as are Sasha and Malia, the Bush twins were frequently the subject of news stories, and rarely in a positive light).
At first I thought, this was an incredible statement and I fully believed in it. But there is one thing I have to point out, while the Left went nuts while Bush was in power, Bush was in command during some really messed up times in American history, and it really seemed like he hasn't handled any of it very well. The left wingers were in a fit, yes, and spawned off some... interesting groups, like 9/11 truthers. But it was Bush (though maybe not personally, but he is ultimately responsible) that brought in all sorts of reactionary politics. The left wingers attacked these things. They weren't grasping at straws when they protested the Iraq war, they weren't grasping at straws when they protested the patriot act, they weren't grasping at straws over the tax cuts.
They were out there calling Bush "Hitler" and all of that... there were plenty on the left that couldn't explain their opposition to anything he was doing, it was just because it was him or the letter after his name. The PATRIOT Act was originally written by Joe Biden and friends back in the 90s, they were just waiting for the right time to pass it and never found the crisis under Clinton. The leaders of the Democrats were all on record in the late 90s advocating threatening Saddam over their belief that he was developing WMD. Likewise for the left's primary opposition to Medicare D, they wanted credit for it themselves since a good chunk of their base relies on the "Republicans want to take away your (x)" wedge issue.
Were there rational arguments to be made? Absolutely... But most of the left that was protesting were doing it out of party politics, not because of some firm moral underpinning.
I personally don't recall (WARNING: this memory lapse is very likely the result of bias towards the left, so please fill in the blanks if you want) the most vocal left wing pundits making random shit up to prove their point on why the Iraq war should not have happened.
Maybe not Iraq, since a good number of them supported Iraq or had just a couple years earlier and would have been called out on their hypocrisy... but there was never any lack of trying to smear Bush in the media, including Dan Rather's phony Air National Guard report that, how did he put it, may have been forged but were true anyway, or something to that effect. On Iraq specifically, Limbaugh and some others made a lot of political hay playing the statements of high ranking Congressional Democrats in the late 90s flip-flopping their public positions just a year or two later.
But the right wing rhetoric of "death panels" in Obamacare
Because there ARE review panels that will determine what treatments are viable and who is eligible to receive them. Yes, the private insurance companies already do it, but the government WILL be getting into the business as well, just like with Britain's NICE board. The man Obama has appointed to oversee the implementation of Obamacare is a huge fan of the British system and wants to implement it here. Will you go in front of a panel and be sentenced to death? No. Will your case go in front of a panel that will decide whether or not you can get treatment, including life saving treatment? Yes. Hence, the idea of a death panel - a panel that decides whether or not you live or die by granting or denying treatment. Sorry, grandpa's 72 and we don't think it's worth paying for him to get a new heart since he'll likely only get another 5 years out of it.
And speaking of queer, how can you have a small government and a ban on gay marriage at the same time? That is a ridiculous position to hold because a small government implies its inability to dictate morality.
There's are some large factions on the right that are focused on different issues. Fiscal conservatives and libertarian types believe in small government. Religious conservatives (not really social conservatives, since not all social conservatives have a morality
Where by "40" you mean "41" (remember when Brown was elected? it was in all the papers) and quite capable of blocking cloture (and have done so as recently as last week). That 1 makes a helluva difference and scuttles your entire would-be point.
Good call... but it still gave the Democrats an entire year with nobody to stop them. That they didn't accomplish what their base wanted them to in that time was their fault, not the Republicans. Truth is, the Dems were like kids in a candy store and didn't know where to start, they just started grabbing a little bit of everything in sight rather than focusing on accomplishing any specific goals, which is why we keep ending up with multi-thousand page bills, thousands of earmarks within them, etc.
Back it up. If you're pulling it out of your ass, it's no better than what the GP pulled out of his/her ass, so don't pretend it's better or more factual unless you can support your claim any better.
Show me the polls where a significant amount of people care about Obama's race... and show me a significant portion of the Tea Party movement specifically that hangs their banner on racism... All you need to do, is to go to the JournoList archives to see the lefties in the media literally conspiring to play the race card unjustly to try to marginalize anyone that disagrees with Obama. Just to pull the first link off google. GP was doing more of the same tarring here. I can't prove that only 10% of Americans are racist (be it for or against a race) since you'll never know what's truly in someone's heart, but it should be pretty trivial to prove these so called claims of racism that the left keeps shouting about. Where's the actual evidence of racism on the part of those that oppose Obama's policies?
Great theory. The trouble is that one reason the 17th was passed in the first place was the increasing corruption and backroom deals involved with the election of Senators by State legislatures. How do you stop that from happening again?
All those earmarks, Senators getting VIP deals from banks, the campaign donations/bribes, sure went away with the 17th Amendment. It's not like there were any Senators named Ted Stevens or Chris Dodd in the past decade, and that Larry Craig is a paragon of virtue, there is no nepotism (Murkowski, Carnahan), etc.
So it looks like the 17th Amendment didn't fix anything in that regard, is simply shuffled the deck, eliminating some problems, creating others and keeping some. Ergo, it's repeal will eliminate some forms of corruptions, and yes, probably create/recreate some some others.
More importantly, it will restore the rightful place of the signatories to the Constitution (people didn't ratify it, states did). The Constitution is a compact between the states, much like the Articles of Confederation were, though more broad, yet specifically limited, to work together for a common purpose. It is only a modern notion, post Lincoln, and getting progressively worse under Wilson, Hoover and FDR (and all since him), that the federal government gets to tell the states what to do. I'm sure you've heard of jury nullification, read up on the history of state nullification of federal law.
It's funny. Lately I've heard more and more conservatives make the claim that they were pissed off with Bush, and outraged at what he did, back when he was president. Yet I still retain a memory, and I lived through the Bush administration. Where were you guys when it mattered?
Conservatives (note, conservatives and Republicans are not the same thing, especially not the Republican leadership) disagreed with GWB on different issues than those on the left did. Conservatives opposed amnesty for illegal aliens despite the attempts to push it by Bush/McCain/Graham and were frustrated by his lack of effort to secure the borders and ports, fought back on the Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination and caused him to withdraw it, opposed Medicare D (lefties opposed it because they wanted the credit for passing it, conservatives opposed it because they don't support the expansion of the federal government), strongly opposed TARP and all of the bailouts, opposed No Child Left Behind (written by Ted Kennedy btw) because of federal power expansion over local school boards, opposed the handling of Iraq after the military victory even though many supported the initial goal, opposed the creation of the DHS and the federalization of the TSA, etc. Do I need to go through and get links, or can you google those if you dispute them?
