Check the political climate back in 1912/1913. Woodrow Wilson had just come into power, the 16th Amendment (income tax) had just passed ratification by the skin of its teeth, and the progressives had all kinds of things they wanted to do at the federal level like eugenics/forced abortion/sterilization (never got much farther than the "talk about" stage in terms of national policy), the Federal Reserve system, prohibition, creating a new layer of government at the world level, etc but were worried about the states standing in their way (that is, they wanted to usurp power from the states).
So, they pushed for the popular election of Senators as a means of manipulating the people through propaganda to empower the people that favored big government. Seriously, history classes in the US tend to gloss over Woodrow Wilson and what an evil bastard he was, they don't even really discuss his politics beyond the League of Nations. He flat out hated the system of checks and balances because it limited the power of the federal government to grow unchecked. In fact, he hated the entire US system of government and preferred a parliamentary system
He got his way... ever notice that the federal government just continues to take power these days, whether it's Constitutional or not, whether it is a violation of the powers of the states or not, whether it's a violation of your rights/liberty/freedom or not? And when was the last time your Senator gave you any real consideration (at least without you, uh, returning said consideration, generally, in the form of a bribe, I mean campaign donation)? You're one of millions of tiny voices that he represents rather than one large voice (the state) that his job actually hinges on respecting. For that matter, imagine Senators without the influence of the corporations and special interest groups that they rely on to get re-elected.
I know it's crazy talk, but how about the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which made Senators directly elected by the people (and hence, prone to the partisanship winds of the day) rather than being representatives of the states (hence the term Statesmen)? These days, the Senate tends to be just as petty and partisan as the House, if not even moreso, and it's all because the Senators have to play up their act to get re-elected rather than being able to vote their conscience.
As an added bonus, it might just slow down the federal government's powergrab from the states (see things like speed limits or drinking age) since, you know, someone would actually be representing the states in the united STATES government.
If by roughly half, you mean absolutely no power to stop any legislation in the House that the Democrats agree on (if anything fails in the House, it is strictly because the Democrats aren't all on board) and 40 out of 100 Senate seats, which isn't enough to prevent cloture.
The Democrats wield ALL of the power between Congress and the White House right now and the Republicans can't do a thing to stop them, only fellow Democrats that have trepidation about their leadership's goals. But keep blaming the Republicans because that's the narrative being pushed by the White House and their friends in the media, just like how the Republicans controlled Congress for 6 of 8 years during GWB's administration (they may have had a small majority in the House, nothing like what the Dems have now, but the Senate flip flopped back and forth, with Democrats controlling the first two years and the last two years, with a slim, non-filibuster proof Republican majority between).
As for the skin color remark, you're delusional. Maybe 10% of the population cares about his skin color whether they hate him or like him because of it (and you'll never be able to completely eliminate the tribalism involved, just see the way you're smearing Republicans because they have an R after their name). The vast majority of the right has a problem with his policies and has since before anyone ever heard of Barack Obama (Keynesian Economics for example).
And don't take any of the above on the assumption that I think Republicans have governed any better than the Democrats. Both parties suck, especially their leadership. My problem is the regurgitation of false narratives meant solely to smear people, attacking the messenger, because you don't like the message. Even worse, it's because you're dissatisfied with Obama's own party but would rather attack the other guys for his team's own failings.
They tend to get critical praise becuase the critics tend to support the politics portrayed by the movies... on the other hand, the movie going audience wants to be entertained for their $10, not preached to, so they tend to stay away. Almost all of the movies in the last 5 years or so that have involved the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq have flopped, especially at the US box office.
From boxofficemojo.com and by no means a complete list, just what came to mind
The Hurt Locker - $16 million US ($4 million of which came during re-release after the Oscar), $32 million foreign
Green Zone - $35 million US, $59 million foreign
In the Valley of Elah - $6.8 million US, $23 million foreign
Stop-Loss - $11 million US, $291k foreign
Brothers - $29 million US, $14 million foreign
The Kite Runner - $16 million US, $58 million foreign
Jarhead - $63 million US, $34 million foreign
The Kingdom - $47 million US, $39 million foreign
Lions for Lambs - $15 million US, $48 million foreign
Rendition - $10 million US, $17 million foreign
Redacted - $65k US, $716k foreign
Most of them didn't even make back their production budgets when considering worldwide gross, much less the marketing budgets to go with them. The shear number of movies show that Hollywood is completely obsessed and the continue to make movies about the subject even though the American public is generally pretty consistently turned off by them. You could say that they're targeting the foreign markets instead, but I guess that makes Hollywood not so much Hollywood, USA anymore, doesn't it? Then again, films are being made outside the US more and more, with Hollywood merely remaining the traditional centralized headquarters that everyone reports back to/meets up at.
Back to the politics, look at how many of the same critics panned The Stoning of Soraya M. Despite being a gutsy portrayal of how women are still treated in some Islamic countries, it doesn't suit the politics of a good chunk of the critics.
So do the best of both... Institute a flat tax while allowing a cost of living deduction, say $30,000 just to throw a number out there, on the income. Earn anywhere up to $30,000? Pay nothing. Earn $90,000, pay tax on $60,000. Earn $1,000,000, pay tax on $970,000. The simplicity of a flat tax with the humanity of a progressive tax.
The current system of loopholes, credits and deductions exists to give the government and its friends power. It allows them to favor certain businesses or states with verbiage that ensures the right handful are protected while sounding so convoluted nobody knows what it means or likewise penalizing others through the same means. It makes it so that everyone has some amount of uncertainty when they file their taxes - did you do everything exactly right? After all, not even the Treasury Secretary in charge did. Better make sure, especially if you piss off the wrong politically connected guy/party/federal employee and get audited (of course, they'd never do that,/wink). Remember, they couldn't get Capone on murder, but they did get him on tax evasion and that was before the current mess was instituted.
One of the most feared government agencies is the IRS... most people fear being audited in much the same way as it's a pain in the ass to get audited by the (non-governmental) BSA. You'd better be damn sure all of your ducks are in a row or you'll be paying penalties, back taxes, interest and maybe going to jail. How exactly is it humane to make people fear making a minor mistake on their taxes and having the full behemoth of the federal government coming down on them for it, when they're only guilty of misunderstanding a line out of thousands of tax code or putting a number on the wrong line of a form? The rich have people that take care of it for them, and I don't mean some cheap store bought tax program, I mean tax attorneys and CPAs. They shelter their money without worry because they're paying others to dot every I and cross every T. It is the poor which suffer under the current complexity.
The way you opt out of paying into Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is by not earning money in the country.
So the only way to opt out, is to renounce US citizenship and leave the country (being a US citizen, any money you earn outside of the country is still taxable regardless of where you reside). Hence, either become a slave doing the bidding of others or leave. That's your definition of free choice? And you can't see how that is tyrannical? So, I guess indentured servitude was ok too... even though, at least with indentured servitude, you choose to enslave yourself in return for a favor you asked for.
Paying tax doesnt make you a slave, its an obligation in return for the government providing other service.
That's fine and dandy. I agree to pay for roads and cops. I don't agree to pay your medical bills. Oh, you want to use government to force me to pay your medical bills? That's slavery - you're forcing me to work to provide you with the services that you want.
Part of being human is our desire to form social ties, if you cant accept that, might i refer you to the subject of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism [wikipedia.org]
Oh noes, if I grow only enough food to feed myself, it's because I'm an evil narcissist! Nobody should ever do for themselves, they should be mandated to do for everyone else first and then do for themselves with whatever scraps are left! On the other hand, in a collectivist society, I have less incentive to grow even enough for myself because some altruistic soul out there will grow enough for me too! (again, see Plymouth or how with the failure of the Five Year Plan, Stalin ended up privatizing some farm ownership, whereby the 2% of privately owned land was producing 30% of Russia's agricultural output)
You don't find it, oh, just as narcissitic to assume that you deserve someone else's help just because you live in the same society? Collectivists constantly whine about the greed and selfishness of capitalists, but guess what, they're the underlying theme of collectivism too - you want what others have, you just don't want to have to provide it yourself and you take security in knowing that the state will takeit from them to provide for you.
Your arguments are running pretty thin here... maybe it's hard to defend collectivized government once it is put in terms of tyranny and slavery. Don't you have to stop reading again or something before your head asplodes?
Servitude is INHERENT to socialism. Tell me, how do I opt out of paying into Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, especially if I'm willing to waive my right to collect them in the process? How do you opt out of the European health care systems?
Mandatory participation is forced participation, ie, the opposite of choice. Give me one socialist program that allows you to opt out entirely, whether it be the receiving end OR more importantly, the paying end.
If you can't accept that, might I refer you to the subject of cognitive dissonance?
Socialism, aka communism light, is community ownership of the means of production, product or service while people can retain private ownership of some of their things. That community ownership is maintained by the force of government compelling people to participate, be it the original owner (if there was one and he was compelled to sell or if it was outright taken without compensation) and/or mandatory participation in the ownership and maintenance of said facility. Communism is the complete lack of individual property, including individuals themselves since they are degraded from individuals to members of the commune, with the community owning everything and the members being given an individual temporary share.
BOTH equate to slavery to one's fellow man because of the compulsion to provide for them, just as the slave was compelled to serve his master's needs above and beyond the slave's own. You might not be required to go out and pick cotton for 40 hours this week, but you are forced to surrender the fruits of up to 50% of your labor (federal, state, local taxes and fees combined) to serve your government/fellow man. So, whether you work 40 hours out in the cotton field or 20 hours earning for yourself and 20 hours picking cotton, you're still picking cotton for someone else under collectivist economies, and thus, a slave to them.
