The CEO who has been driving that company into the grave recently commented that he was looking for ways to maximize the profits of their patent portfolio. Being unfamiliar with the guy, and suspecting he was some hired-gun CEO with a degree in patent law I figured I'd look him up.... He turns out to be on Obama's jobs council:
To be REALLY competitive, you invest in R&D, create new products, create new services, or find ways to deliver existing products or services better than your competitors. When your company is a sinking ship, you have no ideas, and you are just trying to delay the inevitable plunge, you look for ways to squeeze-out the last bits of value by selling-off property and converting your patent portfolio into cash. This guy's no better than Romney or McBride; anybody who works there and is not a lawyer should be prepping a resume; anybody with a product or service that might be sued by a desperate patent troll named Kodak should prepare to be sued. Very sad end.
No. "Capitalism" it a term Marx coined to denigrate one of the most successful economic systems ever created (free markets) while promoting one of the worst (socialism). As harsh as free markets can be and as imperfect as they are, they are so much more efficient at directing resources to where they will best be used that the surpluses elevate all and have provided more and better food, clothing, shelter, and medicine to more people than any other system. Other schemes that promise more utopian outcomes generally fail to supply even the most basic needs
The solution to the concerns of businesses growing to monster proportions and then throwing their weight around is simple: properly constructed and universally enforced anti-trust laws. That's it. For such rules to work, however, they really need to apply equally to big unions. If you are not going to allow, for example, one car company to dominate the car market, then you also must not allow one labor union to dominate, in this example, the car-workers market. Unfortunately, many on the left do not want to throttle the unions and many on the right do not want to throttle the businesses. If you only favor limits on one, but not the other, then you are part of the problem.
This is where people who spend too much time in lecture halls listening to socialist professors and not enough time reading actual history and working in the real world go astray
First, this is not a democracy. Our founders were quite specific about that. Democracy is nothing more than organized mob-rule. In a "Democracy" with a dozen wolves and two sheep guess who is for dinner? (hint: it's the same outcome as in a might-makes-right, mob-rule system). This is a Republic with democratically elected representatives of a largely Judeo-Christian population (from which the intellectual framework and public expectation of "rights of the minority" originally derived). Note that communists (like the East Germans, North Koreans, and Soviets) have at various times claimed to be economic democracies. Many who crave some form of combined economic and political "democracy" fail to understand that they would be among the first occupants of the resulting gulags, since these systems usually hate free speech and free thought above nearly everything else.
Second, such a system CAN work in a free market as long as the population consists of entrepreneurial citizens.....self-starting people who are more likely to start their own business or work in their relative's or neighbor's business than to desire a life-long career as a cog in a gigantic multinational corporation (willing to trade slavery for security). Your freedom is at risk WHENEVER power is concentrated in the hands of too few corruptible human beings, which is why big business, big unions, and big governments are ALL dangerous.
Patriotism is not only NOT bigotry, it is sometimes that only thread that ties together enough people to resist the worst forms of evil and tyranny over man
The biggest single block of campaign money in many places (like the state of California) is the massive state workers unions NOT the corporations. The biggest among these are the teachers unions and the SEIU. In many places, Indian tribes with casinos are nearly as powerful. Corporate spending is often less that the unions and casinos.
If the Bushies had illegally funneled half a billion dollars of taxpayer money to their political donors through a company in this way, every lefty on slashdot would be outraged. Federal law is quite specific on the matter of putting taxpayers ahead of other investors in deals like that one and yet the Obama admin violated that law and they continue to point fingers every-which-way and pretend to have no recollection when Issa asks for the name of the person/persons who violated that law
Solyndra was rotten from the beginning. Issa has already forced the executive branch to dump enough docs that we now know the Bush admin turned them down for their loans because a review of their business model showed that it was doomed to fail (and the govt analysts even predicted the month and year when the thing would inevitably go down.... quite accurately it turns out). The shovel loads of money Obama threw at Solyndra did NOT save the company, but they DID let the Obama fundraisers who had invested in it get THEIR cash out replacing it with taxpayer money that was then lost in the collapse. Oh, that's right, Obama is a Democrat.... move along...... nothing to see here......Issa is the bad guy.....
The Republicans generally support the goals of big business
Nope. MOST Republicans are big supporters of SMALL BUSINESS. Big businesses tend to become corrupt and become the best buddies of big corrupt government. Big corrupt businesses like to lobby big corrupt government to create rules and regs that make it hard for any new upstart business to rise and challenge them (it's easier for such goliaths than actual innovation and competition). G.E. (owner of NBC/MSNBC, exporter of thousands of jobs and complete tax dodge) is one of Obama's biggest supporters and the CEO is on Obama's jobs council. The exception is that SOME north-eastern "establishment" Republicans love big business because that portion of the party wants power and always thinks that it will get the love of corps like G.E. if it can get in power.
Barack Obama took more money from big Wall St banks than any Republican has ever taken. Some of the biggest firms on Wall St, like Goldman Sachs and the biggest GSE's (like Fannie and Freddie) are virtual arms of the Democratic party (which is why EVERY Democrat senator INCLUDING Biden AND Obama voted to keep Bush from having any power to stop all the reckless activity and Fannie and Freddy before the meltdown.)
...and have a top-down approach to wealth. They believe that making people at the top rich will lead to prosperity for all.
Comic-book, simplistic, pushed-by-unionized-Wisonsin-school-teachers-style drivel. Most Republicans/Conservatives believe that government should keep its paws mostly off of the markets and that the basic rules of the market, while imperfect, are the best solution to the very complex routing of resources to where they will best be used, while providing benefits to individuals and society generally with more freedom and efficiency; They tend to think that you are better-off as an individual if you are free to choose your own career, start your own business, create your own product or service, etc than you are if somebody else tries to manage the economy, picking winners and losers (where YOU might be the "loser" and their political friends are the "winners").
...Many believe that social programs do not help well enough to justify many of them.
Most Republicans/Conservatives believe that INDIVIDUALS are free (and even MORALLY, rather than legally or politically) obligated to be charitable, but that it is borderline criminal to have the state take money from one citizen at gunpoint and hand that cash to another citizen (or non-citizen). Make no mistake, taxes are not voluntary; it you fail to pay your taxes, somebody from the government will garnish your wages. If you find a way to get your money, then they will try to take your stuff, including your home. If you refuse to surrender you stuff, they will show-up with guns and encourage you to let go. If you resist, they will try to carry you away from your stuff and home. If you fight them, they will shoot you. Taxation for the GENERAL welfare (i.e. taxing all to provide something to the general public including all the taxed (like roads, national defense, parks, courts, etc) is one thing and is clearly intended by the Constitution. Taking from some, for the purpose of giving the cash to others (INDIVIDUAL welfare) is nothing more than armed-robbery-by-proxy.
Many members feel that they have a moral imperative to attempt to push their moral agenda on people who have nothing to do with them, and whose behaviors do not affect them in the slightest.