You might be in that 1% group of conservatives that were outraged, but as a majority, right wingers went along with everything Bush did. Bush had screwed up enough by 2004 that he deserved to be voted out, and yet there was no big counter movement in conservative circles against him.
There was a TON of disagreement on the right with Bush, the left just refused to see it because they were too busy screaming and shouting about other things to notice. And yeah, in 2004, conservatives supported Bush. Sitting Presidents tend to be renominated by their party and, what were conservatives going to do, vote for the complete opposite of what they believe by voting for Kerry? They held their nose and voted for the least worst option of the two. Had the Democrats fielded someone the conservatives could stomach, it's possible that they could have won in a landslide. Instead, they picked a guy nobody was particularly excited about.
I don't remember any tea-party railing against his economically devastating policies.
The spending? Conservatives complained. TARP and the bailouts, conservatives complained. Expansion of the CRA, conservatives complained.
However, if you're calling tax cuts "devastating," conservatives and you have a different view of economics, whereby they don't believe economics isn't a zero-sum game, that the Laffer Curve shows that cutting tax rates may produce higher revenues through GDP growth if there is too much tax (and they did, Bush and the Congress just spent faster than revenues grew), etc. You might as well be debating emacs/vi or gpl/bsd because Keynesians, Chicagoans (economics) and Austrians (economics) are never going to see eye to eye.
On the other hand, amending the Constitution requires a 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress, plus 3/4 of the state legislatures.
Think about that a moment - at least 2/3 of senators and at least 3/4 of the state legislatures thought that having the senate represent the state legislatures was unsatisfactory. If those thought that way of doing things was any good at all, the 17th amendment would never have passed.
And 98 Senators voted for the original PATRIOT Act. That's more than your 3/4s of states. People do stupid things from time to time, sometimes including shooting themselves in the foot, especially during a crisis or time of political upheaval. Wilson was the first Democrat elected in 20 years, carrying 40 states, and had 300 seats in the House and 52 Senate seats (and filibusters didn't work the way they do today, you could only filibuster for as long as you could keep talking).
It's not that hard to understand how it passed ratification in that climate. I mean, it's not like they didn't pass another amendment a couple years later that would be the only amendment to ever be repealed (prohibition)... only by the time prohibition was repealed (1933), the big government takeover was already well entrenched (20 years) and there was no way it was going to surrender power back to the states, especially under FDR's leadership.
And you think they'll act any better when they have to play up their act to get re-appointed? Dream on, because history doesn't support you.
The Senate was far, far more rational before becoming popularly elected. Sure, there was the occasional nutjob, but most of them were thoughtful and respectable people that had earned the trust of their state. Care to back your assertion that today's Senate is more thoughtful and civil than the Senate of old? Or is that one of those revisions where we ignore history so we can claim anything we want today, like the notion that the Constitution isn't the hard law of the land, but a living document meant to be constantly reinterpreted into violating itself, like with the creation of the current federal bureaucracy and the erosion of the explicit rights protected in the Bill of Rights?
And how is somebody meant to represent the state supposed to vote his conscience as you think he would (above)? Or, to put it another way, how do you think the patronage and pork system got started in the first place?
It's a lot easier to explain to 30 or 50 or even 100 people why you voted the way you did, especially if you make a habit of consulting with them along the way, than it is to explain to millions of individuals why you voted against the Save the Children and Feed the Puppies Act of 2010, especially when most of those individuals don't pay attention beyond the occasional gasp of "omg, they voted against saving the children and they want puppies to die!" Most voters tend to be very uninformed, most legislators at least tend to take their jobs seriously enough to usually pay attention to what's going on.
Besides, how is being answerable to your state's government a worse thing than being answerable to whoever cuts you the biggest donation/runs a 527 supporting your policies/etc? Those people are already buying the White House and one house of Congress, they don't need the other.
So, now that I've answered it, let me flip the question... how is the direct election of Senators better for the states and people than the old system prior to the 17th Amendment?
Slashdot Mirror
The House is split 253 (Dems) to 178 (Reps), giving the Democrats a 75 vote advantage. EVERY vote the House does is controlled by a simply majority (there is no filibuster like in the Senate), meaning all you need is 218 votes to pass anything. The Democrats could afford to lose 35 of their members' votes and still pass it... yet, you're sitting there blaming the Republicans. Partisan much?
The GOP has absolutely no power in the House... none. The reason why NN was tabled BY THE DEMOCRATS, is because the term has a different meaning to everyone that uses it (some people mean that it implies no shaping or throttling can be done at all, some think it means that you can throttle and shape, others think it means that it'll give the government censorship powers, etc and some think that it'll be good for consumers, some think it'll be bad for consumers, some think it'll be good for the industry and some think it'll be bad). Further, the bill was so full of loopholes and compromises, it wasn't about just NN, it had dozens or even hundreds of unintended consequences in it that had yet to be fixed. There was even a group of 72 Dems that wrote to the FCC just about a year ago about some deep concerns about NN. But, don't let that get in the way of your "must be the GOP" bias either... I bet it's all Bush's fault.
Hmmm. Well they ARE empowered by people fearing republicans. You got me there.
It's not just simple fear, it's hyperbolic demagoguery promoted by Democrats. I've been around long enough to listen to the Dems tell you that Republicans just want you to die (Alan Grayson in the last year on health care), want to starve the children (modifications to the school lunch program in the 90s), think grandma should be relegated to eating cat food before dying in the street (any time Social Security reform is brought up), etc. I don't think many rational people can honestly say that is true of Republicans (and those that can are some fringe nuts), but needless to say, that's what the party will officially campaign on.
Is it reasonable to fear that the Republicans screwed up the current wars? You bet. Is it reasonable to fear that they screwed up the economy? You bet. Some fears are reasonable, but come the silly season of campaigning, the debate over some long championed idea, the defense of one's pet program, or virtually any debate at any time on an internet forum, neither side agrees to any reasonable bounds on rhetoric.
That's a big part of the problem today - we're all busy shouting at each other in unreasonable ways rather than actually debating to find some mutually shared ground. I guess you can argue we're at a crossroads, where there is little to no middle ground left, with the Democrat leadership wanting authoritative socialism and the Republican leadership wanting authoritative crony capitalism. Most of the little people are too busy playing blue team/red team to notice that they're the target of both teams.