So, you tell me how servitude isn't inherent to socialism... and I'll tell you, racism hurts capitalists since it drives potential customers and suppliers to other entities, making you less profitable and them moreso. Any good capitalist would care less about the race of their customer or supplier and they'll put the bad capitalists that do out of business, so long as those bad capitalists don't have the government interfering with the market to prop them up like the old segregationist laws. Capitalism favors no race, sex, creed, or any other inherent trait, it favors those that choose to participate in the system, particularly if they have excess capital themselves (which may have originated through nefarious means outside of the modern capitalist system itself, be it through slavery, royalty, theft, inheritance, etc. Where one derives their capital outside of the market has no bearing on the capitalist system itself, just as it isn't the fault of the car if you step into it drunk).
Captialism: I choose where and how to spend my money, whether it is in my interest or not
Socialism: Government tells me how to spend some part my money because it knows better than me
Communism: Government doesn't let me have any money because it promises that my only interest is its interests
One of those things provides freedom and liberty, the other two enforce different amounts of servitude and slavery to others.
Offtopic, but I was hoping to ask a few questions to an intelligent, rational member of the Tea Party. I'm assuming you qualify, since you are a member of this tribe
I'm a tea party organizer and I have spoken at four of them.
What is your take on "Congress shall make no law" when it is in conflict with sections of The Constitution like the responsibility of The President to provide for the national defense? Does the prohibition in The Bill of Rights take precedence, or the obligation in The Constitution?
"Congress shall make no law" literally means Congress shall make no law. The President is the Commander in Chief of the military, the highest general, but he cannot declare a war himself, though it is generally accepted that he can order immediate action to defend the country (that is, if we come under attack, he can order troops into action to defend and doesn't have to wait for a declaration of war. Congress abdicated its power to declare war after WWII, while prior to that, Wilson and FDR blatantly ignored Congress and the American people by trying to lure us into WWI and WWII (they couldn't declare war outright themselves, so they figured if they could get us attacked, they could change public sentiment into giving them the wars they wanted). And that is why Congress alone was to have the power to declare war rather than investing it solele in one person.
The Bill of Rights supercedes anything written in the Constitution, by the very virtue that they are amendments of the Constitution. Therefore, the largely ignored Ninth and Tenth Amendments buttress the claim that, unless the federal government is given the power to do something, they have no such authority to assume that power for themselves.
I am a strong supporter of The Second Amendment. Yet I am tempted to agree that private citizens should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons. The Supreme Court once ruled (in not protecting sawed off shotguns) that the second only applied to weapons of war, though clearly nuclear weapons are weapons of war (or mortars or tanks, for example). Many have argued the "well regulated militia angle", of course. Where do you stand on limitations to The Second Amendment?
People have the right to own arms, and by that, the Founding Fathers meant military weapons... and while they could never conceive of something like a nuclear weapon, they gave us the solution to fix that problem - a Constitutional Amendment. Amendments tend to be hard to pass, but perhaps more importantly, since I doubt anyone would have a problem with banning private ownership of nuclear weapons, the reason why such an amendment isn't passed, is it would lead further credence to the Constitution being the hard written law of the land rather than "a living document" meant to be revisionistly reinterpretted into whatever someone seeking power wants it to read.
What is your take on The Establishment Clause? The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion, yet many (including many high ranking members of The Tea Party) have expressed a belief that religious morals rightly should inform legislation. There are certainly laws which satisfy religious morals while not being an establishment of religion, like the prohibition against murder. Other issues, such as the distinction between civil union and marriage, seem difficult to divide from their religious origins. How should The Establishment Clause be interpreted, and do you feel that The Tea Party as an organization has internalized that interpretation?
I'm somewhere between atheist and agnostic myself (I don't believe there is an all powerful, all knowing deity, but I think there exists something greater than ourselves in a cosmic sense). The federal government should have very little influence over criminal or even civil law, since its purpose is to act on international affairs (diplomacy, war, trade, etc)
Im not sure its servitude if one chooses to use their individualism to empower society rather than just using it for personal benefit.
The best system, capitalism or socialism is one that fairly reflects the values of the society it covers, a group oriented society should lean towards socialism, an individualist society should lean towards capitalism.
As any society is comprised of both types of people, the best system is one that encourages each group, while protecting it from exploitation by the other.
You can't really have both groups overlapping in the same community. Socialism requires people to contribute by force (forced charity isn't charity, it's theft), so you end up removing the choice of people that believe in individualism first. That, in turn causes oppression and resentment, which works to undermine the sense of community. Eventually, things fall apart when the individualists leave, stop contributing (quit their job, operate in black markets, stop making more than they need for themselves to get by) or when the community's demands exceed the community's ability to support itself.
Capitalism works the same way, people that elect to have the community support them rather than support themselves end up oppressed and resentful, largely because the community at large doesn't agree with them. Brutal as it sounds, those people are forced to either take care of themselves, live off the generosity of those who wish to support them (charity), move to someplace that will support them (which may be jail if they chose to prey on society to meet their needs) or die. However, in this case, the refusal of the outsider group to participate causes little harm to the group at large because they're already supporting themselves, likely in excess of their own needs.
To put it into a slashdot analogy, if you're the computer nerd of the family, everyone in the family (and many of your friends too) tries to compel you to come over and fix their computers for them, often relying solely on your relation/association with them. They often don't give any type of remuneration for it, you're supposed to do it out of the goodness of your heart because of your relationship, regardless of if they'll ever repay you in some way. LOTS of slashdotters complain about how much time they continually have to waste in this scenario and many of them eventually stop doing it because they feel unappreciated and abused by their relatives, thus, the productives "stop contributing to society" and the people demanding their service end up going without. The end result, whether under capitalism or socialism, is that the takers always shoot themselves in the foot and the independent people will generally take care of themselves, generally in excess under capitalism and to the bare minimum under socialism.
If you think people are fundamentally bad than capitalism is for you, if you dream of something better than try and be a socialist.
I don't think people are fundamentally bad or good. I think people are fundamentally after their own self interests. For people capable of using their talent and knowledge for their own benefit, that generally means providing for themselves, though they may choose to donate some of their bounty to people less fortunate than them. Likewise, people that aren't capable of using their talent, knowledge and/or skill for their own benefit - because they're disabled, because they have no marketable talent/knowledge/skill, see no benefit of exercising their talent/knowledge to take care of themselves, etc, choose to have others support them.
Whether you believe it's evil to make lots of money or whether you believe it's evil to take other people's money to provide support for someone else, it's not a matter of evil, it's a matter of whether you think people have a duty to take care of themselves first or whether you think everyone has a duty to take care of society first. Humans tend care first for themselves
Meet Gerald Walpin, the former Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service, who was fired for questioning irregularities regarding an AmeriCorps grant given to an Obama supporter as well as opening an investigation into $80 million given to the City University of NY. That is, he was fired for doing his job, he just happened to look into the "wrong" people.
It seems the USA has a very bad track record of avoiding war over the last years.
Abraham Lincoln, 1848
"The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood."
Executives LOVE war... for some, it is a way to acquire new territory (Tyler/Mexican-American and McKinley/Spanish-American wars), for others, it's a way to try to gain power on the world stage (Wilson/WWI and FDR/WWII - both of which tried to actively manuever America into the wars, deliberately violating our neutrality to try to put us in position of being attacked so we could retaliate), for national pride (Truman/Korea, LBJ/Vietnam), to secure imports (GHWB/GWB Iraq I/II), to help with personal needs (Clinton bombing of the Sudan aspirin factory the day Monica Lewinsky went to testify in front of the grand jury), etc.
So long as there are spoils of war, there are going to be people willing to risk the lives of others to obtain those spoils for themselves. Kings and Presidents no longer lead their armies in hand to hand combat on the battlefield, they get to sit in the safety of their secured locations ordering others to die. Legislatures tend to have much more restraint, but Congress hasn't declared a formal war since Korea. The main reason why they rejected Wilson's League of Nations, is they feared that they'd cede their sovereignty in the process... and over the last 60 years, they did exactly that by allowing Presidents to engage in "police actions" at whim.
Want to restrain America from getting involved in wars? Enforce the Constitution, ALL of it. Further, abandon the UN, which tends to be representative of EXECUTIVE wishes from its member governments rather than their legislatures and their main mission is to constantly meddle in foreign affairs. Much like the Federal Reserve was "meant" to prevent the collapse of the economy, the UN has been just as successful in "preventing" countries from warring with each other.
Not that I'm passing any type of judgment on the merits of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (in fact, I think it was largely a good thing), but when critics complained that it would be used to create preferences and quotas, Senator Hubert Humphrey remarked to a colleague, "If the senator can find in the Title VII... any language which provides than an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there." Senators Joseph Clark and Clifford Case wrote a memo stating that there was no requirement for an employer to "maintain a racial balance in his workforce" and that such a balance "would involve a violation of the legislation because maintaining such a balance would require an employer to hire or fire on the basis of race." However, they refused to acknowledge that since it is impossible to know whether hiring decisions are made on the basis of discrimination or honest determinations, the act guaranteed a system of preferential treatment and/or quotas benefiting minorities in order to keep from being sued.
That followed with Supreme Court rulings in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, where even unintentional discrimination by requiring something like a high school diploma to get a promotion, because a disparate number of blacks lacked one, was still discrimination, overturning any provision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that discrimination had to be intentional... Thus, creating a system of affirmative action programs based on race (and later other factors) despite the contrary claims of Congressional supporters of the bill.