Also not generally true. First, many (though certainly not all) do feel that the country once had moral standards which had developed over centuries which provided societal benefits, and that as those standards have been relaxed, many negative side-effects have arisen. There simply is no American equivalent of the Taliban trying to enforce some radical moral agenda. Even the most energetic activists of the GOP mostly want SOME of th
First, we stopped buying B-2 bombers and F-22 fighters long ago
Second, Bush43 and Obama have both dramatically under-funded a number of vital weapons systems, like ships and submarines, that wear-out over time and must be periodically replaced. The money that should have been used to keep stuff current over the past decade was largely diverted into the wars and to various various emergency/unforeseen systems like the move from Hummers to MRAPS, the move from recon drones to armed drones which happened as a result of lessons learned during the wars and has been expensive because many of these programs were rushed. As a result, we have a wave of high-cost replacement programs on the horizon that can only be delayed for a limited time.
Third, Simple-minded people always say "well those shiny new bombers/ships cost a billion each, so lets just cut a couple and use those billions elsewhere" however the cost is actually not just the cost of the item but also a portion of the overhead of the program (part of the R&D, part of the factory cost, part of the costs of tools and jigs and test equipment, training for workers, etc) so when you reduce the number of items purchased, the remaining units carry a bigger chunk of overhead and their prices go up. Often, these military systems use custom materials, custom jigs, and very exotic production techniques requiring special custom tools etc. If you start by saying you will only buy 100 bombers, then you cut back to 50 then 40, etc the overhead costs make the per-unit cost skyrocket; this is not like iPods being churned-out by the millions on a highly-automated line where making a dozen fewer has no impact. At numbers as low as our purchases of big weapons systems have been in the past several decades, and with congresses in the habit of awarding contracts for hundreds of items and then reducing the buys over-and-over during the production runs, contractors cannot justify the set-up of highly-automated and optimized production lines and each unit becomes almost hand-built (during WWII, by contrast, the government bought huge numbers, in many cases actually increasing its buys, so massive production lines were built and then hundreds of bombers rolled-out of some factories every month with the full advantage of mass-production). As a result, you never save as much as you think you will when you cut back on your purchased quantity in this era, and you even drive-up the long-term operation costs
Fourth, The biggest part of the pentagon budget actually is not hardware; it's personnel. Not just the current people, but all the costs for all the retired ones including benefits to vets who served in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, The Gulf War, etc.
Here's some easier low-hanging fruit: Obama spent about $800 Billion in two years on his stimulus package and is now calling for about $400 Billion in one year (which is the same cash burn-rate) in a "jobs bill". Funny that he did not just spend $3 Billion per year to keep thousands high-tech workers employed at NASA and contractors by keeping shuttles flying while building the new systems. He still could give NASA and even commercial space a huge boost for only a few billion of this new bill, but he has not proposed to.
And if the banks had done their jobs and not made all the bad home loans we'd also not be in this mess... but they were intimidated by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who dangled threats of government involvement over their heads when they hesitated to make those risky loans. But I'm sure that if the ratings agencies had gotten in their way, Dodd and Frank would have done nothing to try to intimidate the ratings agencies...
When chairmen of congressional committees (pick any party or any committee) get too much power, they tend to use it. It's not just a Dodd/Frank thing, some other politicians with that much power in those two chairs might have used their power to intimidate other people into doing other bad things
The real problem is that the federal government is involved in far too many aspects of our life and society; it distorts markets and industries and it makes messes which politicians like to clean-up with taxpayer dollars. Politicians simply cannot resist the urge to use the power of government to do their own pet projects, or the pet projects of their most-important backers. The U.S. government should never have gotten into the home loan business, should never have created the quasi-governmental Fannie and Freddie companies, should never have implicitly insured them, should never have used tax dollars to bail anybody out, etc. The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to be doing any of the things it did which set us up for the 2008 crash, or many of the things it has done in response. There is one group of people who could have spared us all of this if they had done their jobs: the federal courts. Up until the 1930s, the federal courts refused to allow the federal government to get into a lot of this stuff, but when FDR came along and the courts ruled against him, he threatened to circumvent the law and just replace the Supreme Court. The courts got spooked and the federal judges have essentially refused to limit the reach of the federal government during the succeeding decades...They let FDR have his "New Deal", they let LBJ have his "Great Society", and even though it will ultimately destroy the U.S. (we cannot affors the additional trillions of dollars), they might very well let Obama have "Obama care". The government should not have bailed-out the car companies. The idea that you will suffer if you screw-up is called "moral hazard" and is absolutely necessary in a free society (it's what makes people self-regulating and helps reduce the requirement for laws and governmental officials and agencies). By getting involved in these things, the government has reduced or eliminated moral hazard for some selected parts of society (by shifting the hazard to the taxpayers) which has following side effects:
1. Encouraging bad policies, performance, planning and management (failure is not punished)
2. Discouraging responsibility (the hard workers and savers who earn and save money get taxed to pay for the bail-outs)
3. Hiding failure. (failed businesses that ought to have been closed and auctioned-off are still standing and appear healthy which can trick new investors, vendors, and customers into getting involved with an entity that is actually still a mess)
4. Distorting markets (If a bad business with a bad economic model is propped-up, it will "compete" with other businesses forcing them into bad business activities... see the airlines for an example of this; so many have been in-and-out of government-manipulated re-organizations without being liquidated that they nearly all operate on bizarrely-distorted business models now)
Do not mis-understand their report. They are doing their job.... assessing risk and deciding whether the U.S. is likely to get control of the problem. They would accept that control in the form of massive spending cuts, massive tax increases, or some combination. To them, the main issues are how far the U.S. is in debt, whether there is a plan to repay the debt, and whether the plan is likely to be followed. As such, and from the perspective of the investors they are advising, anything that they see blocking a plan is "bad" without regard to whether it is "good" or "bad" on other scales. Therefore, they will note as negative anything that makes a deal look difficult, like partisan politics, or any party to negotiations who is not willing to take any particular action. They are not in the business of assessing whether there might be valid reasons, or other values involved in any potential obstruction.
Don't now about "retards", and I'd normally ignore your blather, but you somehow got rated "Score:4, Insightful" and that just begs for a response...
All Presidents from George Washington through and including George W. Bush took the U.S. national debt to 10.6 trillion dollars. In only 2.5 years, Obama took it to 14.6 trillion dollars, maxed-out the credit card and demanded that the limit be raised by more than 2 trillion more just to get him past his re-election attempt..... this means he plans to take the debt to over 16.6 trillion before he is either replaced or inaugurated for a 2nd term. In other words, 230+ years to reach 10 trillion, but only 4 years to add 6 trillion more!!!! Yes, establishment Republicans have had their spending issues in the past, as have establishment Democrats... but Obama is a train wreck on an entirely new scale. The true "retards" in this story, if there are any, are the people who cannot properly wrap their brain cells around the scale of the numbers and what the new Obama debt means to the people who are under 30 years old. If you are under 30, you ought to be joining the tea party, which is the only group in American politics willing to take-on the establishment Republicans and Democrats to demand that an unsustainable pattern be ended. If we do not get this stuff under control with very serious cuts, (not the goofy cuts in the rate of spending growth, like this deal included) younger Americans will find the government taking so much of their income 20 years from now that they will be unable to afford to buy homes, have kids, take vacations, etc.