Pare away all of the punditry, the smears, the people trying to assume control for their own benefit, etc... and that's really the underlying feeling with the whole tea party movement. That government has gotten so big, that it has become an "us versus them" mentality, us as in people like you and me, regardless of where our views may stand, and the ruling elite that continually seek more power over us. The left asks us where we were during GWB and I ask them where are they today during GWB2/Obama? Look at groups like Code Pink - vehemently anti-war under Bush, but willing to cozy up to Obama even though he's doing the exact same things Bush did, including surging/escalating. Their rhetoric was completely hollow, they were merely anti-Bush, not anti-war and too many people on the left have abandoned their "principled positions" once they gained power.
I think you missed by point. Managing people, shmoozing, and simply "holding authority" doesn't really benefit society. I mean, I'm really glad I'm not the one who has to babysit 5 engineers, but it's not that important of a job. When the skills you develop become less important then your ability to wine and dine clients, then you've stopped helping humanity and you're simply trying to live off of the fat of humanity. Marketing, for example, is all about fooling the customers into buying a product. Sure, it pays a lot, but it doesn't benefit society.
I think most management/bureaucracy is a waste... but you said most people making over a million are a waste. Not everyone making over $1 million are some useless PHB with a golden parachute and not every PHB makes anywhere near $1 million. Besides, generally speaking, what other people make has little to no effect on what you make or how much happiness you have... if it does, the problem isn't with the other guy for making more than he deserves, it's with you for envying him. Yeah, I think shit CEOs that get paid tens of millions to leave a company they ran into the ground is obscene, but unless you're a shareholder of that company, does it really matter to you? Why let it bother you, don't you have more important things to worry about and, if you don't, shouldn't you just be happy and content?
As far as sales and marketing goes, yeah, there's a LOT of sociopathic BS there, but the simple truth is, we need m
He's saying that the republican party base is ruled by fear, and the republican party is empowered by fear.
As opposed to the Democrat Party, which is ruled and empowered by fear. To use your examples, if you elect a Republican, Grandma is going to starve in the street and lets not forget those rednecks (isn't that bordering on racism, to declare the inferiority of a certain group of white people?) with guns.
BOTH parties rule by fear and you're playing right into their game. Combined, you get a ratchet effect where government power ever increases while our freedoms continually decrease.
Realizing that anyone making over a mill probably isn't that productive anymore, nor is anyone wearing a suit and tie.
A LOT of millionaires put in more hours in a given week than slashdotters do during crunch time. A lot of people are millionaires because they're workaholics, putting in 80 even 100 hours a week, every week for most of the year. I think you have a misconception that everyone with a significant income is a Paris Hilton... most millionaires are still self-made (IIRC, only 6% of millionaires inherited their wealth). The self-made tend to get their through their habits and personality - the money is part of the journey and not simply the final destination. They tend to enjoy what they do, though some end up relaxing as hard as they work, which may seem opulent to us, but they've earned it.
Also, EVERYONE should be able to enrich themselves. How else do you think people become productive?
You seem to think most people can't rise out of their bracket if there are too many "yacht salesmen"... The 1995 Annual Report from the Dallas Federal Reserve shows (page 8) that only 0.5% of the population stayed in the bottom 20% of incomes from 1975-1991. 25% of the bottom bracket moved up to the next bracket in 1976 and never fell back into it, while 75% of the bottom bracket moved into the top two brackets at some point during the study... and yet, there are more millionaires today than ever before, defying your logic.
But when I read it, I only matched the IRS as such a program. You know, since their sole purpose is to take your money. And that's not nearly the governments largest expenditure.
You do realize that Social Security and Medicare have their own line items on your income statements, right? Yes, those would be government agencies which exist solely and specifically to transfer money. And yes, they are the government's largest expenditures too, exceeding military spending (with the wars thrown in), and they have been since 1971 if you combine them ($79 billion in military versus $92 billion in entitlements in 1971, compared to $661 billion/$2156 billion today). And that's just the federal level, excluding what state and local governments spend on various forms of redistribution.
We can argue whether or not it is a positive thing, but it's very much correct to say that government these days is mostly in the wealth redistribution business.
Keeping grandma from starving in the street is important. Arguably more important than transferring your income to rednecks with guns out in the desert stirring up a big pot of bad karma. Or is the military beyond reproach?
What's wrong with grandma relying on her family to take care of her in her elder years? Even through Social Security, she is, since the program takes money from those paying in today to pay those collecting today... and even then, Grandma isn't just taking her family's money, she's taking money from people that aren't even related to her even if they need that money to, say, pay for their child's autism therapy.
As for your characterization of our fine people in the military being "rednecks with guns," I think you have a certain smug elitism about yourself, looking down on people that do
Are you saying we're dipping into income tax revenues to pay out social security checks? The program is supposedly solvent for about 20 more years.
Maybe you've noticed that your income tax and social security payments are separate items on your paycheck... A lot of people don't understand this whole "entitlement" thing. We've had politicians confusing Social Security with "welfare" for the past couple of months.
Social Security is already spending more than it takes in this year and until recently, was projected to do so beginning in 2018 anyway. They'll tell you that, at that point, they'll start taking money out of the Social Security Trust Fund, but the truth is, there is absolutely no money in trust. What there is, essentially, is a bunch of IOUs to be repaid from the general fund.
To give a brief history of why Social Security is already borrowing from the general fund, we need to go back to the mid-60s. In 1965, Medicare/Medicaid passed... and the CBO's estimates for what they would cost were drastically low. Congress quickly found itself paying significantly more than what it was told they would cost. In addition, Vietnam began heating up. So, Congress's solution, was in 1967, to pass a law stating that any government trust which ran a surplus would allow the general fund to borrow the surplus with the promise to repay it later. Since 1967, we've been papering over our deficits with Social Security money to make it look like the federal government wasn't running even larger deficits. The politicians of that era, like all politicians, wanted to get re-elected, so the last thing they were about to do, was admit to their constituents that they had screwed up... so they put a bandaid on it and pushed the problem down the road for a future generation to have to deal with.
Most of those politicians aren't in office anymore, in fact, most of them are buried by now... But here we are, suddenly finding ourselves mortgaged to the hilt so they could be re-elected back in the day... and our only choices are solutions that nobody is going to like - tell recipients that they aren't going to get the benefits they were promised (retirement age, amounts, wealth/income qualifications, etc) and/or to increase the tax the currently working generation has to pay. No politician wants to touch it (it isn't called the third rail of American politics for nothing) because doing anything to fix it would be career suicide... so, instead, we seemed destined to continue to do nothing, waiting for us to smack into the brick wall ahead.
It's not like they're taxing you so they can pay me more when I retire. What I get back depends on what I put in. But I guess misrepresenting the whole thing is a whole lot more effective as stirring the more ignorant parts of the population to come vote for you, so certain politicians rant about "entitlement" as if it were a hand-out.