Justice Brennan's majority ruling in United Steelworkers of America v. Baker, where Baker sued on the basis of being denied a promotion because of Kaiser Aluminum's affirmative action policies, found that the real meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was meant to be found in the spirit of the text, and since the "spirit" animating the legislation was aimed at helping blacks, it wasn't a violation of the act to discriminate against whites regardless of what the text of the legislation said.
Ultimately, by the time the Supreme Court ruled on the legislation created in the name of ending discrimination based on race, effectively it endorsed discrimination based on race.
I think it would be wise to be wary of what ANY legislator claims the intent of his legislation is because they don't have the final determination in how that legislation will be interpreted and expanded in the future. It's even crazier for an individual to assume what a legislator is going to write before it is written, amended and passed. How many loopholes and ambiguous clauses is the legislation going to create? I'm not sure you could pass an airtight (in terms of being free of abuse by government or corporations) Net Neutrality law in a paragraph, much less the dozen/hundred/thousand page bill/regulatory document that will be drawn up.
I was really confused for a second until I realized you were calling the newspapers assholes instead of the assholes that they are trying to prevent cluttering up their comment boards.
I hate reading comments in most papers (and slashdot) where anonymous trolls spew the worst rhetoric just to get a rise out of people. (BTW, good job here, it worked on me)
My local paper is also just as guilty of anonymously trolling the public through their editorials... after all, controversy drives eyeballs. Slashdot is guilty of it to some extent too, the politics and religion articles are always the most highly commented on (9 of the top 10). That's why they keep (pick your least favorite editor here) around, because he'll stir up comments and, thus, drive traffic.
If your bitching about a one-time.99 cent fee, then you need to get off the internet because of the electricity cost.
I wouldn't care about a one time 99 cent fee. I do care about people showing up at my house and threatening my family because they disagree with my commentary, be it one lone nut job or an entire activist group. I post pseudo-anonymously, especially on particularly controversial topics, for a reason; Sometimes unpopular things NEED to be said and sometimes, you can find yourself in quite a bit of danger for even saying popular things that someone in power doesn't want said.
If my name was John Smith of some large city with hundreds of us in the phonebook, I probably wouldn't care. As it is, there are all of two people with my name in my entire county, much less identifying me by town, and both of us live under the same roof. The Buffalo News just adopted a Real Name policy and that is the biggest concern there as well.
Nixon - the same guy responsible for getting away from sound money (gold standard)
Nixon gave it the final death blow, but FDR killed the gold/silver certificate in 1933. Truman later agreed to the Bretton Woods Agreement, in which foreign currencies were fixed to US dollars, effectively making the dollar the world's standard. During Vietnam (which France had actually helped cause), France ended up draining the gold reserves backing the US dollars, ultimately leading to Nixon's decision to permanently cease the gold standard.
they same guy setting up minimum wage laws
Again, minimum wage laws, as well as wage and price controls, started under FDR as part of the New Deal. You can also thank union organizers, who wanted to use the government to encourage people to join the unions in order to get a job (mostly because the union bosses wanted more dues to put in their pockets). People were desperate to earn money and would willingly take pennies just to do some type of meaningful work to take care of their families. The unions didn't want to be undercut and have their workers put out of work, so they cozied up to FDR and used the government to harm non-union workers (the entire National Recovery Act was built largely on helping the unions while harming business owners and non-union workers).
the same guy who destroyed the working health insurance for people by getting government subsidies into it and causing the insurance prices to skyrocket
Health insurance didn't exist prior to the New Deal. It was a way to get around the imposed wage controls in order to keep good help. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid were passed because "it wasn't fair" that working people had their health costs paid for but poor and elderly people didn't. Thus, it wasn't Nixon that started subsidizing health care, but LBJ as part of the Great Society as a reaction to an unintended consequence from the previous government interference under the New Deal. Ted Kennedy created the HMO system, which Nixon signed, as a result of Medicare/Medicaid destabilizing the existing insurance market. Another side effect of that, was Social Security reform in 1967 which allowed the government to use the Social Security surplus to cover up the exploding budget deficits caused by Medicare/Medicaid (which had greatly exceeded cost estimates) and the escalation of Vietnam.
Oh, and, of course, today, we need a new government health care system to save us from the existing problems that government health care caused. As an added bonus, Social Security is running in the red already and we'll have to borrow money to pay it. Forget the $13 trillion debt, that's small potatoes; We owe $109.5 trillion in unfunded liabilities and they start adding to the debt NOW as boomers start to retire. Doubly so if the rumored legislation to get people to retire early to "create" jobs for younger people happens.
By fixing food prices to make them 'stable', he caused
Again, it goes back to FDR, the New Deal and the Great Depression. Did you know that FDR ordered tons of food destroyed, while people were starving, to prop up the price? Did you know that under him, it became illegal to grow wheat for your own consumption (see Wickard v. Filburn)?
By getting government into health insurance (CHIP), he created a moral hazard for the medical establishment that allowed it to spike the prices up, which happens only when government guarantees to pay,
Nixon signed Ted Kennedy's HMO system into law. Clinton signed CHIP into law and it was expanded under GWB and Obama. And, again, it was Medicaid/Medicare which drove up the costs, making existing insurance plans insufficient, resulting in more government interference in health care to shore up the private plans.
same problem with government loans for higher education - prices shoot up.
Cut welfare, ALL welfare. Corporate welfare, farm subsidies, entitlements, regulations meant to harm small businesses in favor of big businesses, eternal extensions of copyright and patents on unpatentable things, etc. It's not just the big ticket items like entitlements and defense, but the little things like regulating the size of holes in swiss cheese (even simple regulation requires oversight which costs money and creates barriers to entry), constructing turtle crossing tunnels and studying pig flatulence which adds up too.
Those red states have plenty of lobbyists demanding money for things like corn, but the blue states have plenty of lobbyists for things like subsidized ethanol, which further redirects money from the big blues to the flyover reds. It's not unlike pre-Civil War America, in that most of the manufacturing takes place in the urban states while the resources come largely from the less populous states. Manufacturing and white colar jobs ultimately pay more than tilling soil or digging for ore, so more people would like to do those types of jobs... but ultimately, someone has to do the hard work too. Those blue states die pretty quickly if they can't get coal, food or steel.
It's in everyone's interests to work together, which was the entire purpose of forming a united coalition of states to facilitate interstate cooperation. If the blue states feel like they're getting the raw end of the deal, they have the power to help change things, but they should also admit that they had a hand in creating many of the things that they're complaining about. That's where the rub comes in, they have to admit their earlier ideas were wrong and nobody, especially not a politician, wants to face the public and say "look, I screwed up." They all want someone or something else to blame.
The solution is to go back to the purposes we were founded on and the Constitution which was meant to dictate our interstate cooperation. Namely, we have to stop using the federal government as a hammer to pound our desires onto everyone else, we should reconsider the idea of taxing based on apportionment and the number of representatives, to stop using the federal government to spread wealth from one group to another, etc. Maybe most important to this particular conversation is the purpose of the Commerce Clause, which was originally meant to facilitate commerce, making trade a regular action between the states, not to tell you whether or not you're allowed to grow wheat in your back yard for your own use.
Once that happens, California can make the welfare laws which are best tailored to the Californian population, New York can make the education standards best suited to New York, West Virginia can create the mining laws best suited to West Virginia, Louisiana can best figure out how to protect itself from flooding, etc. As it is, every state, especially big, wealthy states that don't have to worry about meeting budgets, want to meddle in the affairs of every other state and their citizens... and it costs us a fortune. That's fine for the blue states during good times, but now that they've gotten a taste of what its like to have to bear the economic burdens of those regulations themselves, they're crying foul.
Truth is, a good number of people from the red states would LOVE to reduce the size, scope and cost of the federal bureaucracy and they routinely elect politicians who pledge to do just that. Now, those politicians rarely live up to their promises, but the red state voters are largely up for it. Sure, they may bulk at losing something like corn subsidies, but someone has to have the guts to actually do it. The market will eventually take care of itself and some politicians may get voted out for actually keeping their promises... but its the right thing to do. It's also why only the House of Representatives was supposed to be publicly elected, with the Senators, the Statesmen, if you will, being virtually untouchable so that they COULD do the right thing.
Actually CA like most coastal states brings more money to the Fed than it gets back. Without this it might be able to balance its books. Perhaps we should stop feeding the welfare queen that is middle America.
California controls 53 of the 435 voting seats in the House of Representatives, which is the sole federal body that can appropriate money. If Californians have a problem with how much money the federal government takes, they control a good 1/8th of the House by themselves. That's a pretty good start on a push to reduce federal spending and regulations and they'd get a bipartisan following if they made a concerted effort.
HOWEVER, Californians love to push for federal spending and new federal programs, plus they love to use the size of their own economy to bully the other states into accepting their ideas through non-federal government means as well (see the CARB emission standards for starters). California is like New York (read New York City)... they've advocated all kinds of obscene spending for years and now that the economy is derailed enough to affect them, they suddenly have a problem with it. Those of us in western NY have been dealing with the consequences of that mentality for decades.
Fiscal conservatives and libertarian types have been warning about the negatives of abusive nanny governments that spend oodles of money for years, and these very same people that suddenly don't know what to do were the ones shouting us down. Welcome to reality, you can't keep spending on the credit card figuring you'll get a raise every year to cover it while simultaneously never paying down the debt, always promising to do it next year.