As to ratings agencies... They arose just like insurance agencies did. Back in the days of sailing ships, a little business in London named Lloyds arose to "insure" ships (which were not very safe or reliable and tended to sail into uncharted waters). They were essentially gambling that ships would reach their destinations while the owners of the ships and cargo were gambling that the ships would be lost... which seems backwards, but the gamble works for two reasons: 1st, the guys who own the ships and cargo generally care enough about it that they will try to succeed even as they buy "insurance" in case they fail. 2nd, the guys from Lloyds started investigating each ship and giving it a risk rating in their internal books, which helped them decide how much to weight the bet (i.e. how much to charge for the insurance). This is where the idea of non-governmental ratings of risk which are then used to set rates seems to have originated. Bond ratings agencies are essentially the same thing, but for bonds issued by companies and governments. The credibility of a ratings agency is earned by their performance and has exactly as much weight as investors place in its judgements. (investors are free to ignore the ratings, but most do not)
If you ever grow up enough to drop the expletives and the obvious hostility, and you decide to pay attention to the facts, then you might actually see that Obama is exactly as responsible for his acts as George Bush is for his... and if you hated what Bush did with money, you should be positively outraged by Obama. Obama is running annual deficits about 3 times the size of the worst Bush deficit, and his budget proposal earlier this year projected even worse with no end... not one Democrat in the U.S.Senate, nor even the openly-Socialist senator from Vermont voted in favour of that budget!!!!!!
Whoever modded you "Insightful" will probably mod my response "troll"...
This is something that really does bother me about modern American politics/discussions/media. Political Correctness (which did not exist in the U.S. prior to the Clinton years). Those Slashdotters who are too young may not realize that Americans, during the Cold War, used to joke about the insane phenomenon of "political correctness" in the Soviet Union. The very concept used to be insane to Americans. One could ask a question of a Soviet Citizen and get an obviously incorrect answer (but one the Communist Party wanted given) and when you challenged to speaker,he might quietly respond that of course it was actually false, but it was "politically correct". Thanks to "political correctness", normal otherwise-sane people talk like children and say things like "the n-word", "the s-word", "the c-word", etc and refuse to show pictures of dead/wounded Americans (how many of us have seen ANY photos of the corpses of the victims of 9-11????). This all has the perverse effect of whitewashing evil. When somebody says something vile or does something vile we all hide the reality and talk in code, so the evil is hidden and not confronted. Our ancestors were not so childish/cowardly
I prefer to have the racists among us actually being openly racists so we all know who they are, and I prefer to see them accurately quoted so that they are not made to seem acceptable by the mainstream media. When a Klan member uses the term "nigger" we should hear it, and laugh at him (given that it was poorly-educated drawling whites showing their stupidity and ignorance who degraded the word "negro") and see him for the dirt-bag he is. When Jesse Jackson uses the anti-Jew term for New York "Hymie-town" we should hear it and know he is a dirt bag. When Louis Farrakan calls white people "devils" and "ice people" we should hear it and know he is a dirt bag
There are modern drugs that can help with delusional thinking... consult your doctor
Let's see...
Everything seems to empower the Tea Party. Every court ruling, every law passed, even after the US government defaults this would also benefit the Tea Party.
Not so much. There have been court rulings both ways on Obama care, the NLRB case re Boeing is up in the air, and while the TEA Party people are primarily concerned with economics, I'd bet many of them are unhappy with the court rulings on things like Arizona's 1070 and California's Prop 8; so you're wrong on this point
When are we going to accept that the Tea Party is a domestic terrorist group that fantasizes about having another civil war?
Um, the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party believes government it too big, taxes too much, and should get back to its original principles of Federalism with a smaller Federal government doing only the things the Constitution says it will do and not doing the things the Constituion says it may not do. Just how does this equate to a non-uniformed group not affiliated with any nation-state which kills randomly selected innocent civilians in order to incite terror in a population so that the population will force political change? You are wrong on point #2
Their policies are straight from the old south. The for profit prisons, which mean prisons are now the new plantations where corporations can have the cheapest possible labor force. These corporations also write our laws. Check out ALEC exposed [alecexposed.org] to see the whole plan.
You mean the "old south" where Democrats owned black people and ran for-profit prisons... oh, no, you seem to think the old south had something to do with the right-wing religious nutcase Republicans who opposed slavery and under the leadership of right-wing religious CRAZY dude Abraham Lincoln opposed the Democrat-led-and-declared civil war... Oh, and do you have any links to sites about the Queen, the Bilderburgs, and the Masons that you could also share with us??? (I eagerly await an updated set of foil hat making instructions...)
After the US defaults the Tea Party is planning to blame Obama.
No "plan" is needed. The Constitution says that all spending bills originate in the House (currently run by Republicans...who HAVE passed a bill to lift the credit limit) then must pass the Senate (currently run by Democrats... who refuse to offer their own plan and who have refused to even debate the bill the House passed) then get signed or vetoed by the President. If the US defaults it will now either be the Senate Democrats who are to blame or it will be Obama... that's just the reality, unless you do not believe in the Constitution, in which case this entire discussion is moot anyway
Now they have the legal justification to threaten Obama's life in their attempts to overthrow him.
WHAT?!?!? First, nobody has been given a "legal justification to threaten Obama's life"; A judge recognized a drunken racists fool's ramblings were not the same as a specific threat. Second, Nobody needs to "overthrow" Obama.... he is rapidly reducing his own reelection chances. I Guarantee that there are NO real TEA Party types who want any physical harm to Obama as it would damage their cause and provide sympathy to his causes at the very time when they are winning the argument about insane levels of spending. Were you this worked-up and angry with liberals/progressives when they burned Bush in effigy often spoke of killing him and even made a movie about his assasination??????
It seems like a disaster waiting to happen with the looming default, and coming economic crisis as the trigger point.
Obama has already set us up for an economic disaster; there is little any of us can do now to avoid it; the only question now is whether we can reduce the agony we will eventually face. Obama is spending over $1,600,000,000,000.00 more per year than he takes in. When he complains that the house speaker wan
Let's see.... The Atlantic, Slate and CBS all considered America's nuclear deterrent and concluded that we should disarm.
Move along. Nothing new to see here....
The US has cut its arsenal down from something like 20K nukes to about 5K, and those are becoming obsolete. Meanwhile, neither Bush nor Obama has been able to keep N. Korea from going nuclear, keep Iran from trying to go nuclear, keep Pakistan from ramping-up production of nuclear bombs and spreading the technology, nor keep China from increasing its arsenal or Russia from modernizing its launchers. Yeah, this sure sounds like a great time to disarm, I'm sure the rest of the world will follow since the history of the world is replete with examples of global peaceful coexistence and cooperation....
Only a moron thinks that a weapon in his own hands is more dangerous than more of the same weapons in the hands of his enemy...which, of course, explains Atlantic Slate and CBS...
The Constitution requires the federal government to provide for the national defense.... but then The Atlantic, Slate, and CBS probably think the Constitution is either quaint and obsolete or a "living document" with words whose meanings can only be discovered via large applications of pot.