You'll get back far more than you paid in.... it only takes a couple years to recoup the investment you made over your lifetime, while most people that collect collect for years, even decades, beyond their break even point... and, as I said, since the Trust Fund is essentially empty, yes, you will have to tax me so you can get paid when you retire. Sad part, is the people that are going to have to pay for the baby boomers weren't the ones electing the politicians that screwed us over, that would be the baby boomers and their parents that did that... but here we are stuck holding the bag.
That Thomas Jefferson guy wrote pretty extensively about how immoral it would be for one generation to saddle future generations with debt, but, hey, we wouldn't want that to get in the way of the me generation. Truth is, the boomers and their parents handed today's generations a country worse off than what they were handed at their birth, but in their narcissism, they've convinced themselves that, not only is the country better off, but we owe them something on top of it for granting it to us.
Which makes me think...what would happen if abortion was brought up at a tea party rally? Would the religious extremists (who want the government to step in and enforce their morality) fight with the libertarians (who want the government to leave us all alone)?
Yes. I'm a tea party organizer and we have a selected panel of fellow tea party folks that met at our tea parties who sit down and plan future events together. Forget the national groups and figures trying to claim the mantle of the tea party, because there is no national party in the Democrat/Republican sense, it is a grassroots movement. Though some people want to champion it for their own ego (Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots, Palin, etc), we, frankly, don't give a crap about them and, in fact, would prefer they quit trying to say they speak for us. We also take no money from outside groups, paying all of the expenses ourselves (which amounts to a couple hundred dollars per event for permits, port-a-potties, equipment rentals, etc - all of our advertising is word of mouth and we pay nobody to speak).
Anyway, there are usually around a dozen people (out of about two dozen organizers total) per meeting (we generally meet monthly, but in the last month prior to an event, we meet weekly) and we constantly have to remind ourselves to focus on the things we agree on. We have the full range of opinions on the war (from lets do more, to support the troops, to do what it takes to win so we can get out, to we should pull out immediately and damn the consequences), abortion, religion (a couple devout catholics, some protestants, two jews, some evangelicals, a couple of atheists, a baptist, other people that don't mention their religion, two priests that I'm not sure of their denomination since they're grief counselors, etc), democrats/republicans/independents/libertarians/Independence (a NY third party), a former member of MoveOn, married people, single people, men, women, a transgendered person, blacks, whites, browns, etc.
Anyway, every meeting, at some point or another, we all get distracted by the things that divide us, and we have to steer things back to what we're united on. Politicians love dividing us with those wedge issues since, as long as we're busy fighting with each other, we aren't paying attention to what the ruling class is doing to us. We pick an overall theme for our rally (the transgressions of our liberty, the breakdown of federalism, etc), inform the people that want to give speeches what our theme is, make sure the speakers aren't duplicating the same subject, and let them do their thing. We don't screen the speeches and sometimes, a speaker will say something that's worth a facepalm, but they're regular people, not professional speakers or politicians (in fact, while politicians are welcome to attend to listen, we refuse to give them a platform to speak), so they're going to make the occasional mistake, but even that is few and far between. The only time we felt we had to say something to reprimand a speaker, was when the guy that was supposed to offer a prayer didn't show up, but a minister (a black southern baptist guy if you want to know) that some outsider sent did, and then he proceeded to "damn the homosexuals" as part of his "blessing." Even the social/religious conservatives in the crowd cringed at that.
There's a LOT of misinformation about the tea party movement being offered by those that flat out oppose it, those that don't understand it and those that don't want to understand it, a lot of which could be cleared up if people actually got off their asses to attend one instead of simply taking their favorite pundit or editorial page's opinion of them. Truth is, a lot of people don't care to understand what the tea party movement is really about, including a lot of slashdotters, so they dishonestly paint it with whatever brush it is they choose to tar it with. That's their right, but they should at least admit to themselves that they're intellectually dishonest. Of cou
No, not "cronyism". We all have cronies, have you ever tried to get any money out of them? Friends are friends but business is BUSINESS...
Checked the bottom lines of the newspaper and news magazine companies lately? You too can have your own magazine franchise or big city newspaper for $1.
Ads may generate some day to day revenue if you've got a single big scoop, but political favors generate access, which in turn gets you future exclusives and leaks to make even more revenue off of, not to mention the prestige points in the press pool based on your seating, access and whatnot. That's not to even get into the extortion potential - imagine the power you could have if you had dirt on the President, a governor or Congressman. All of that leverage is gone if you run the story... and as for proving extortion, well, you haven't run it yet since you were triple checking the facts because of the importance.
If all else fails and you go bankrupt, you simply ask for a newspaper bailout to save you from your deliberate failure to provide a check on the very powers that you cozied up to. Oh, and if you're lucky, you even get special protections, a "shield" if you will, to keep you from having to rat out the very cronies that passed the law to protect them from being prosecuted for the leaks they provided you.
I'm sorry, folks, I gave the Tea Party people as much slack and excuses as I could, but they're totally incoherent and nonsensical, complaining about stuff that doesn't exist or about, um, taxes, while at the same time pretending to be against the deficit. But pro-war, don't forget that.
The Tea Party isn't a movement, it's a label corporations have slapped on the Republican base and distributed nonsense to. There's no consistency at all except, possibly, xenophobia and absurd beliefs in objectively wrong facts.
That's because the Tea Party isn't a political party, it's a series of local movements. There is no national leader, though some people or groups try to pretend they're the leader(s). The tea parties I've helped to organize were put together by a dozen or so local people of all different stripes (libertarians, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and even a former member of MoveOn, and there were males and females (about 50/50), whites, blacks and browns) and we funded it completely out of our own pockets, passing a hat around the table.
At the core of our tea parties, is economic freedom and freedom from government encroachment on our liberty. We've agreed to unite on the things we agree upon rather than be divided by the wedge issues politicians love to get us to disagree on. So, we make no endorsement of or condemnation of homosexuality and/or gay marriage. If anything, most of us believe government should get out of the business of marriage entirely.
Don't assume that Beck speaks for the Tea Party Movement - he has absolutely nothing to do with the TPM and while his Beckbots, er, We Surround Them project may have some commonalities with the TPM, locally, the Beckbots have chosen to do their own thing and don't want anything to do with public advocacy anymore. Likewise, Palin doesn't speak for us, Ron Paul doesn't speak for us, the Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots or whatever "national" group doesn't speak for us.