Or maybe we could get the couple percent of americans who actually have all the money to pay their fair share of taxes. No, that would be unamerican.
Screw their income... confiscate 100% of their wealth! That'll show 'em... and you will barely even dent the $2.5 trillion in debt generated in just the last year and a half, much less the full debt and worse, future unfunded obligations. Bill Gates is worth about $50 billion, Warren Buffett around $40 billion. The Forbes 400 have a combined net worth (not income, total worth) of $1.27 trillion. I think you seriously underestimate just how much the government is spending because the numbers are too large to really grasp.
It started in 1967, two years after the introduction of Medicare/Medicaid. Congress realized that the cost estimates when they were debating passing Medicare/Medicaid were extremely low and, combined with escalating costs in Vietnam, the government was going to run huge deficits*. To cover up their mistakes/lies, they passed a law stating that the general fund could borrow the surpluses from Social Security, promising "to pay it back in the years that the federal government wasn't running deficits." Of course, they knew the government wasn't going to run surpluses and the debts would never get paid back, but by that time, they'd be out of office, so there weren't any consequences for them.
Lefties like to blame Reagan for the explosion in debt, but the truth is, much of the debt under Reagan came from the growth of entitlement programs created in LBJ's Great Society. Federal social spending eclipsed military spending in 1971 and it has only increased its lead since. Back in the 80s, they were already focusing on a critical collapse of Social Security funding precisely because the politicians of the 60s gutted the program... the gravy train papering over the deficits just happened to run out about 15 years later.
Today, with Social Security already running in the red, the truth is here, the US is in deep, deep trouble... and the baby boomers haven't even begun mass retirement yet. Hey, I've got an idea, how about a giant new entitlement program? That'll fix everything... I mean, forget the $13 trillion in existing debt and a $1+ trillion annual deficit, what's $109 trillion in unfunded liabilities between friends?
* Federal outlays increased from 118.2B in 1965 to 157.4B in 1967 to 178.1B in 1968, growing by about 50% over just 3 years.
California also controls 53 of the 435 voting seats in the House of Representatives, which is the sole federal body that can appropriate money. If Californians have a problem with how much money the federal government takes, they control a good 1/8th of the House. If they prefer local/state control of taxation, like, say, Californians funding California's education system instead of the federal government introducing mandates to get some percentage of Californian tax money back, they have a pretty good start on eliminating such actions in the federal government.
But Californians, by and large, DON'T want a reduced federal government. They like playing the bully to the other states with their domination through the House and by creating restrictions that, through the sheer size of their economy, forces companies to choose making multiple SKUs (higher costs) or pass California's standards onto the other states (see things like CARB and their vehicular standards). California is also home to a lot of people that advocate the government taxing you so they can spend your money on their philanthropy, so isn't it a bit hypocritical for Californians to complain about the federal government taxing Californians so other people can use California's money for their philanthropy?
You mean like the "lack of regulation" that caused them to drill in deep water rather than on the continental shelf? Or maybe the "lack of regulation" that caused the federal government to give Deep Horizon a safety award last year? Or maybe the "lack of regulation" where the MMS decided not to send inspectors out, but to trust the platform to inspect itself? Or maybe the "lack of regulation" that limited damages to $75 million so it didn't matter if drillers acted irresponsibly?
The government CONSTANTLY passes new laws then doesn't enforce them as an excuse to pass a new law.
See immigration: In the 1980s, government granted amnesty to illegals aliens that could prove they were living here in exchange for "better enforcement" of our borders and cracking down on people that hire illegals. 2 decades later, there's another 10-30 million illegals and the enforcement of borders and illegal employers has been negligent to say the least. The solution? Same thing as in the 80s, which won't solve anything.
See firearms: pass the Brady Bill (1993), requiring a background check and waiting period to buy a gun. Despite hundreds of thousands of violators, Clinton prosecuted just a few hundred. Meanwhile, gun crime didn't decrease (the Brady Bill targets lawful gun buyers, not criminals), so we got the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994 (that had nothing to do with how a weapon functioned, just how scary it looks). Despite both of those, you still had Kleibold and Harris acquiring a Tec-9 with the clamor for more gun control post-Columbine.
Those are just two examples... The result is a "need" to pass a new law, taking a little more of your freedom than the law before it... but since the laws aren't enforced, nobody takes them seriously. Then, one day, you wake up to realize that the last law took away YOUR freedom and actually will be enforced. It's the baby step road to tyranny and government control of your life.
And, of course, now after the government agency, MMS, refused to do the enforcement portion of their job, there's a "need" for the government to "better regulate" the petroleum industry, spend more money on green energy, and, of course, pass an intrusive, sweeping, expensive cap and tax bill that was already dead until the current crisis "allow(ed) you to do things you couldn't do before." (to quote Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel)
Thomas Sowell: Economic Facts and Fallacies, pages 125-132, which also has 27 footnotes in that span supporting his assertion that real wages and purchasing power have increased.
As for the amount of money being spent on food, processed, pre-cooked and foods cost significantly more than raw ingredients then cooking it yourself. The fast food craze has only been around since the mid-50s and it has grown in size pretty much every year since. Ditto for the pre-packaged stuff. So, even if adjusted for inflation, the price of an apple remains constant, and the price of making an entire apple pie from scratch remains constant, the average American isn't making an apple pie anymore, they're buying a pre-baked one at a higher price, at as much as twice the price that it would cost if it were still made the traditional way, so obviously the "average cost" of a pie has increased... but the cost of making one from scratch is still virtually the same.
Again, as I said, it's all about people being impatient and willing to spend money on frivilous things, rather than an actual decrease in their spending power. They don't have less spending power, they just choose to spend it on convenience rather than making it go as far as it could.
You feel like you're doing less well than your parents, because you're living off credit and losing anywhere from 8-25% of your purchasing power through interest because you had to have that big ticket item now, while your parents saved up for it. Likewise, your parents were satisfied with a 1400 sq ft house on a quarter acre in a housing tract, while today, you need at least a 2000 sq ft house with an acre or more just to be considered middle class.
So yeah, purchasing power has increased when you focus on a single product, largely because of the cost of manufacturing the product has decresed (economies of scale, new materials and processes, shipping manufacturing overseas, etc). Just look at the costs of a a computer from 1960 to 1980 to 2000 to today and then add in the massive increase in performance on top of that. But on whole, purchasing power feels like it has gone down because of the way we've chosen to spend our money and our insatiable appetite to always have more than the previous generation did. In short, purchasing power decreases as financial illiteracy/personal irresponsibility/instant gratification increases... and that's true whether comparisons are made within a generation or across generations.
I'll admit that, while I'm interested in space exploration, I'm not a space nerd, tracking every project NASA has going on...
But, is the failure of the Ares I a lack of intellectual and creative ability to develop the project, or is it that we've become so accustomed to fearing anything less than perfection when human lives are on the line, that we're afraid to move forward?
Nobody wants to lose astronauts, but in the 1960s, we ALL (ok, I wasn't born yet, but Americans at the time) understood that it was likely that we would lose a few astronauts along the way. A few lives were an acceptable loss on the way to conquering space. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in Apollo 1 on the launchpad in 1967. A year and a half later, we put men into space on that brand new platform.
In 1986, Challenger exploded and it took 2.5 years to get back into space. In 2003, Columbia burned up on re-entry and, like Challenger, it took 2.5 years to get back into space despite safely completing 112 of 114 missions on the platform. In 2004, just about a year after the failure of STS-114, Bush announced the end of the Space Shuttle without having a successor ready to go, effectively abandoning manned space flight.
Now, in 201x America, it appears no loss of life is acceptable even though there is nothing less dangerous about going into space today than there was in the 1960s. Astronauts know what they're getting into when they sign up, they volunteer, dreaming just to have a chance at a position, despite knowing the risks. Now, I'm not saying we should cavalierly blow them up, but we have to accept that we can't perfect every engineering design on paper, at some point, we have to build it and fire it. My suspicion is that NASA is so afraid that something will go wrong, and that "something" will bring the end to NASA as we know it, that they're afraid to take any chances... and that's why they're doing things like reusing as much existing hardware as possible even though it's time to "refactor the code," if you will.
If, in his off time, a police officer were to participate in a Klan march - no violence, just freedom of speech and expression of his views - what should his department do? Every time he arrests a non-white person, there will be the presumption that it was because of the officer's racist views, which taints the prosecution's case. At that point, he's useless for the department to continue to employ because no jury will convict anyone he arrests. Every defense will bring up the officer's views to discredit him, and thus his testimony, on the stand.
Should we, the taxpayers, continue to employ him if he's no longer capable of doing his job because of the taint of his expression and speech outside of work? Do we give him a desk job, where his views will still be seen as tainting his department and/or subordinates? What about all the wrongful arrest/imprisonment lawsuits, the lawsuits of other employees that claim they didn't get promoted because of the racist cop's views, etc? At that point, said cop is nothing BUT a liability and the best thing to do is terminate him.
So yeah, there are occasions where merely speaking your views, even off duty and not in uniform, SHOULD cost you your job as a public servant, even if those views are only presumed to have harmed someone. See also Mark Fuhrman, who became a felon for committing perjury on the basis of using the n word in regard to a screenplay he was involved in.
egcs was a fork of gcc, created because development of the original gcc went stale. The FSF abandoned the original gcc in light of the success of ecgs. In other words, the fork killed the parent, which is what the gp said he wanted an example of. After the death of the original gcc, ecgs was renamed gcc and took over its place in the GNU stack.