Trial by jury, as envisioned by the founders is not such a cost-to-others, see my other post addressing that one
National defense is not a "Constitutional right". The pentagon defends the nation as a whole (and that's a responsibility of the federal government related to the general welfare) but it has no duty to protect each citizen personally as a matter of his/her "rights". Also note that while the federal government has a Constitutional duty related to the general welfare there is no duty to a specific or individual welfare
Education is not a Constitutional right
public defenders are not a Constitutional right. You have a right to bring a defense lawyer into court. You can pay for that lawyer with your own funds, or a charity may provide the funds, or a lawyer may volunteer his/her services. The modern notion that the courts must provide you a lawyer could still be satisfied without public funds. If the government was not automatically funding this, there would be non-profits that would arise to fill the need just as we have groups who fund care for animals, preservation of trees and water, investigations aimed at freeing people from death row, etc.
It's truly sad to see how many people have slipped into the idea that every good thing must be provided by government, and that such good things, once desired, must be provided by forcing others to provide them.
The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shall not covet," and "Thou shall not steal," are not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free. - John Adams
No, education is not "free". The teachers are paid employees and the taxpayers are paying through the nose as we fund these part-time workers with full-time salaries and then provide them with decades of retirement benefits which are better than those of the average taxpayer
Also note: while certain politicians cite education as a "right", it is not in the Constitution as such. Your Constitutional rights are your God-given rights which no government may take away and no other person must provide; they are cited in the Constitution as a list in the form of "thus far and no further" limitations to government power.
Also note: "education" takes many forms. The modern idea of cramming hoardes of children into government-run schools (like injecting blobs of molten plastic into steel molds in a factory assembly line) is not necessarily a good form of "education". Many of our nations best and brightest were in fact not educated this way, while most of the fools who voted for Obama clearly were;-p
First, "trial by jury" is not an out-of-the-blue societal expense mandated by the Constitution, it is an alternative to trial-without-a-jury. In other words, there is a presumption that government is accusing a person of a crime and that government is going to put that person on trial, so the cost of the courtroom action is going to be incurred anyway (and these expenses are not associated with the "rights" of the defendant), therefore the only part of "trial by jury" which might be said to "cost others" is the cost to the jurors, which bears thoughtful consideration: First, we need to step back from abominations like the Casey Anthony trial; the nation's founders did not create the lunatic asylum that is the modern practice of law.... what we have now is the product of two centuries of lawyers in legislatures, on the bench, and before the bench adding layer upon layer of things the founders never mandated. For example, there is no Constitutionally mandated notion of a sequestered jury, no Constitutional requirement that jurors abandon common sense, not talk to each other at various times, not talk to others, etc. In fact, our founders gave us the jury precisely because the jury would be our peers with typical life experiences and common sense. The founders never mandated juries that would need to travel to the court at any particular expense, never mandated any situation in which jurors would serve at particular times of day (causing them to miss work and lose income) nor even ever mandated that any particular citizen would be forced into jury duty. The founders clearly envisioned a situation in which your fellow citizens would serve on your jury on a volunteer basis, for no wages just out of a sense of civic duty (which many generally did and still do) Unfortunately, as lawyers have gunked things up and made trials take longer and longer while introducing things like sequestration, jury duty has become more costly to jurors, who are now more-likely to try to avoid serving....
In case you are now thinking that the defense lawyer is a right which costs somebody else, again you need to put the modern corrupted form of court out of mind. The founders would probably be shocked by the modern practice of multi-million dollar prosecutions and defenses in multi-year cases which enrich the members of the legal profession on all sides. There is no Constitutional requirement that any particular lawyer would have to provide his/her services to a defendant at no cost. Our founders assumed that a defendant would pay for his own defense if he could (just as a person would pay to publish his own words, etc) or that others would provide funds as a charitable act for that defense if needed, and that there would be lawyers who would also step-up and volunteer their services as needed.
Our courts with their defense lawyers and jurors would indeed guarantee your rights without forcing costs onto any other person if things were as the founders established them. The alternative is to have rights which do force costs onto others, which is, in effect, servitude. That might be rational and you might want that, but it is not what the Constitution contemplates and it leads to a big fight where we break into groups who each demand that the things we want are "rights" and that people in the other groups must pay for them. Oh, wait, that's where we have been going with all this post-1960's "rights" talk......
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams
The gas bags who run the various unaccountable globalist organizations need to learn to keep a low profile. They do not win friends among their funders by continually poking fingers in their eyes, and they certainly cannot be winning friends among the world's poor as they lend money to dictators and later demand austerity from the poor who suffered under those same dictators...while wining-and-dining each-other in high-end facilities from New York to Paris. It's not much money relative to the U.S. economy, but as an American taxpayer who is tired of being lectured by flakey euro quasi-intellectual crypto-socialist jerks who can never see an end to the good things they can do to the poor of the world with my money I would get some measure of satisfaction from seeing the IMF on the chopping block.... I Think I will call my congresscritter in the morning....
When these statistics are cited this way it is extremely misleading, and generally intentionally so
Yes, the rates have been very high at times in the past, but there were also massive loopholes that people like the Rockefellers could sail their yachts through. Historically, the government has taken about 19% of GDP every year (a bit more during WWII) but with the massive increase in spending under Obama we are headed to about 40% in 2075 by the govt's own admission. If you are under the age of 30, you should be very worried about how you will support yourself and your kids in the future; taxes on everybody will need to rise dramatically and Social Security and Medicare will be bankrupt long before you see a penny from them unless they are radically re-structured. The illusion that the left always dangles in front of the masses is that everybody can have goodies payed for by "taxing the rich"; the truth is that while there are some obscenely wealthy people, there are simply not enough of them. The real money is and always has been in the middle class people who each have only limited assets but who exist in great numbers. Part of the deal Reagan made with the Democrats in the 80s was to lower the rates and remove many of the loopholes; that held for a few years, but then the politicians started cutting new loopholes for their backers and started calling for rate increases to deal with it.
Funny, when Reagan used to run $200B annual deficits, the Democrats used to scream that he was evil and irresponsible and dooming the country.... but now with Obama running $1600B annual deficits, we hear crickets from the Dems
As Maggie Thatcher once warned: Sooner or later you run out of other people's money
First, how could you login to examine your "account"? You have no PIN number...heck the social security people are so screwed-up they cannot tell the difference between you and an illegal immigrant with a different name and living in a different city who is using your number!!!!! On those occasions where an illegal uses somebody's number with a legitimate employer, and the employer makes payments to the govt using that "account number", the govt does not see the double payments under two names from multiple locations as a sign that anything is wrong!!!!
Second, Nobody used to get such "statements". The Clinton administration started sending them out in 2000 after some public polling indicated that young people had more belief in UFOs than in the solvency of social security; The federal govt panicked and generated these "statements" to try to convince younger workers that they had "accounts" just like they got statements from the bank on their bank accounts. All Ponzi schemes fall apart when the younger generation of "investors" start to suspect that all their money is being handed out to the earlier investors and not invested in some manner so that it will be there when they try to get it back. The Politicians cannot survive the wrath of a bunch of elderly voters whose checks are cut-off because the young workers lose faith and stop paying in. The time for young workers to really start to panic will be if the debt limit is increased (signalling that the feds have every intent of going bankrupt by continuing to borrow and spend until the world's investors stop lending) If we keep at this until the world's investors stop investing in our debt, then there will be no funds available to pay young workers when they retire and no way to try to push it off onto an even younger generation.