So, if the Tea Party Movement seems disjointed to you, it's because it is... precisely because it's a real grassroots movement and not some sham astroturf like the "Coffee Party" groups. We're entirely bottom up, not top down, despite the consternation of those that want to call themselves leaders... only the left hasn't quite seemed to figure that out yet since they're too busy listening to people spouting sexual innuendo, cropping pictures of black people holding guns accusing them of being white, etc.
Suddenly, dissent went from the highest form of patriotism to "paid astroturf" if it is something the former protestors disagree with.
And, pissing me off personally, they've tried to steal the American revolution, was about a government denying civil rights, not about taxes.
Read the Declaration of Independence... you don't see any parallels in there to today?
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good - Presidents, governors, Congressmen, police, etc don't consider themselves above the law?
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. - The federal government issues mandates outside its jurisdiction, like drinking laws, seat belt laws, schooling issues, etc... and unless those jurisdictions surrender their control, the federal government denies them funding and access.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. - 16,000 new IRS agents in the Health Care bill alone... not to mention dozens of new bureaucracies to support it... and that's just ONE law from one recent President. How about the TSA and everything that happened under Bush too?
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Conse
Burger King is just down the road, across the street with the drive through window facing the general direction of the hydrogen station... working the drive through, she probably had some concussive ear pain from the force of the explosion channeling into the drive through "tunnel."
What dickspills like you don't seem to realise is that "the market" didn't magically reduce discrimination, poverty and so on when it was allowed to operate without government interference in the Nineteenth Century. All it did was create the seeds of violent revolution, which was avoided in places like the UK by slowly introducing such things as anti-Child labour laws, health and safety legislation, and so on.
Government endorsement and maintenance of slavery isn't interfering the market? The Northerners demanding higher tariffs to protect their industries while driving the South further into the poor house wasn't interfering in the market?
Did you know that, in 1832, South Carolina used its nullification power to overturn a newly imposed federal tariff (yeah, states have nullification powers too, even though we never hear about it anymore). Did you know that the constant introduction of tariffs through the federal government by the North was one of the contributing factors that led to the Civil War (not just slavery) and that some NORTHERNERS wanted to secede had the south not? You realize that the Emancipation Proclamation was given in September 1862, a year and a half after the Civil War started, not immediately after the South seceded, right? It was meant to demoralize the South since the South was winning at that point, not so much to free the slaves.
And yeah, every other country in the western hemisphere eliminated slavery through peaceful means except us. As for the labor laws, those came in piece by piece here as well.
As for your opening remark, I'm glad to see you're so mature... it really bolsters your arguments.
First of all, the Declaration of Independence is not law in the United States and never has been. It has only sentimental and symbolic influence on our laws. The law has never followed these documents, and in fact for nearly a hundred years after the republic was formed the government did have the power to enslave people. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal,
The Declaration of Independence is a declaration of the rights of ALL man, the foundation from which we declared out power to cede from our previous government with the goal of governing ourselves. Had you paid attention to what I wrote, I said that. I also said that the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were implementations of self-governance that obviously didn't live up to the declaration of rights itself.
but the Constitution said for nearly a hundred years that slaves were 3/5 of a person. And then for a hundred years after that was repealed, the law said that blacks were not allowed to have the same opportunities as whites. This is not something that some shadowy force "the government" forced on the people. This was the common will of the people, as expressed through the laws made by their representatives.
And why was it the will of the people, do you know? It's for the same reason that the "life, liberty and property" were changed to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Northerners knew that counting slaves in the apportionment of Congress would give the south a secure advantage in the House of Representatives. Counting a slave as a full apportionment allotment, although the slaves had no right to vote, meant that the slave owners in the south would have an undue advantage in the House. Presciently, Ben Franklin warned that the South would further declare the slaves to be property, which is why the wording was changed in the Declaration of Independence, to help bolster the notion that people had the right to self-determination, that they were not the property of anyone else.
So no, the 3/5ths clause has nothing to do with thinking of blacks as less than human, and everything to do with making sure that the North would eventually be able to use their greater representation to eventually push for an end to slavery. Read the works of Frederick Douglass (a summary of how his views changed from your position)
You seem to have a really strange concept of government as an outside force acting on the people. The government is just a concept of the societal rules which we impose on each other by common consensus. There is no such thing as *more* or *less* government in a democracy. There is *more* or *less* regulation, *more* or *fewer* laws, but the government is just a rigidly defined system for enforcing the collective will of the people. There is no difference between "the people" and "the government." You cannot break apart the concept like that. "The Government" is simply the system we have for enacting the will of the people.
The government just passed a health care law that 75% of the population didn't support and even the Speaker of the House said that they had to pass the bill before we could find out what is in it. THAT is "enacting the will of the people?"
The US Federal government is limited to the nineteen powers enumerated to it in the Constitution and no more. An overstep of those powers, an encroachment on power not granted to it, IS, by definition, more government, and an unlawful government at that since it erodes your natural rights (which were further ensured by the oft neglected Ninth and Tenth Amendments). Now, there can be more or less regulation created for a power granted to the government. It doesn't matter if the immigration law is 1 page or 1500 pages, since that is within the scope of Congress to legislate. More regulation has negative effects as well, e
* The Constitution (Article IV, Section 2) and Fugitive Slave Acts granted government the power to return people to slavery
* Dred Scott was freed by the Circuit Court, only to be returned to slavery by the Supreme Court.
* During Reconstitution, the North basically told the South what they had to do, mandating that the South pass segregation laws similar to the ones already existing in the North, particularly in the Northeast, Indiana and Wisconsin (yeah, that doesn't get taught much in history classes today). They also declared that the southern states no longer had the right to representation in Congress.
* Plessy v Furgenson upheld racial segregation with "separate but equal".
Now, if you consider the Declaration of Independence and the arguments within it to be the foundation of our beliefs, with the original Articles of Confederation and later Constitution being an implementation of those beliefs, you can see that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, that they have inherent inalienable rights, including the right to be free and determine their own lives, and that they have the right and duty to throw off the chains of despotism, you'll see that government has NO power to enslave you to itself or to someone else. Government allowed, even supported, slavery, black codes and segregation, so naturally it would take a further act of government, or the overthrow of the government, to remove those injustices.
Your argument that only more government can end injustice ignores the very fact that those injustices were created, sanctioned and supported by the government. Deny the government those powers, that is, rescind the government's unjust assumption power, and it can no longer do those things.