Slashdot Mirror
Check the political climate back in 1912/1913. Woodrow Wilson had just come into power, the 16th Amendment (income tax) had just passed ratification by the skin of its teeth, and the progressives had all kinds of things they wanted to do at the federal level like eugenics/forced abortion/sterilization (never got much farther than the "talk about" stage in terms of national policy), the Federal Reserve system, prohibition, creating a new layer of government at the world level, etc but were worried about the states standing in their way (that is, they wanted to usurp power from the states).
So, they pushed for the popular election of Senators as a means of manipulating the people through propaganda to empower the people that favored big government. Seriously, history classes in the US tend to gloss over Woodrow Wilson and what an evil bastard he was, they don't even really discuss his politics beyond the League of Nations. He flat out hated the system of checks and balances because it limited the power of the federal government to grow unchecked. In fact, he hated the entire US system of government and preferred a parliamentary system
He got his way... ever notice that the federal government just continues to take power these days, whether it's Constitutional or not, whether it is a violation of the powers of the states or not, whether it's a violation of your rights/liberty/freedom or not? And when was the last time your Senator gave you any real consideration (at least without you, uh, returning said consideration, generally, in the form of a bribe, I mean campaign donation)? You're one of millions of tiny voices that he represents rather than one large voice (the state) that his job actually hinges on respecting. For that matter, imagine Senators without the influence of the corporations and special interest groups that they rely on to get re-elected.
I know it's crazy talk, but how about the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which made Senators directly elected by the people (and hence, prone to the partisanship winds of the day) rather than being representatives of the states (hence the term Statesmen)? These days, the Senate tends to be just as petty and partisan as the House, if not even moreso, and it's all because the Senators have to play up their act to get re-elected rather than being able to vote their conscience.
As an added bonus, it might just slow down the federal government's powergrab from the states (see things like speed limits or drinking age) since, you know, someone would actually be representing the states in the united STATES government.
If by roughly half, you mean absolutely no power to stop any legislation in the House that the Democrats agree on (if anything fails in the House, it is strictly because the Democrats aren't all on board) and 40 out of 100 Senate seats, which isn't enough to prevent cloture.
The Democrats wield ALL of the power between Congress and the White House right now and the Republicans can't do a thing to stop them, only fellow Democrats that have trepidation about their leadership's goals. But keep blaming the Republicans because that's the narrative being pushed by the White House and their friends in the media, just like how the Republicans controlled Congress for 6 of 8 years during GWB's administration (they may have had a small majority in the House, nothing like what the Dems have now, but the Senate flip flopped back and forth, with Democrats controlling the first two years and the last two years, with a slim, non-filibuster proof Republican majority between).
As for the skin color remark, you're delusional. Maybe 10% of the population cares about his skin color whether they hate him or like him because of it (and you'll never be able to completely eliminate the tribalism involved, just see the way you're smearing Republicans because they have an R after their name). The vast majority of the right has a problem with his policies and has since before anyone ever heard of Barack Obama (Keynesian Economics for example).
And don't take any of the above on the assumption that I think Republicans have governed any better than the Democrats. Both parties suck, especially their leadership. My problem is the regurgitation of false narratives meant solely to smear people, attacking the messenger, because you don't like the message. Even worse, it's because you're dissatisfied with Obama's own party but would rather attack the other guys for his team's own failings.
They tend to get critical praise becuase the critics tend to support the politics portrayed by the movies... on the other hand, the movie going audience wants to be entertained for their $10, not preached to, so they tend to stay away. Almost all of the movies in the last 5 years or so that have involved the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq have flopped, especially at the US box office.
From boxofficemojo.com and by no means a complete list, just what came to mind
The Hurt Locker - $16 million US ($4 million of which came during re-release after the Oscar), $32 million foreign
Green Zone - $35 million US, $59 million foreign
In the Valley of Elah - $6.8 million US, $23 million foreign
Stop-Loss - $11 million US, $291k foreign
Brothers - $29 million US, $14 million foreign
The Kite Runner - $16 million US, $58 million foreign
Jarhead - $63 million US, $34 million foreign
The Kingdom - $47 million US, $39 million foreign
Lions for Lambs - $15 million US, $48 million foreign
Rendition - $10 million US, $17 million foreign
Redacted - $65k US, $716k foreign
Most of them didn't even make back their production budgets when considering worldwide gross, much less the marketing budgets to go with them. The shear number of movies show that Hollywood is completely obsessed and the continue to make movies about the subject even though the American public is generally pretty consistently turned off by them. You could say that they're targeting the foreign markets instead, but I guess that makes Hollywood not so much Hollywood, USA anymore, doesn't it? Then again, films are being made outside the US more and more, with Hollywood merely remaining the traditional centralized headquarters that everyone reports back to/meets up at.
Back to the politics, look at how many of the same critics panned The Stoning of Soraya M. Despite being a gutsy portrayal of how women are still treated in some Islamic countries, it doesn't suit the politics of a good chunk of the critics.
So do the best of both... Institute a flat tax while allowing a cost of living deduction, say $30,000 just to throw a number out there, on the income. Earn anywhere up to $30,000? Pay nothing. Earn $90,000, pay tax on $60,000. Earn $1,000,000, pay tax on $970,000. The simplicity of a flat tax with the humanity of a progressive tax.
/wink). Remember, they couldn't get Capone on murder, but they did get him on tax evasion and that was before the current mess was instituted.
The current system of loopholes, credits and deductions exists to give the government and its friends power. It allows them to favor certain businesses or states with verbiage that ensures the right handful are protected while sounding so convoluted nobody knows what it means or likewise penalizing others through the same means. It makes it so that everyone has some amount of uncertainty when they file their taxes - did you do everything exactly right? After all, not even the Treasury Secretary in charge did. Better make sure, especially if you piss off the wrong politically connected guy/party/federal employee and get audited (of course, they'd never do that,
One of the most feared government agencies is the IRS... most people fear being audited in much the same way as it's a pain in the ass to get audited by the (non-governmental) BSA. You'd better be damn sure all of your ducks are in a row or you'll be paying penalties, back taxes, interest and maybe going to jail. How exactly is it humane to make people fear making a minor mistake on their taxes and having the full behemoth of the federal government coming down on them for it, when they're only guilty of misunderstanding a line out of thousands of tax code or putting a number on the wrong line of a form? The rich have people that take care of it for them, and I don't mean some cheap store bought tax program, I mean tax attorneys and CPAs. They shelter their money without worry because they're paying others to dot every I and cross every T. It is the poor which suffer under the current complexity.
The way you opt out of paying into Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is by not earning money in the country.
So the only way to opt out, is to renounce US citizenship and leave the country (being a US citizen, any money you earn outside of the country is still taxable regardless of where you reside). Hence, either become a slave doing the bidding of others or leave. That's your definition of free choice? And you can't see how that is tyrannical? So, I guess indentured servitude was ok too... even though, at least with indentured servitude, you choose to enslave yourself in return for a favor you asked for.
Paying tax doesnt make you a slave, its an obligation in return for the government providing other service.
That's fine and dandy. I agree to pay for roads and cops. I don't agree to pay your medical bills. Oh, you want to use government to force me to pay your medical bills? That's slavery - you're forcing me to work to provide you with the services that you want.
Part of being human is our desire to form social ties, if you cant accept that, might i refer you to the subject of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism [wikipedia.org]
Oh noes, if I grow only enough food to feed myself, it's because I'm an evil narcissist! Nobody should ever do for themselves, they should be mandated to do for everyone else first and then do for themselves with whatever scraps are left! On the other hand, in a collectivist society, I have less incentive to grow even enough for myself because some altruistic soul out there will grow enough for me too! (again, see Plymouth or how with the failure of the Five Year Plan, Stalin ended up privatizing some farm ownership, whereby the 2% of privately owned land was producing 30% of Russia's agricultural output)
You don't find it, oh, just as narcissitic to assume that you deserve someone else's help just because you live in the same society? Collectivists constantly whine about the greed and selfishness of capitalists, but guess what, they're the underlying theme of collectivism too - you want what others have, you just don't want to have to provide it yourself and you take security in knowing that the state will takeit from them to provide for you.
Your arguments are running pretty thin here... maybe it's hard to defend collectivized government once it is put in terms of tyranny and slavery. Don't you have to stop reading again or something before your head asplodes?
Servitude is INHERENT to socialism. Tell me, how do I opt out of paying into Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, especially if I'm willing to waive my right to collect them in the process? How do you opt out of the European health care systems?
Mandatory participation is forced participation, ie, the opposite of choice. Give me one socialist program that allows you to opt out entirely, whether it be the receiving end OR more importantly, the paying end.
If you can't accept that, might I refer you to the subject of cognitive dissonance?
Socialism, aka communism light, is community ownership of the means of production, product or service while people can retain private ownership of some of their things. That community ownership is maintained by the force of government compelling people to participate, be it the original owner (if there was one and he was compelled to sell or if it was outright taken without compensation) and/or mandatory participation in the ownership and maintenance of said facility. Communism is the complete lack of individual property, including individuals themselves since they are degraded from individuals to members of the commune, with the community owning everything and the members being given an individual temporary share.
BOTH equate to slavery to one's fellow man because of the compulsion to provide for them, just as the slave was compelled to serve his master's needs above and beyond the slave's own. You might not be required to go out and pick cotton for 40 hours this week, but you are forced to surrender the fruits of up to 50% of your labor (federal, state, local taxes and fees combined) to serve your government/fellow man. So, whether you work 40 hours out in the cotton field or 20 hours earning for yourself and 20 hours picking cotton, you're still picking cotton for someone else under collectivist economies, and thus, a slave to them.