First, the courts have already ruled on this. According to the Supreme court, the federal government gets to decide each year whether it will pay-out to social security recipients and how much to pay. There is nothing other than public outrage that forces the Federal govt to pay you anything from social security when you retire (they ARE required to pay things like retirement packages of retired govt employees)
Second, if that was an actual account, then why do you not have a PIN number????? (Hint: it's not actually your money, and there is not any actual money there)
Third, IF it is an actual account and IF you own it, then why do your heirs not get to inherit it?
While Obama should've gone back and gotten authorization from Congress to extend the mission in Libya, he acted properly initially
No, as Libya had not attacked us he had no right to attack them without going to congress FIRST
because otherwise there'd be a lot of blood on our hands (see: Bush Sr. in Iraq)
The two situations have nothing in common. When Bush41 went into Iraq it was with BOTH the UN AND Congress giving prior approval for him to kick a foreign invader (Iraq) out of another country (Kuwait, which was also a UN member entitled to UN support in that circumstance). In Libya, a civil war has broken out, and the rebels are asking us to help topple a government that the US hates but has long recognized as the government of the country.
as the resistance capital Benghazi was about to fall had we not intervened.
We do not know this, and we had no treaty obligations nor strategic interests...what we had was European allies who depend upon Libyan oil but have allowed their own military forces to shrivel over the years as they depended on their friends in the US to back them in event of a real emergency
And if you want to be technical, Congress has not passed a bill declaring war on anyone since World War II. It's all "authorization to use force", which is more of the kind of Orwellian terminology in use post-WWII, such as changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
There's no magic password required... If the President asks for the authority and the funds and the congress grants both, then the requirements are met
The birthers are idiots........ however, even an idiot can get close to some truth even if by pure accident. We do not know how Obama got into law school, how he paid for it, or what grades he got. (Other presidents, like Bush41, Bush43, Clinton, Carter, etc have disclosed this stuff as do most candidates) There IS something we now know however: All that talk about him as a "Constitutional Law Professor" was as bogus as the greek columshe had in Denver. The man did indeed teach a class involving the Constitution and its relation to community organizing.... but he did not have a professorship, nor was he teaching classes about "Constitutional Law" as his supporters implied.
We should all be clear about what a "birther" is; Birthers are the idiots who think Obama was born in Kenya or some such place and no evidence will change their mind. People who are not wedded to that notion, but simply wanted Obama to show the same info about their backgrounds that other candidates and Presidents have shown (including a birth certificate which removes any doubts about eligibility) should not be called "birthers". The Obama team is trying to keep anybody from asking any questions about his background by calling them all "birthers". Frankly, I'd like to see all candidates line-up and file certain documents to prove their eligibilty before they get on the ballot, just as average Americans must show certain documents before they can get a driver's license, or buy a gun, etc (this would have killed any birther garbage before it could have taken root)
Oh, and we've already had a Democrat president say, under oath in a court, "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" so maybe it depends on what the meaning of the words "drone", "strike" and "hostile" are....
Some day, liberals will learn that every precedent, every rule, every regulation, and every agency that they are excited to see their guys put in place will be there and available for some conservative to use some day. Conservatives understand that the reverse is true, which is why they so often grumble when a Republican (like Nixon or Bush43) sets-up a new agency (like EPA or DHS) or a new benefit (like Medicare-D), or appoints a goofy judge. When they learn this, some of them will become libertarians. Who knows, maybe Romney will get elected and use Obama's "I can make everybody buy health insurance" precedent to make everybody buy a book of Mormon.... or maybe Herman Cain can get elected and require everyone to buy several Godfather's Pizzas every week... or Bachman can get elected and require everyone to adopt a bunch of kids (surely THAT is both an economic activity and its arguably good for society)
Oh, please.... this stuff did not "happen" to this president.... Barry is the one doing these things
The only true "warmongering hawk president" we ever had was T.R. I'm not a big Bush fan, but I am a big fan of accurate history. Bush did not roll some dice or pick a card or some such thing to select a war because he was itching to wage a war. He went into afghanistan because that was the origin of the 9-11 attacks... had he done nothing in response to 9-11 he would have been impeached. He went into Iraq because were already at war with Saddam (Gulf war ended with a conditional cease fire whose terms Saddam was violating) and he was sitting on reports from most of the intelligence services of the US and our allies who said Saddam had WMDs (and Saddam had a history of using them on his own citizens)
So-called free speech zones did not originate with Bush. All politicians always try to control the visibility of their opponents, and such zones have been getting gradually worse since the 72 election cycle. Of course, the protesters have been getting more obnoxious all along as well, so they are the ones who enable the politicians by being so ill-mannered that average citizens WANT them to be shut-up and hidden-away
Bush did not block scientific papers; his administration DID insist that such papers go uphill (so the politicians would be aware of their contents and not be blind-sided in some press conference) before those papers were published. Remember that during these years, there was a constant flow of research papers shouting about life being discovered on mars rocks, sea levels rising to flood New York and Florida, etc. and Bush people were frequently stepping to a press podium and getting asked about such papers, with certain members of the press trying to build a press narrative about the dummies in the admin not knowing this or that. Many Bush people came from the business world, where it is considered unacceptable for low-level employees to blind-side the boss the way people in various agencies were blind siding the Bush people. I will admit that there were indeed some examples of mid-level administration people who wanted some language moderated in several reports, this behavior was neither universal nor is it unique to the Bush administration. In fact, team Obama has been caught doing the exact same thing. I disapprove of both admins for any edits, but somehow I suspect you are fine with Obama doing it. There was an active political effort which began before the 2004 election to have liberals claim that Bush was suppressing science, which is why for example James Hanson spent so much of his time talking to the press saying he was being muzzled; he clearly counted on most people not noticing that nobody was blocking him from all those conversations about how blocked he was...
As for inventing BS from thin air and setting legal precedents... too late. Barry has set all the precedent the next LBJ or Nixon could ever wish for. The funniest part of all is that he duped the young into voting for him! Obama's youngest supporters are the ones who will pay the highest price; most of them will pay higher taxes over their lives than any other generation while getting fewer benefits than any recent generation just to pay for his massive ramp-up in spending. They will live with higher unemployment and less growth due to his thousands of new regulations. Obama is running out of other people's money
You are wrong. Mustard gas is a classic WMD. Weapons of Mass Destruction used to be called "NBC" weapons (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) and their use used to be referred to as NBC warfare. The reason they are in a special category is not that they are super-destructive.... rather, they are placed into a special category because their effects cannot be easily limited to combatants on a battlefield; if you deploy chemicals or bio weapons, they can blow around and end-up killing civilians and even the troops who deployed them. The weather, the terrain, etc can have as much to do with who is killed as the people who unleash these things. Nuclear falls into this class as well, NOT because of the bright flash and the heat, but because the fallout, like bio and chem weapons, is essentially uncontrollable. Indeed, the use of mustard gas in WWI was one of the reasons that the NBC/WMD category and the revulsion for such weapons arose.