Now, as for private business discriminating, the government has no business interfering in that business' operations. Any business which is willing to discriminate is ensuring that it will run at a suboptimal efficiency, allowing competitors to either take business (they serve blacks and whites) or hire more suitable candidates (a minority's abilities blow away his peers, but since the discriminator won't hire him, he loses productivity). Let the market punish them naturally, they'll find themselves out of business quickly enough, especially when tough times hit, and that will force them to re-evaluate their opinions. On the other hand, forcing them to meet hiring quotas (stated or not) or to serve people they don't wish to serve only generates MORE animosity, furthering the divide between people, preventing people from being forced to reconsider their views. I think anyone willing to discriminate is an idiot, but I'd rather they openly be an idiot so that they and others can learn from their mistake, rather than to brood a contempt that runs deep under the surface, which will only get worse, not better.
After Brown v BOE, Zora Neale Hurston remarked unethusiastically that it was "a court order for somebody to associate me with who does not wish me near them" and that the court's basis, that all-black schools were inherently inferior to other schools, and that blacks could only succeed with the help of whites was "insulting rather than honoring."
So, as you advocate the "success" of bigger government, remember, what the government gives, the government can also take away... and that's the difference between the core foundations of America and Europe, Locke and Hobbes, whether you believe you derive your own rights by your mere existence, or whether you believe rights derive from and are granted by the government.
I live in NY and I HATE the deposit scheme.
You collect your pop bottles/cans, it's pointless to take back just one or two at a time, dealing with the hassle of messing with a machine that may or may not work (it's broken because someone put the wrong container in there, it's full, it's out of paper, it can't read the barcode on your bottle or rejects it even though it is valid, etc), then you get a flimsy ticket printed on thermal paper that you either take to the service desk (and wait in line to get your cash back) or check out with. So, you leave a bunch of bottles and cans sitting around taking up space, consolidating it into a single trip... and you wash out the cans/bottles (wasting water) for sanitary reasons, even though they'll be washed again at the recycling plant. Then, to top it off, some people will make a special trip just to return their bottles, burning who knows how much gas on the way.
OR you can have the truck that comes around once a week anyway, which is mandated to pick up recyclables left at the curb, take them... conserving gas, water, space, etc. But instead, we put that nickel deposit on them, forcing everyone to be environmentally wasteful, potentially unsanitary and encouraging them to buy more space than they need to store something which they want to discard anyway (and yes, I've seen garages half full of pop/beer bottles hat people intend to take back "one of these days").
Meanwhile, under the deposit system, the state (deposits collected but not paid out plus any interest generated on the fund/interest not have to be paid if they "borrow" the money for the general fund since we run deficits like there's no tomorrow), Tomra and the store (both of whom get paid per recyclable returned, 2 cents per bottle combined IIRC) make a fortune. But by all means, question the motives of the people that don't support the wasteful deposit system...
It doesn't cut both ways, as the idea that you've advanced is more complicated than the alternatives. Rapists don't generally commit crimes when they know that they're being watched, for the simple reason that they don't want to go to prison. Consequently, it would require added complexities to buy into that particular hypothesis.
People do all kinds of stupid stuff when they know they're being watched, especially if their ego is a little too inflated. Look at the aforementioned Charlie Rangel, who has been under investigation for at least two years for improperly filing his taxes and reports to Congress, possessing more rent controlled apartments than allowed under law and using them in unlawful ways, etc... and he continued to do it because he was bigger than everyone else. Look at Newt Gingrich having an affair in the midst of Clinton's impeachment era despite Larry Flynn and others openly investigating Congress members. Look at Terry Childs withdrawing a ton of money even though he knew he was facing indictment (large money withdrawal being one of those "intent to flee" signals that will get you locked up, often without bail, right away) or Hans Reiser buying books on murder investigations shortly after his wife's disappearance. Bernie Madoff continued his schemes right up until his arrest despite numerous close calls on investigations, only surviving as long as he did because of an inept/lazy SEC. Look at Mark Hurd's behavior despite the recent actions at the top of HP - he had to know the board would be watching. How about Lindsey Lohan drinking and skipping AA meetings despite having an alcohol monitor and probation officer to report to?
Sociopaths and narcissists think the law either doesn't apply to them or they're too smart to get caught. Their own reckless abandon is what tends to do them in eventually. So, it's perfectly reasonable that someone that knows they're being watched will commit a crime, especially if they're of a certain mindset.
But, it did come out that the warrant has been withdrawn, whether it was an attempted conspiracy, attempted extortion or just an accident is going to be tough to say.
Nobody wants to see false charges... ok, maybe a few people that would rather not get exposed themselves salivated at watching Assange get falsely charged. I'm glad the warrant was dropped before it ruined his life, despite my own strong disagreements with how he runs wikileaks.
The razor cuts the other way just as simply too... sometimes people with too much power, fame or ego think the rules of society no longer apply to them and they can get away with anything they want. Pick your favorite politician embroiled in a scandal - Charlie Rangel (who was the head of the committee that writes the tax laws) not paying his taxes, Ted Stevens getting work done on his home by lobbyists and not reporting it, Rod Blagojevic trying to sell Obama's former Senate seat, Mark Foley targetting Congressional pages, etc.
Assange doesn't seem like the type to be humble about the way he's gone after the US military... all of his tv appearances would say otherwise. Perhaps the power that comes with knocking down such a powerful institution and the fame he's generated with it have gone to his head. In fact, we already know that he thinks the rules don't apply to him - while he demands the transparency of other organizations, he does his best to disclose as little as possible about his own.
James J. Hill would disagree with you. You'll note that the Great Northern took no federal subsidies, got no land through eminent domain or land grants, and was only one of a handful of railroads that didn't fail in the Panic of 1893 (a run on banks caused by overexpansion of railroads, similar to the bubble caused by overexpansion of housing we're currently experiencing - kind of odd that federal subsidization are core to both, but, well, who needs history to avoid repeating things?).
It's also worth noting that The Pacific Railway Act was horribly inefficient, encouraging the railroads to build shoddy track and in the most inefficient routes possible. A good chunk of the transcontinental railroad had to be rebuilt before it was even usable and despite all the subsidies, both the Central Pacific (entirely leased out in 1885 to avoid bankruptcy proper) and Union Pacific (1880 and 1893) railroads went bankrupt shortly after finishing.
Just a little history that most people are never taught these days.
and how long does it take to rebuild an essential bridge that the trains must travel over if someone decides to take it out? If we become highly dependent on trains, we can be crippled by terrorists taking out a few key targets. Cars and planes can route around the damage, train tracks are much harder, more expensive and slower to do so. Just look at how ridiculously bogged down reconstruction projects like the World Trade Center. In fact, Michael Barone has an article this week talking about how big government forgot how to build big projects.