So, you tell me how servitude isn't inherent to socialism... and I'll tell you, racism hurts capitalists since it drives potential customers and suppliers to other entities, making you less profitable and them moreso. Any good capitalist would care less about the race of their customer or supplier and they'll put the bad capitalists that do out of business, so long as those bad capitalists don't have the government interfering with the market to prop them up like the old segregationist laws. Capitalism favors no race, sex, creed, or any other inherent trait, it favors those that choose to participate in the system, particularly if they have excess capital themselves (which may have originated through nefarious means outside of the modern capitalist system itself, be it through slavery, royalty, theft, inheritance, etc. Where one derives their capital outside of the market has no bearing on the capitalist system itself, just as it isn't the fault of the car if you step into it drunk).
Captialism: I choose where and how to spend my money, whether it is in my interest or not
Socialism: Government tells me how to spend some part my money because it knows better than me
Communism: Government doesn't let me have any money because it promises that my only interest is its interests
One of those things provides freedom and liberty, the other two enforce different amounts of servitude and slavery to others.
Offtopic, but I was hoping to ask a few questions to an intelligent, rational member of the Tea Party. I'm assuming you qualify, since you are a member of this tribe
I'm a tea party organizer and I have spoken at four of them.
What is your take on "Congress shall make no law" when it is in conflict with sections of The Constitution like the responsibility of The President to provide for the national defense? Does the prohibition in The Bill of Rights take precedence, or the obligation in The Constitution?
"Congress shall make no law" literally means Congress shall make no law. The President is the Commander in Chief of the military, the highest general, but he cannot declare a war himself, though it is generally accepted that he can order immediate action to defend the country (that is, if we come under attack, he can order troops into action to defend and doesn't have to wait for a declaration of war. Congress abdicated its power to declare war after WWII, while prior to that, Wilson and FDR blatantly ignored Congress and the American people by trying to lure us into WWI and WWII (they couldn't declare war outright themselves, so they figured if they could get us attacked, they could change public sentiment into giving them the wars they wanted). And that is why Congress alone was to have the power to declare war rather than investing it solele in one person.
The Bill of Rights supercedes anything written in the Constitution, by the very virtue that they are amendments of the Constitution. Therefore, the largely ignored Ninth and Tenth Amendments buttress the claim that, unless the federal government is given the power to do something, they have no such authority to assume that power for themselves.
I am a strong supporter of The Second Amendment. Yet I am tempted to agree that private citizens should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons. The Supreme Court once ruled (in not protecting sawed off shotguns) that the second only applied to weapons of war, though clearly nuclear weapons are weapons of war (or mortars or tanks, for example). Many have argued the "well regulated militia angle", of course. Where do you stand on limitations to The Second Amendment?
People have the right to own arms, and by that, the Founding Fathers meant military weapons... and while they could never conceive of something like a nuclear weapon, they gave us the solution to fix that problem - a Constitutional Amendment. Amendments tend to be hard to pass, but perhaps more importantly, since I doubt anyone would have a problem with banning private ownership of nuclear weapons, the reason why such an amendment isn't passed, is it would lead further credence to the Constitution being the hard written law of the land rather than "a living document" meant to be revisionistly reinterpretted into whatever someone seeking power wants it to read.
What is your take on The Establishment Clause? The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion, yet many (including many high ranking members of The Tea Party) have expressed a belief that religious morals rightly should inform legislation. There are certainly laws which satisfy religious morals while not being an establishment of religion, like the prohibition against murder. Other issues, such as the distinction between civil union and marriage, seem difficult to divide from their religious origins. How should The Establishment Clause be interpreted, and do you feel that The Tea Party as an organization has internalized that interpretation?
I'm somewhere between atheist and agnostic myself (I don't believe there is an all powerful, all knowing deity, but I think there exists something greater than ourselves in a cosmic sense). The federal government should have very little influence over criminal or even civil law, since its purpose is to act on international affairs (diplomacy, war, trade, etc)
Im not sure its servitude if one chooses to use their individualism to empower society rather than just using it for personal benefit.
The best system, capitalism or socialism is one that fairly reflects the values of the society it covers, a group oriented society should lean towards socialism, an individualist society should lean towards capitalism.
As any society is comprised of both types of people, the best system is one that encourages each group, while protecting it from exploitation by the other.
You can't really have both groups overlapping in the same community. Socialism requires people to contribute by force (forced charity isn't charity, it's theft), so you end up removing the choice of people that believe in individualism first. That, in turn causes oppression and resentment, which works to undermine the sense of community. Eventually, things fall apart when the individualists leave, stop contributing (quit their job, operate in black markets, stop making more than they need for themselves to get by) or when the community's demands exceed the community's ability to support itself.
Capitalism works the same way, people that elect to have the community support them rather than support themselves end up oppressed and resentful, largely because the community at large doesn't agree with them. Brutal as it sounds, those people are forced to either take care of themselves, live off the generosity of those who wish to support them (charity), move to someplace that will support them (which may be jail if they chose to prey on society to meet their needs) or die. However, in this case, the refusal of the outsider group to participate causes little harm to the group at large because they're already supporting themselves, likely in excess of their own needs.
To put it into a slashdot analogy, if you're the computer nerd of the family, everyone in the family (and many of your friends too) tries to compel you to come over and fix their computers for them, often relying solely on your relation/association with them. They often don't give any type of remuneration for it, you're supposed to do it out of the goodness of your heart because of your relationship, regardless of if they'll ever repay you in some way. LOTS of slashdotters complain about how much time they continually have to waste in this scenario and many of them eventually stop doing it because they feel unappreciated and abused by their relatives, thus, the productives "stop contributing to society" and the people demanding their service end up going without. The end result, whether under capitalism or socialism, is that the takers always shoot themselves in the foot and the independent people will generally take care of themselves, generally in excess under capitalism and to the bare minimum under socialism.
If you think people are fundamentally bad than capitalism is for you, if you dream of something better than try and be a socialist.
I don't think people are fundamentally bad or good. I think people are fundamentally after their own self interests. For people capable of using their talent and knowledge for their own benefit, that generally means providing for themselves, though they may choose to donate some of their bounty to people less fortunate than them. Likewise, people that aren't capable of using their talent, knowledge and/or skill for their own benefit - because they're disabled, because they have no marketable talent/knowledge/skill, see no benefit of exercising their talent/knowledge to take care of themselves, etc, choose to have others support them.
Whether you believe it's evil to make lots of money or whether you believe it's evil to take other people's money to provide support for someone else, it's not a matter of evil, it's a matter of whether you think people have a duty to take care of themselves first or whether you think everyone has a duty to take care of society first. Humans tend care first for themselves
Meet Gerald Walpin, the former Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service, who was fired for questioning irregularities regarding an AmeriCorps grant given to an Obama supporter as well as opening an investigation into $80 million given to the City University of NY. That is, he was fired for doing his job, he just happened to look into the "wrong" people.
It seems the USA has a very bad track record of avoiding war over the last years.
Abraham Lincoln, 1848 "The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood."
Executives LOVE war... for some, it is a way to acquire new territory (Tyler/Mexican-American and McKinley/Spanish-American wars), for others, it's a way to try to gain power on the world stage (Wilson/WWI and FDR/WWII - both of which tried to actively manuever America into the wars, deliberately violating our neutrality to try to put us in position of being attacked so we could retaliate), for national pride (Truman/Korea, LBJ/Vietnam), to secure imports (GHWB/GWB Iraq I/II), to help with personal needs (Clinton bombing of the Sudan aspirin factory the day Monica Lewinsky went to testify in front of the grand jury), etc.
So long as there are spoils of war, there are going to be people willing to risk the lives of others to obtain those spoils for themselves. Kings and Presidents no longer lead their armies in hand to hand combat on the battlefield, they get to sit in the safety of their secured locations ordering others to die. Legislatures tend to have much more restraint, but Congress hasn't declared a formal war since Korea. The main reason why they rejected Wilson's League of Nations, is they feared that they'd cede their sovereignty in the process... and over the last 60 years, they did exactly that by allowing Presidents to engage in "police actions" at whim.
Want to restrain America from getting involved in wars? Enforce the Constitution, ALL of it. Further, abandon the UN, which tends to be representative of EXECUTIVE wishes from its member governments rather than their legislatures and their main mission is to constantly meddle in foreign affairs. Much like the Federal Reserve was "meant" to prevent the collapse of the economy, the UN has been just as successful in "preventing" countries from warring with each other.
Not that I'm passing any type of judgment on the merits of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (in fact, I think it was largely a good thing), but when critics complained that it would be used to create preferences and quotas, Senator Hubert Humphrey remarked to a colleague, "If the senator can find in the Title VII ... any language which provides than an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there." Senators Joseph Clark and Clifford Case wrote a memo stating that there was no requirement for an employer to "maintain a racial balance in his workforce" and that such a balance "would involve a violation of the legislation because maintaining such a balance would require an employer to hire or fire on the basis of race." However, they refused to acknowledge that since it is impossible to know whether hiring decisions are made on the basis of discrimination or honest determinations, the act guaranteed a system of preferential treatment and/or quotas benefiting minorities in order to keep from being sued.
That followed with Supreme Court rulings in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, where even unintentional discrimination by requiring something like a high school diploma to get a promotion, because a disparate number of blacks lacked one, was still discrimination, overturning any provision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that discrimination had to be intentional... Thus, creating a system of affirmative action programs based on race (and later other factors) despite the contrary claims of Congressional supporters of the bill.