The constitution says that only congress may declare war, but from the beginning, the US has engaged in conflicts without declaring war. In fact, congress has only declared war five times.
Wrong, and frequently cited by people who, well, just are not very deep thinkers
The Constitution does not say that congress must pass a bill with a certain magical set of wizard words which will then invoke a war. When a president goes to congress and says, in effect, "I believe we need to go bomb or shoot some other country" and the congress answers, in effect, "we agree, here's the money, and you are authorized to go blow something up", the Constitution has been satisfied. The congress is not required to issue a proclamation that starts with "We the people of the United States do hereby declare war..."
Slashdot Mirror
The CEO who has been driving that company into the grave recently commented that he was looking for ways to maximize the profits of their patent portfolio. Being unfamiliar with the guy, and suspecting he was some hired-gun CEO with a degree in patent law I figured I'd look him up.... He turns out to be on Obama's jobs council:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/advisory-boards/jobs-council/members/perez
To be REALLY competitive, you invest in R&D, create new products, create new services, or find ways to deliver existing products or services better than your competitors. When your company is a sinking ship, you have no ideas, and you are just trying to delay the inevitable plunge, you look for ways to squeeze-out the last bits of value by selling-off property and converting your patent portfolio into cash. This guy's no better than Romney or McBride; anybody who works there and is not a lawyer should be prepping a resume; anybody with a product or service that might be sued by a desperate patent troll named Kodak should prepare to be sued. Very sad end.
Capitalism is an unsustainable utopian idea
No. "Capitalism" it a term Marx coined to denigrate one of the most successful economic systems ever created (free markets) while promoting one of the worst (socialism). As harsh as free markets can be and as imperfect as they are, they are so much more efficient at directing resources to where they will best be used that the surpluses elevate all and have provided more and better food, clothing, shelter, and medicine to more people than any other system. Other schemes that promise more utopian outcomes generally fail to supply even the most basic needs
The solution to the concerns of businesses growing to monster proportions and then throwing their weight around is simple: properly constructed and universally enforced anti-trust laws. That's it. For such rules to work, however, they really need to apply equally to big unions. If you are not going to allow, for example, one car company to dominate the car market, then you also must not allow one labor union to dominate, in this example, the car-workers market. Unfortunately, many on the left do not want to throttle the unions and many on the right do not want to throttle the businesses. If you only favor limits on one, but not the other, then you are part of the problem.
This is where people who spend too much time in lecture halls listening to socialist professors and not enough time reading actual history and working in the real world go astray
First, this is not a democracy. Our founders were quite specific about that. Democracy is nothing more than organized mob-rule. In a "Democracy" with a dozen wolves and two sheep guess who is for dinner? (hint: it's the same outcome as in a might-makes-right, mob-rule system). This is a Republic with democratically elected representatives of a largely Judeo-Christian population (from which the intellectual framework and public expectation of "rights of the minority" originally derived). Note that communists (like the East Germans, North Koreans, and Soviets) have at various times claimed to be economic democracies. Many who crave some form of combined economic and political "democracy" fail to understand that they would be among the first occupants of the resulting gulags, since these systems usually hate free speech and free thought above nearly everything else.
Second, such a system CAN work in a free market as long as the population consists of entrepreneurial citizens.....self-starting people who are more likely to start their own business or work in their relative's or neighbor's business than to desire a life-long career as a cog in a gigantic multinational corporation (willing to trade slavery for security). Your freedom is at risk WHENEVER power is concentrated in the hands of too few corruptible human beings, which is why big business, big unions, and big governments are ALL dangerous.
Patriotism is not only NOT bigotry, it is sometimes that only thread that ties together enough people to resist the worst forms of evil and tyranny over man
The biggest single block of campaign money in many places (like the state of California) is the massive state workers unions NOT the corporations. The biggest among these are the teachers unions and the SEIU. In many places, Indian tribes with casinos are nearly as powerful. Corporate spending is often less that the unions and casinos.
See, for example:
latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2010/03/teachers-union-tops-list-of-state-political-spenders.html
False scandal mongering?
If the Bushies had illegally funneled half a billion dollars of taxpayer money to their political donors through a company in this way, every lefty on slashdot would be outraged. Federal law is quite specific on the matter of putting taxpayers ahead of other investors in deals like that one and yet the Obama admin violated that law and they continue to point fingers every-which-way and pretend to have no recollection when Issa asks for the name of the person/persons who violated that law
Solyndra was rotten from the beginning. Issa has already forced the executive branch to dump enough docs that we now know the Bush admin turned them down for their loans because a review of their business model showed that it was doomed to fail (and the govt analysts even predicted the month and year when the thing would inevitably go down.... quite accurately it turns out). The shovel loads of money Obama threw at Solyndra did NOT save the company, but they DID let the Obama fundraisers who had invested in it get THEIR cash out replacing it with taxpayer money that was then lost in the collapse. Oh, that's right, Obama is a Democrat.... move along...... nothing to see here......Issa is the bad guy.....
Wow. It's pretty hard to be more wrong.
The Republicans generally support the goals of big business
Nope. MOST Republicans are big supporters of SMALL BUSINESS. Big businesses tend to become corrupt and become the best buddies of big corrupt government. Big corrupt businesses like to lobby big corrupt government to create rules and regs that make it hard for any new upstart business to rise and challenge them (it's easier for such goliaths than actual innovation and competition). G.E. (owner of NBC/MSNBC, exporter of thousands of jobs and complete tax dodge) is one of Obama's biggest supporters and the CEO is on Obama's jobs council. The exception is that SOME north-eastern "establishment" Republicans love big business because that portion of the party wants power and always thinks that it will get the love of corps like G.E. if it can get in power.
Barack Obama took more money from big Wall St banks than any Republican has ever taken. Some of the biggest firms on Wall St, like Goldman Sachs and the biggest GSE's (like Fannie and Freddie) are virtual arms of the Democratic party (which is why EVERY Democrat senator INCLUDING Biden AND Obama voted to keep Bush from having any power to stop all the reckless activity and Fannie and Freddy before the meltdown.)
Comic-book, simplistic, pushed-by-unionized-Wisonsin-school-teachers-style drivel. Most Republicans/Conservatives believe that government should keep its paws mostly off of the markets and that the basic rules of the market, while imperfect, are the best solution to the very complex routing of resources to where they will best be used, while providing benefits to individuals and society generally with more freedom and efficiency; They tend to think that you are better-off as an individual if you are free to choose your own career, start your own business, create your own product or service, etc than you are if somebody else tries to manage the economy, picking winners and losers (where YOU might be the "loser" and their political friends are the "winners").