While there are clearly religious based laws on the books (like blue laws), I tend to look at religion as the codification of society's standards and solutions to existing problems at the time of the creation of religion. Do we have laws against stealing because it's frowned upon in the bible, or is there a commandment against stealing because taking other people's stuff causes strife and contributes to a decay of society? Likewise for adultery, screwing around with someone else's spouse is going to cause problems. Ditto for murder.
I think George Carlin nailed it pretty well with his thoughts on the Ten Commandments, that there should only be two and we can pretty much all agree on them "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie" and "Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you." And for those, you don't really need a religion, in fact, religion is superfluous if you already have a decent existing government, which will have created laws against murder, stealing, etc regardless of the religion or lack thereof of its members.
Now, I'm off to worship the sun and pray to Joe Pesci.
Like a minor child? Damn those 5 year olds blowing into the tube when daddy tells them to... I mean, they even think it's a game with the beeping and everything else. Yeah! Those 5 year olds deserve a fiery death because of their parent's irresponsibility! Or if a 5 year old is too over the top for you because of the smaller lung capacity, how about 14 year old wanting a ride to their friend's house so they don't have to deal with their drunk parent for the night? A lot of children of alcoholic parents will do anything to escape their situation for a while, including getting into a car with the drunk parent since a 5 minute ride is "safer" than a night at home.
As for a driver using the device, what about diabetics, who can test positive for alcohol on a blow test due to ketoacidosis despite not drinking a thing? Ditto for someone on a low carb diet in ketosis. A blood or urine test can confirm that it is acetone in their blood rather than alcohol, but we're talking about breathalyzers in these cars... and barring an immediate blood test, you know the assumption will be that the driver was drinking. Or if there is going to be a general waiver given to diabetics, what's to stop them from abusing that waiver anyway, and wouldn't that give non-diabetics an Equal Protection argument to overturn the statute?
Did you see the coverage post-Katrina, where they were accusing Bush of being a racist? Did you listen to Air America where fascist was about the best thing they had to say about Bush? Didn't the left wing talking heads accuse Bush of exchanging blood for oil in Iraq? Bush was implicated as more or less performing the acts at Abu Ghrab. Fake stories like flushed Qurans were made up to tar the military and by extension Bush for ordering them to act that way. The media so hated Bush, that the term "Bush Derangement Syndrome" was coined because they could never find a good thing to say about him.
Please don't make me defend Bush by ignoring the things people in the media said about him during his term, I feel dirty enough already. It's called confirmation bias - only the things you disagree with stick out as noteworthy to you and, since you probably had a great distaste for Bush, you didn't make note of how vitriolic the attacks were on him (and his kids for that matter - Chelsea Clinton was mostly treated hands off by the media while their father was in office, as are Sasha and Malia, the Bush twins were frequently the subject of news stories, and rarely in a positive light).
At first I thought, this was an incredible statement and I fully believed in it. But there is one thing I have to point out, while the Left went nuts while Bush was in power, Bush was in command during some really messed up times in American history, and it really seemed like he hasn't handled any of it very well. The left wingers were in a fit, yes, and spawned off some... interesting groups, like 9/11 truthers. But it was Bush (though maybe not personally, but he is ultimately responsible) that brought in all sorts of reactionary politics. The left wingers attacked these things. They weren't grasping at straws when they protested the Iraq war, they weren't grasping at straws when they protested the patriot act, they weren't grasping at straws over the tax cuts.
They were out there calling Bush "Hitler" and all of that... there were plenty on the left that couldn't explain their opposition to anything he was doing, it was just because it was him or the letter after his name. The PATRIOT Act was originally written by Joe Biden and friends back in the 90s, they were just waiting for the right time to pass it and never found the crisis under Clinton. The leaders of the Democrats were all on record in the late 90s advocating threatening Saddam over their belief that he was developing WMD. Likewise for the left's primary opposition to Medicare D, they wanted credit for it themselves since a good chunk of their base relies on the "Republicans want to take away your (x)" wedge issue.
Were there rational arguments to be made? Absolutely... But most of the left that was protesting were doing it out of party politics, not because of some firm moral underpinning.
I personally don't recall (WARNING: this memory lapse is very likely the result of bias towards the left, so please fill in the blanks if you want) the most vocal left wing pundits making random shit up to prove their point on why the Iraq war should not have happened.
Maybe not Iraq, since a good number of them supported Iraq or had just a couple years earlier and would have been called out on their hypocrisy... but there was never any lack of trying to smear Bush in the media, including Dan Rather's phony Air National Guard report that, how did he put it, may have been forged but were true anyway, or something to that effect. On Iraq specifically, Limbaugh and some others made a lot of political hay playing the statements of high ranking Congressional Democrats in the late 90s flip-flopping their public positions just a year or two later.
But the right wing rhetoric of "death panels" in Obamacare
Because there ARE review panels that will determine what treatments are viable and who is eligible to receive them. Yes, the private insurance companies already do it, but the government WILL be getting into the business as well, just like with Britain's NICE board. The man Obama has appointed to oversee the implementation of Obamacare is a huge fan of the British system and wants to implement it here. Will you go in front of a panel and be sentenced to death? No. Will your case go in front of a panel that will decide whether or not you can get treatment, including life saving treatment? Yes. Hence, the idea of a death panel - a panel that decides whether or not you live or die by granting or denying treatment. Sorry, grandpa's 72 and we don't think it's worth paying for him to get a new heart since he'll likely only get another 5 years out of it.
And speaking of queer, how can you have a small government and a ban on gay marriage at the same time? That is a ridiculous position to hold because a small government implies its inability to dictate morality.
There's are some large factions on the right that are focused on different issues. Fiscal conservatives and libertarian types believe in small government. Religious conservatives (not really social conservatives, since not all social conservatives have a morality
Where by "40" you mean "41" (remember when Brown was elected? it was in all the papers) and quite capable of blocking cloture (and have done so as recently as last week). That 1 makes a helluva difference and scuttles your entire would-be point.
Good call... but it still gave the Democrats an entire year with nobody to stop them. That they didn't accomplish what their base wanted them to in that time was their fault, not the Republicans. Truth is, the Dems were like kids in a candy store and didn't know where to start, they just started grabbing a little bit of everything in sight rather than focusing on accomplishing any specific goals, which is why we keep ending up with multi-thousand page bills, thousands of earmarks within them, etc.
Back it up. If you're pulling it out of your ass, it's no better than what the GP pulled out of his/her ass, so don't pretend it's better or more factual unless you can support your claim any better.