Justice Brennan's majority ruling in United Steelworkers of America v. Baker, where Baker sued on the basis of being denied a promotion because of Kaiser Aluminum's affirmative action policies, found that the real meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was meant to be found in the spirit of the text, and since the "spirit" animating the legislation was aimed at helping blacks, it wasn't a violation of the act to discriminate against whites regardless of what the text of the legislation said.
Ultimately, by the time the Supreme Court ruled on the legislation created in the name of ending discrimination based on race, effectively it endorsed discrimination based on race.
I think it would be wise to be wary of what ANY legislator claims the intent of his legislation is because they don't have the final determination in how that legislation will be interpreted and expanded in the future. It's even crazier for an individual to assume what a legislator is going to write before it is written, amended and passed. How many loopholes and ambiguous clauses is the legislation going to create? I'm not sure you could pass an airtight (in terms of being free of abuse by government or corporations) Net Neutrality law in a paragraph, much less the dozen/hundred/thousand page bill/regulatory document that will be drawn up.
I was really confused for a second until I realized you were calling the newspapers assholes instead of the assholes that they are trying to prevent cluttering up their comment boards. I hate reading comments in most papers (and slashdot) where anonymous trolls spew the worst rhetoric just to get a rise out of people. (BTW, good job here, it worked on me)
My local paper is also just as guilty of anonymously trolling the public through their editorials... after all, controversy drives eyeballs. Slashdot is guilty of it to some extent too, the politics and religion articles are always the most highly commented on (9 of the top 10). That's why they keep (pick your least favorite editor here) around, because he'll stir up comments and, thus, drive traffic.
If your bitching about a one-time .99 cent fee, then you need to get off the internet because of the electricity cost.
I wouldn't care about a one time 99 cent fee. I do care about people showing up at my house and threatening my family because they disagree with my commentary, be it one lone nut job or an entire activist group. I post pseudo-anonymously, especially on particularly controversial topics, for a reason; Sometimes unpopular things NEED to be said and sometimes, you can find yourself in quite a bit of danger for even saying popular things that someone in power doesn't want said.
If my name was John Smith of some large city with hundreds of us in the phonebook, I probably wouldn't care. As it is, there are all of two people with my name in my entire county, much less identifying me by town, and both of us live under the same roof. The Buffalo News just adopted a Real Name policy and that is the biggest concern there as well.
Nixon - the same guy responsible for getting away from sound money (gold standard)
Nixon gave it the final death blow, but FDR killed the gold/silver certificate in 1933. Truman later agreed to the Bretton Woods Agreement, in which foreign currencies were fixed to US dollars, effectively making the dollar the world's standard. During Vietnam (which France had actually helped cause), France ended up draining the gold reserves backing the US dollars, ultimately leading to Nixon's decision to permanently cease the gold standard.
they same guy setting up minimum wage laws
Again, minimum wage laws, as well as wage and price controls, started under FDR as part of the New Deal. You can also thank union organizers, who wanted to use the government to encourage people to join the unions in order to get a job (mostly because the union bosses wanted more dues to put in their pockets). People were desperate to earn money and would willingly take pennies just to do some type of meaningful work to take care of their families. The unions didn't want to be undercut and have their workers put out of work, so they cozied up to FDR and used the government to harm non-union workers (the entire National Recovery Act was built largely on helping the unions while harming business owners and non-union workers).
the same guy who destroyed the working health insurance for people by getting government subsidies into it and causing the insurance prices to skyrocket
Health insurance didn't exist prior to the New Deal. It was a way to get around the imposed wage controls in order to keep good help. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid were passed because "it wasn't fair" that working people had their health costs paid for but poor and elderly people didn't. Thus, it wasn't Nixon that started subsidizing health care, but LBJ as part of the Great Society as a reaction to an unintended consequence from the previous government interference under the New Deal. Ted Kennedy created the HMO system, which Nixon signed, as a result of Medicare/Medicaid destabilizing the existing insurance market. Another side effect of that, was Social Security reform in 1967 which allowed the government to use the Social Security surplus to cover up the exploding budget deficits caused by Medicare/Medicaid (which had greatly exceeded cost estimates) and the escalation of Vietnam. Oh, and, of course, today, we need a new government health care system to save us from the existing problems that government health care caused. As an added bonus, Social Security is running in the red already and we'll have to borrow money to pay it. Forget the $13 trillion debt, that's small potatoes; We owe $109.5 trillion in unfunded liabilities and they start adding to the debt NOW as boomers start to retire. Doubly so if the rumored legislation to get people to retire early to "create" jobs for younger people happens.
By fixing food prices to make them 'stable', he caused
Again, it goes back to FDR, the New Deal and the Great Depression. Did you know that FDR ordered tons of food destroyed, while people were starving, to prop up the price? Did you know that under him, it became illegal to grow wheat for your own consumption (see Wickard v. Filburn)?
By getting government into health insurance (CHIP), he created a moral hazard for the medical establishment that allowed it to spike the prices up, which happens only when government guarantees to pay,
Nixon signed Ted Kennedy's HMO system into law. Clinton signed CHIP into law and it was expanded under GWB and Obama. And, again, it was Medicaid/Medicare which drove up the costs, making existing insurance plans insufficient, resulting in more government interference in health care to shore up the private plans.
same problem with government loans for higher education - prices shoot up.
Again, thank FDR for that, passing th
Cut welfare, ALL welfare. Corporate welfare, farm subsidies, entitlements, regulations meant to harm small businesses in favor of big businesses, eternal extensions of copyright and patents on unpatentable things, etc. It's not just the big ticket items like entitlements and defense, but the little things like regulating the size of holes in swiss cheese (even simple regulation requires oversight which costs money and creates barriers to entry), constructing turtle crossing tunnels and studying pig flatulence which adds up too.
Those red states have plenty of lobbyists demanding money for things like corn, but the blue states have plenty of lobbyists for things like subsidized ethanol, which further redirects money from the big blues to the flyover reds. It's not unlike pre-Civil War America, in that most of the manufacturing takes place in the urban states while the resources come largely from the less populous states. Manufacturing and white colar jobs ultimately pay more than tilling soil or digging for ore, so more people would like to do those types of jobs... but ultimately, someone has to do the hard work too. Those blue states die pretty quickly if they can't get coal, food or steel.
It's in everyone's interests to work together, which was the entire purpose of forming a united coalition of states to facilitate interstate cooperation. If the blue states feel like they're getting the raw end of the deal, they have the power to help change things, but they should also admit that they had a hand in creating many of the things that they're complaining about. That's where the rub comes in, they have to admit their earlier ideas were wrong and nobody, especially not a politician, wants to face the public and say "look, I screwed up." They all want someone or something else to blame.
The solution is to go back to the purposes we were founded on and the Constitution which was meant to dictate our interstate cooperation. Namely, we have to stop using the federal government as a hammer to pound our desires onto everyone else, we should reconsider the idea of taxing based on apportionment and the number of representatives, to stop using the federal government to spread wealth from one group to another, etc. Maybe most important to this particular conversation is the purpose of the Commerce Clause, which was originally meant to facilitate commerce, making trade a regular action between the states, not to tell you whether or not you're allowed to grow wheat in your back yard for your own use.
Once that happens, California can make the welfare laws which are best tailored to the Californian population, New York can make the education standards best suited to New York, West Virginia can create the mining laws best suited to West Virginia, Louisiana can best figure out how to protect itself from flooding, etc. As it is, every state, especially big, wealthy states that don't have to worry about meeting budgets, want to meddle in the affairs of every other state and their citizens... and it costs us a fortune. That's fine for the blue states during good times, but now that they've gotten a taste of what its like to have to bear the economic burdens of those regulations themselves, they're crying foul.
Truth is, a good number of people from the red states would LOVE to reduce the size, scope and cost of the federal bureaucracy and they routinely elect politicians who pledge to do just that. Now, those politicians rarely live up to their promises, but the red state voters are largely up for it. Sure, they may bulk at losing something like corn subsidies, but someone has to have the guts to actually do it. The market will eventually take care of itself and some politicians may get voted out for actually keeping their promises... but its the right thing to do. It's also why only the House of Representatives was supposed to be publicly elected, with the Senators, the Statesmen, if you will, being virtually untouchable so that they COULD do the right thing.
We've completely ign
Actually CA like most coastal states brings more money to the Fed than it gets back. Without this it might be able to balance its books. Perhaps we should stop feeding the welfare queen that is middle America.
California controls 53 of the 435 voting seats in the House of Representatives, which is the sole federal body that can appropriate money. If Californians have a problem with how much money the federal government takes, they control a good 1/8th of the House by themselves. That's a pretty good start on a push to reduce federal spending and regulations and they'd get a bipartisan following if they made a concerted effort.
HOWEVER, Californians love to push for federal spending and new federal programs, plus they love to use the size of their own economy to bully the other states into accepting their ideas through non-federal government means as well (see the CARB emission standards for starters). California is like New York (read New York City)... they've advocated all kinds of obscene spending for years and now that the economy is derailed enough to affect them, they suddenly have a problem with it. Those of us in western NY have been dealing with the consequences of that mentality for decades.
Fiscal conservatives and libertarian types have been warning about the negatives of abusive nanny governments that spend oodles of money for years, and these very same people that suddenly don't know what to do were the ones shouting us down. Welcome to reality, you can't keep spending on the credit card figuring you'll get a raise every year to cover it while simultaneously never paying down the debt, always promising to do it next year.