Most Republicans/Conservatives believe that INDIVIDUALS are free (and even MORALLY, rather than legally or politically) obligated to be charitable, but that it is borderline criminal to have the state take money from one citizen at gunpoint and hand that cash to another citizen (or non-citizen). Make no mistake, taxes are not voluntary; it you fail to pay your taxes, somebody from the government will garnish your wages. If you find a way to get your money, then they will try to take your stuff, including your home. If you refuse to surrender you stuff, they will show-up with guns and encourage you to let go. If you resist, they will try to carry you away from your stuff and home. If you fight them, they will shoot you. Taxation for the GENERAL welfare (i.e. taxing all to provide something to the general public including all the taxed (like roads, national defense, parks, courts, etc) is one thing and is clearly intended by the Constitution. Taking from some, for the purpose of giving the cash to others (INDIVIDUAL welfare) is nothing more than armed-robbery-by-proxy.
Many members feel that they have a moral imperative to attempt to push their moral agenda on people who have nothing to do with them, and whose behaviors do not affect them in the slightest.
Also not generally true. First, many (though certainly not all) do feel that the country once had moral standards which had developed over centuries which provided societal benefits, and that as those standards have been relaxed, many negative side-effects have arisen. There simply is no American equivalent of the Taliban trying to enforce some radical moral agenda. Even the most energetic activists of the GOP mostly want SOME of th
Many misconceptions here
First, we stopped buying B-2 bombers and F-22 fighters long ago
Second, Bush43 and Obama have both dramatically under-funded a number of vital weapons systems, like ships and submarines, that wear-out over time and must be periodically replaced. The money that should have been used to keep stuff current over the past decade was largely diverted into the wars and to various various emergency/unforeseen systems like the move from Hummers to MRAPS, the move from recon drones to armed drones which happened as a result of lessons learned during the wars and has been expensive because many of these programs were rushed. As a result, we have a wave of high-cost replacement programs on the horizon that can only be delayed for a limited time.
Third, Simple-minded people always say "well those shiny new bombers/ships cost a billion each, so lets just cut a couple and use those billions elsewhere" however the cost is actually not just the cost of the item but also a portion of the overhead of the program (part of the R&D, part of the factory cost, part of the costs of tools and jigs and test equipment, training for workers, etc) so when you reduce the number of items purchased, the remaining units carry a bigger chunk of overhead and their prices go up. Often, these military systems use custom materials, custom jigs, and very exotic production techniques requiring special custom tools etc. If you start by saying you will only buy 100 bombers, then you cut back to 50 then 40, etc the overhead costs make the per-unit cost skyrocket; this is not like iPods being churned-out by the millions on a highly-automated line where making a dozen fewer has no impact. At numbers as low as our purchases of big weapons systems have been in the past several decades, and with congresses in the habit of awarding contracts for hundreds of items and then reducing the buys over-and-over during the production runs, contractors cannot justify the set-up of highly-automated and optimized production lines and each unit becomes almost hand-built (during WWII, by contrast, the government bought huge numbers, in many cases actually increasing its buys, so massive production lines were built and then hundreds of bombers rolled-out of some factories every month with the full advantage of mass-production). As a result, you never save as much as you think you will when you cut back on your purchased quantity in this era, and you even drive-up the long-term operation costs
Fourth, The biggest part of the pentagon budget actually is not hardware; it's personnel. Not just the current people, but all the costs for all the retired ones including benefits to vets who served in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, The Gulf War, etc.
Here's some easier low-hanging fruit: Obama spent about $800 Billion in two years on his stimulus package and is now calling for about $400 Billion in one year (which is the same cash burn-rate) in a "jobs bill". Funny that he did not just spend $3 Billion per year to keep thousands high-tech workers employed at NASA and contractors by keeping shuttles flying while building the new systems. He still could give NASA and even commercial space a huge boost for only a few billion of this new bill, but he has not proposed to.
And if the banks had done their jobs and not made all the bad home loans we'd also not be in this mess... but they were intimidated by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who dangled threats of government involvement over their heads when they hesitated to make those risky loans. But I'm sure that if the ratings agencies had gotten in their way, Dodd and Frank would have done nothing to try to intimidate the ratings agencies...
When chairmen of congressional committees (pick any party or any committee) get too much power, they tend to use it. It's not just a Dodd/Frank thing, some other politicians with that much power in those two chairs might have used their power to intimidate other people into doing other bad things
The real problem is that the federal government is involved in far too many aspects of our life and society; it distorts markets and industries and it makes messes which politicians like to clean-up with taxpayer dollars. Politicians simply cannot resist the urge to use the power of government to do their own pet projects, or the pet projects of their most-important backers. The U.S. government should never have gotten into the home loan business, should never have created the quasi-governmental Fannie and Freddie companies, should never have implicitly insured them, should never have used tax dollars to bail anybody out, etc. The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to be doing any of the things it did which set us up for the 2008 crash, or many of the things it has done in response. There is one group of people who could have spared us all of this if they had done their jobs: the federal courts. Up until the 1930s, the federal courts refused to allow the federal government to get into a lot of this stuff, but when FDR came along and the courts ruled against him, he threatened to circumvent the law and just replace the Supreme Court. The courts got spooked and the federal judges have essentially refused to limit the reach of the federal government during the succeeding decades...They let FDR have his "New Deal", they let LBJ have his "Great Society", and even though it will ultimately destroy the U.S. (we cannot affors the additional trillions of dollars), they might very well let Obama have "Obama care". The government should not have bailed-out the car companies. The idea that you will suffer if you screw-up is called "moral hazard" and is absolutely necessary in a free society (it's what makes people self-regulating and helps reduce the requirement for laws and governmental officials and agencies). By getting involved in these things, the government has reduced or eliminated moral hazard for some selected parts of society (by shifting the hazard to the taxpayers) which has following side effects:
1. Encouraging bad policies, performance, planning and management (failure is not punished)
2. Discouraging responsibility (the hard workers and savers who earn and save money get taxed to pay for the bail-outs)
3. Hiding failure. (failed businesses that ought to have been closed and auctioned-off are still standing and appear healthy which can trick new investors, vendors, and customers into getting involved with an entity that is actually still a mess)
4. Distorting markets (If a bad business with a bad economic model is propped-up, it will "compete" with other businesses forcing them into bad business activities... see the airlines for an example of this; so many have been in-and-out of government-manipulated re-organizations without being liquidated that they nearly all operate on bizarrely-distorted business models now)
Do not mis-understand their report. They are doing their job.... assessing risk and deciding whether the U.S. is likely to get control of the problem. They would accept that control in the form of massive spending cuts, massive tax increases, or some combination. To them, the main issues are how far the U.S. is in debt, whether there is a plan to repay the debt, and whether the plan is likely to be followed. As such, and from the perspective of the investors they are advising, anything that they see blocking a plan is "bad" without regard to whether it is "good" or "bad" on other scales. Therefore, they will note as negative anything that makes a deal look difficult, like partisan politics, or any party to negotiations who is not willing to take any particular action. They are not in the business of assessing whether there might be valid reasons, or other values involved in any potential obstruction.
Don't now about "retards", and I'd normally ignore your blather, but you somehow got rated "Score:4, Insightful" and that just begs for a response...