Show me the polls where a significant amount of people care about Obama's race... and show me a significant portion of the Tea Party movement specifically that hangs their banner on racism... All you need to do, is to go to the JournoList archives to see the lefties in the media literally conspiring to play the race card unjustly to try to marginalize anyone that disagrees with Obama. Just to pull the first link off google. GP was doing more of the same tarring here. I can't prove that only 10% of Americans are racist (be it for or against a race) since you'll never know what's truly in someone's heart, but it should be pretty trivial to prove these so called claims of racism that the left keeps shouting about. Where's the actual evidence of racism on the part of those that oppose Obama's policies?
Great theory. The trouble is that one reason the 17th was passed in the first place was the increasing corruption and backroom deals involved with the election of Senators by State legislatures. How do you stop that from happening again?
All those earmarks, Senators getting VIP deals from banks, the campaign donations/bribes, sure went away with the 17th Amendment. It's not like there were any Senators named Ted Stevens or Chris Dodd in the past decade, and that Larry Craig is a paragon of virtue, there is no nepotism (Murkowski, Carnahan), etc.
So it looks like the 17th Amendment didn't fix anything in that regard, is simply shuffled the deck, eliminating some problems, creating others and keeping some. Ergo, it's repeal will eliminate some forms of corruptions, and yes, probably create/recreate some some others.
More importantly, it will restore the rightful place of the signatories to the Constitution (people didn't ratify it, states did). The Constitution is a compact between the states, much like the Articles of Confederation were, though more broad, yet specifically limited, to work together for a common purpose. It is only a modern notion, post Lincoln, and getting progressively worse under Wilson, Hoover and FDR (and all since him), that the federal government gets to tell the states what to do. I'm sure you've heard of jury nullification, read up on the history of state nullification of federal law.
It's funny. Lately I've heard more and more conservatives make the claim that they were pissed off with Bush, and outraged at what he did, back when he was president. Yet I still retain a memory, and I lived through the Bush administration. Where were you guys when it mattered?
Conservatives (note, conservatives and Republicans are not the same thing, especially not the Republican leadership) disagreed with GWB on different issues than those on the left did. Conservatives opposed amnesty for illegal aliens despite the attempts to push it by Bush/McCain/Graham and were frustrated by his lack of effort to secure the borders and ports, fought back on the Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination and caused him to withdraw it, opposed Medicare D (lefties opposed it because they wanted the credit for passing it, conservatives opposed it because they don't support the expansion of the federal government), strongly opposed TARP and all of the bailouts, opposed No Child Left Behind (written by Ted Kennedy btw) because of federal power expansion over local school boards, opposed the handling of Iraq after the military victory even though many supported the initial goal, opposed the creation of the DHS and the federalization of the TSA, etc. Do I need to go through and get links, or can you google those if you dispute them?
You might be in that 1% group of conservatives that were outraged, but as a majority, right wingers went along with everything Bush did. Bush had screwed up enough by 2004 that he deserved to be voted out, and yet there was no big counter movement in conservative circles against him.
There was a TON of disagreement on the right with Bush, the left just refused to see it because they were too busy screaming and shouting about other things to notice. And yeah, in 2004, conservatives supported Bush. Sitting Presidents tend to be renominated by their party and, what were conservatives going to do, vote for the complete opposite of what they believe by voting for Kerry? They held their nose and voted for the least worst option of the two. Had the Democrats fielded someone the conservatives could stomach, it's possible that they could have won in a landslide. Instead, they picked a guy nobody was particularly excited about.
I don't remember any tea-party railing against his economically devastating policies.
The spending? Conservatives complained. TARP and the bailouts, conservatives complained. Expansion of the CRA, conservatives complained.
However, if you're calling tax cuts "devastating," conservatives and you have a different view of economics, whereby they don't believe economics isn't a zero-sum game, that the Laffer Curve shows that cutting tax rates may produce higher revenues through GDP growth if there is too much tax (and they did, Bush and the Congress just spent faster than revenues grew), etc. You might as well be debating emacs/vi or gpl/bsd because Keynesians, Chicagoans (economics) and Austrians (economics) are never going to see eye to eye.
On the other hand, amending the Constitution requires a 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress, plus 3/4 of the state legislatures.
Think about that a moment - at least 2/3 of senators and at least 3/4 of the state legislatures thought that having the senate represent the state legislatures was unsatisfactory. If those thought that way of doing things was any good at all, the 17th amendment would never have passed.
And 98 Senators voted for the original PATRIOT Act. That's more than your 3/4s of states. People do stupid things from time to time, sometimes including shooting themselves in the foot, especially during a crisis or time of political upheaval. Wilson was the first Democrat elected in 20 years, carrying 40 states, and had 300 seats in the House and 52 Senate seats (and filibusters didn't work the way they do today, you could only filibuster for as long as you could keep talking).
It's not that hard to understand how it passed ratification in that climate. I mean, it's not like they didn't pass another amendment a couple years later that would be the only amendment to ever be repealed (prohibition)... only by the time prohibition was repealed (1933), the big government takeover was already well entrenched (20 years) and there was no way it was going to surrender power back to the states, especially under FDR's leadership.
And you think they'll act any better when they have to play up their act to get re-appointed? Dream on, because history doesn't support you.
The Senate was far, far more rational before becoming popularly elected. Sure, there was the occasional nutjob, but most of them were thoughtful and respectable people that had earned the trust of their state. Care to back your assertion that today's Senate is more thoughtful and civil than the Senate of old? Or is that one of those revisions where we ignore history so we can claim anything we want today, like the notion that the Constitution isn't the hard law of the land, but a living document meant to be constantly reinterpreted into violating itself, like with the creation of the current federal bureaucracy and the erosion of the explicit rights protected in the Bill of Rights?
And how is somebody meant to represent the state supposed to vote his conscience as you think he would (above)? Or, to put it another way, how do you think the patronage and pork system got started in the first place?
It's a lot easier to explain to 30 or 50 or even 100 people why you voted the way you did, especially if you make a habit of consulting with them along the way, than it is to explain to millions of individuals why you voted against the Save the Children and Feed the Puppies Act of 2010, especially when most of those individuals don't pay attention beyond the occasional gasp of "omg, they voted against saving the children and they want puppies to die!" Most voters tend to be very uninformed, most legislators at least tend to take their jobs seriously enough to usually pay attention to what's going on.
Besides, how is being answerable to your state's government a worse thing than being answerable to whoever cuts you the biggest donation/runs a 527 supporting your policies/etc? Those people are already buying the White House and one house of Congress, they don't need the other.
So, now that I've answered it, let me flip the question... how is the direct election of Senators better for the states and people than the old system prior to the 17th Amendment?