Or maybe we could get the couple percent of americans who actually have all the money to pay their fair share of taxes. No, that would be unamerican.
Screw their income... confiscate 100% of their wealth! That'll show 'em... and you will barely even dent the $2.5 trillion in debt generated in just the last year and a half, much less the full debt and worse, future unfunded obligations. Bill Gates is worth about $50 billion, Warren Buffett around $40 billion. The Forbes 400 have a combined net worth (not income, total worth) of $1.27 trillion. I think you seriously underestimate just how much the government is spending because the numbers are too large to really grasp.
It started in 1967, two years after the introduction of Medicare/Medicaid. Congress realized that the cost estimates when they were debating passing Medicare/Medicaid were extremely low and, combined with escalating costs in Vietnam, the government was going to run huge deficits*. To cover up their mistakes/lies, they passed a law stating that the general fund could borrow the surpluses from Social Security, promising "to pay it back in the years that the federal government wasn't running deficits." Of course, they knew the government wasn't going to run surpluses and the debts would never get paid back, but by that time, they'd be out of office, so there weren't any consequences for them.
Lefties like to blame Reagan for the explosion in debt, but the truth is, much of the debt under Reagan came from the growth of entitlement programs created in LBJ's Great Society. Federal social spending eclipsed military spending in 1971 and it has only increased its lead since. Back in the 80s, they were already focusing on a critical collapse of Social Security funding precisely because the politicians of the 60s gutted the program... the gravy train papering over the deficits just happened to run out about 15 years later.
Today, with Social Security already running in the red, the truth is here, the US is in deep, deep trouble... and the baby boomers haven't even begun mass retirement yet. Hey, I've got an idea, how about a giant new entitlement program? That'll fix everything... I mean, forget the $13 trillion in existing debt and a $1+ trillion annual deficit, what's $109 trillion in unfunded liabilities between friends?
* Federal outlays increased from 118.2B in 1965 to 157.4B in 1967 to 178.1B in 1968, growing by about 50% over just 3 years.
California also controls 53 of the 435 voting seats in the House of Representatives, which is the sole federal body that can appropriate money. If Californians have a problem with how much money the federal government takes, they control a good 1/8th of the House. If they prefer local/state control of taxation, like, say, Californians funding California's education system instead of the federal government introducing mandates to get some percentage of Californian tax money back, they have a pretty good start on eliminating such actions in the federal government.
But Californians, by and large, DON'T want a reduced federal government. They like playing the bully to the other states with their domination through the House and by creating restrictions that, through the sheer size of their economy, forces companies to choose making multiple SKUs (higher costs) or pass California's standards onto the other states (see things like CARB and their vehicular standards). California is also home to a lot of people that advocate the government taxing you so they can spend your money on their philanthropy, so isn't it a bit hypocritical for Californians to complain about the federal government taxing Californians so other people can use California's money for their philanthropy?
You mean like the "lack of regulation" that caused them to drill in deep water rather than on the continental shelf? Or maybe the "lack of regulation" that caused the federal government to give Deep Horizon a safety award last year? Or maybe the "lack of regulation" where the MMS decided not to send inspectors out, but to trust the platform to inspect itself? Or maybe the "lack of regulation" that limited damages to $75 million so it didn't matter if drillers acted irresponsibly?
The government CONSTANTLY passes new laws then doesn't enforce them as an excuse to pass a new law.
See immigration: In the 1980s, government granted amnesty to illegals aliens that could prove they were living here in exchange for "better enforcement" of our borders and cracking down on people that hire illegals. 2 decades later, there's another 10-30 million illegals and the enforcement of borders and illegal employers has been negligent to say the least. The solution? Same thing as in the 80s, which won't solve anything.
See firearms: pass the Brady Bill (1993), requiring a background check and waiting period to buy a gun. Despite hundreds of thousands of violators, Clinton prosecuted just a few hundred. Meanwhile, gun crime didn't decrease (the Brady Bill targets lawful gun buyers, not criminals), so we got the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994 (that had nothing to do with how a weapon functioned, just how scary it looks). Despite both of those, you still had Kleibold and Harris acquiring a Tec-9 with the clamor for more gun control post-Columbine.
Those are just two examples... The result is a "need" to pass a new law, taking a little more of your freedom than the law before it... but since the laws aren't enforced, nobody takes them seriously. Then, one day, you wake up to realize that the last law took away YOUR freedom and actually will be enforced. It's the baby step road to tyranny and government control of your life.
And, of course, now after the government agency, MMS, refused to do the enforcement portion of their job, there's a "need" for the government to "better regulate" the petroleum industry, spend more money on green energy, and, of course, pass an intrusive, sweeping, expensive cap and tax bill that was already dead until the current crisis "allow(ed) you to do things you couldn't do before." (to quote Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel)
Thomas Sowell: Economic Facts and Fallacies, pages 125-132, which also has 27 footnotes in that span supporting his assertion that real wages and purchasing power have increased.
As for the amount of money being spent on food, processed, pre-cooked and foods cost significantly more than raw ingredients then cooking it yourself. The fast food craze has only been around since the mid-50s and it has grown in size pretty much every year since. Ditto for the pre-packaged stuff. So, even if adjusted for inflation, the price of an apple remains constant, and the price of making an entire apple pie from scratch remains constant, the average American isn't making an apple pie anymore, they're buying a pre-baked one at a higher price, at as much as twice the price that it would cost if it were still made the traditional way, so obviously the "average cost" of a pie has increased... but the cost of making one from scratch is still virtually the same.
Again, as I said, it's all about people being impatient and willing to spend money on frivilous things, rather than an actual decrease in their spending power. They don't have less spending power, they just choose to spend it on convenience rather than making it go as far as it could.
You feel like you're doing less well than your parents, because you're living off credit and losing anywhere from 8-25% of your purchasing power through interest because you had to have that big ticket item now, while your parents saved up for it. Likewise, your parents were satisfied with a 1400 sq ft house on a quarter acre in a housing tract, while today, you need at least a 2000 sq ft house with an acre or more just to be considered middle class.
So yeah, purchasing power has increased when you focus on a single product, largely because of the cost of manufacturing the product has decresed (economies of scale, new materials and processes, shipping manufacturing overseas, etc). Just look at the costs of a a computer from 1960 to 1980 to 2000 to today and then add in the massive increase in performance on top of that. But on whole, purchasing power feels like it has gone down because of the way we've chosen to spend our money and our insatiable appetite to always have more than the previous generation did. In short, purchasing power decreases as financial illiteracy/personal irresponsibility/instant gratification increases... and that's true whether comparisons are made within a generation or across generations.
I'll admit that, while I'm interested in space exploration, I'm not a space nerd, tracking every project NASA has going on...
But, is the failure of the Ares I a lack of intellectual and creative ability to develop the project, or is it that we've become so accustomed to fearing anything less than perfection when human lives are on the line, that we're afraid to move forward?
Nobody wants to lose astronauts, but in the 1960s, we ALL (ok, I wasn't born yet, but Americans at the time) understood that it was likely that we would lose a few astronauts along the way. A few lives were an acceptable loss on the way to conquering space. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in Apollo 1 on the launchpad in 1967. A year and a half later, we put men into space on that brand new platform.
In 1986, Challenger exploded and it took 2.5 years to get back into space. In 2003, Columbia burned up on re-entry and, like Challenger, it took 2.5 years to get back into space despite safely completing 112 of 114 missions on the platform. In 2004, just about a year after the failure of STS-114, Bush announced the end of the Space Shuttle without having a successor ready to go, effectively abandoning manned space flight.
Now, in 201x America, it appears no loss of life is acceptable even though there is nothing less dangerous about going into space today than there was in the 1960s. Astronauts know what they're getting into when they sign up, they volunteer, dreaming just to have a chance at a position, despite knowing the risks. Now, I'm not saying we should cavalierly blow them up, but we have to accept that we can't perfect every engineering design on paper, at some point, we have to build it and fire it. My suspicion is that NASA is so afraid that something will go wrong, and that "something" will bring the end to NASA as we know it, that they're afraid to take any chances... and that's why they're doing things like reusing as much existing hardware as possible even though it's time to "refactor the code," if you will.
If, in his off time, a police officer were to participate in a Klan march - no violence, just freedom of speech and expression of his views - what should his department do? Every time he arrests a non-white person, there will be the presumption that it was because of the officer's racist views, which taints the prosecution's case. At that point, he's useless for the department to continue to employ because no jury will convict anyone he arrests. Every defense will bring up the officer's views to discredit him, and thus his testimony, on the stand.
Should we, the taxpayers, continue to employ him if he's no longer capable of doing his job because of the taint of his expression and speech outside of work? Do we give him a desk job, where his views will still be seen as tainting his department and/or subordinates? What about all the wrongful arrest/imprisonment lawsuits, the lawsuits of other employees that claim they didn't get promoted because of the racist cop's views, etc? At that point, said cop is nothing BUT a liability and the best thing to do is terminate him.
So yeah, there are occasions where merely speaking your views, even off duty and not in uniform, SHOULD cost you your job as a public servant, even if those views are only presumed to have harmed someone. See also Mark Fuhrman, who became a felon for committing perjury on the basis of using the n word in regard to a screenplay he was involved in.
egcs was a fork of gcc, created because development of the original gcc went stale. The FSF abandoned the original gcc in light of the success of ecgs. In other words, the fork killed the parent, which is what the gp said he wanted an example of. After the death of the original gcc, ecgs was renamed gcc and took over its place in the GNU stack.