All Presidents from George Washington through and including George W. Bush took the U.S. national debt to 10.6 trillion dollars. In only 2.5 years, Obama took it to 14.6 trillion dollars, maxed-out the credit card and demanded that the limit be raised by more than 2 trillion more just to get him past his re-election attempt..... this means he plans to take the debt to over 16.6 trillion before he is either replaced or inaugurated for a 2nd term. In other words, 230+ years to reach 10 trillion, but only 4 years to add 6 trillion more!!!! Yes, establishment Republicans have had their spending issues in the past, as have establishment Democrats... but Obama is a train wreck on an entirely new scale. The true "retards" in this story, if there are any, are the people who cannot properly wrap their brain cells around the scale of the numbers and what the new Obama debt means to the people who are under 30 years old. If you are under 30, you ought to be joining the tea party, which is the only group in American politics willing to take-on the establishment Republicans and Democrats to demand that an unsustainable pattern be ended. If we do not get this stuff under control with very serious cuts, (not the goofy cuts in the rate of spending growth, like this deal included) younger Americans will find the government taking so much of their income 20 years from now that they will be unable to afford to buy homes, have kids, take vacations, etc.
As to ratings agencies... They arose just like insurance agencies did. Back in the days of sailing ships, a little business in London named Lloyds arose to "insure" ships (which were not very safe or reliable and tended to sail into uncharted waters). They were essentially gambling that ships would reach their destinations while the owners of the ships and cargo were gambling that the ships would be lost... which seems backwards, but the gamble works for two reasons: 1st, the guys who own the ships and cargo generally care enough about it that they will try to succeed even as they buy "insurance" in case they fail. 2nd, the guys from Lloyds started investigating each ship and giving it a risk rating in their internal books, which helped them decide how much to weight the bet (i.e. how much to charge for the insurance). This is where the idea of non-governmental ratings of risk which are then used to set rates seems to have originated. Bond ratings agencies are essentially the same thing, but for bonds issued by companies and governments. The credibility of a ratings agency is earned by their performance and has exactly as much weight as investors place in its judgements. (investors are free to ignore the ratings, but most do not)
If you ever grow up enough to drop the expletives and the obvious hostility, and you decide to pay attention to the facts, then you might actually see that Obama is exactly as responsible for his acts as George Bush is for his... and if you hated what Bush did with money, you should be positively outraged by Obama. Obama is running annual deficits about 3 times the size of the worst Bush deficit, and his budget proposal earlier this year projected even worse with no end... not one Democrat in the U.S.Senate, nor even the openly-Socialist senator from Vermont voted in favour of that budget!!!!!!
Whoever modded you "Insightful" will probably mod my response "troll"...
Horray!
This is something that really does bother me about modern American politics/discussions/media. Political Correctness (which did not exist in the U.S. prior to the Clinton years). Those Slashdotters who are too young may not realize that Americans, during the Cold War, used to joke about the insane phenomenon of "political correctness" in the Soviet Union. The very concept used to be insane to Americans. One could ask a question of a Soviet Citizen and get an obviously incorrect answer (but one the Communist Party wanted given) and when you challenged to speaker,he might quietly respond that of course it was actually false, but it was "politically correct". Thanks to "political correctness", normal otherwise-sane people talk like children and say things like "the n-word", "the s-word", "the c-word", etc and refuse to show pictures of dead/wounded Americans (how many of us have seen ANY photos of the corpses of the victims of 9-11????). This all has the perverse effect of whitewashing evil. When somebody says something vile or does something vile we all hide the reality and talk in code, so the evil is hidden and not confronted. Our ancestors were not so childish/cowardly
I prefer to have the racists among us actually being openly racists so we all know who they are, and I prefer to see them accurately quoted so that they are not made to seem acceptable by the mainstream media. When a Klan member uses the term "nigger" we should hear it, and laugh at him (given that it was poorly-educated drawling whites showing their stupidity and ignorance who degraded the word "negro") and see him for the dirt-bag he is. When Jesse Jackson uses the anti-Jew term for New York "Hymie-town" we should hear it and know he is a dirt bag. When Louis Farrakan calls white people "devils" and "ice people" we should hear it and know he is a dirt bag
There are modern drugs that can help with delusional thinking... consult your doctor
Let's see...
Everything seems to empower the Tea Party. Every court ruling, every law passed, even after the US government defaults this would also benefit the Tea Party.
Not so much. There have been court rulings both ways on Obama care, the NLRB case re Boeing is up in the air, and while the TEA Party people are primarily concerned with economics, I'd bet many of them are unhappy with the court rulings on things like Arizona's 1070 and California's Prop 8; so you're wrong on this point
When are we going to accept that the Tea Party is a domestic terrorist group that fantasizes about having another civil war?
Um, the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party believes government it too big, taxes too much, and should get back to its original principles of Federalism with a smaller Federal government doing only the things the Constitution says it will do and not doing the things the Constituion says it may not do. Just how does this equate to a non-uniformed group not affiliated with any nation-state which kills randomly selected innocent civilians in order to incite terror in a population so that the population will force political change? You are wrong on point #2
Their policies are straight from the old south. The for profit prisons, which mean prisons are now the new plantations where corporations can have the cheapest possible labor force. These corporations also write our laws. Check out ALEC exposed [alecexposed.org] to see the whole plan.
You mean the "old south" where Democrats owned black people and ran for-profit prisons... oh, no, you seem to think the old south had something to do with the right-wing religious nutcase Republicans who opposed slavery and under the leadership of right-wing religious CRAZY dude Abraham Lincoln opposed the Democrat-led-and-declared civil war... Oh, and do you have any links to sites about the Queen, the Bilderburgs, and the Masons that you could also share with us??? (I eagerly await an updated set of foil hat making instructions...)
After the US defaults the Tea Party is planning to blame Obama.
No "plan" is needed. The Constitution says that all spending bills originate in the House (currently run by Republicans...who HAVE passed a bill to lift the credit limit) then must pass the Senate (currently run by Democrats... who refuse to offer their own plan and who have refused to even debate the bill the House passed) then get signed or vetoed by the President. If the US defaults it will now either be the Senate Democrats who are to blame or it will be Obama... that's just the reality, unless you do not believe in the Constitution, in which case this entire discussion is moot anyway
Now they have the legal justification to threaten Obama's life in their attempts to overthrow him.
WHAT?!?!? First, nobody has been given a "legal justification to threaten Obama's life"; A judge recognized a drunken racists fool's ramblings were not the same as a specific threat. Second, Nobody needs to "overthrow" Obama.... he is rapidly reducing his own reelection chances. I Guarantee that there are NO real TEA Party types who want any physical harm to Obama as it would damage their cause and provide sympathy to his causes at the very time when they are winning the argument about insane levels of spending. Were you this worked-up and angry with liberals/progressives when they burned Bush in effigy often spoke of killing him and even made a movie about his assasination??????
It seems like a disaster waiting to happen with the looming default, and coming economic crisis as the trigger point.
Obama has already set us up for an economic disaster; there is little any of us can do now to avoid it; the only question now is whether we can reduce the agony we will eventually face. Obama is spending over $1,600,000,000,000.00 more per year than he takes in. When he complains that the house speaker wan
Let's see.... The Atlantic, Slate and CBS all considered America's nuclear deterrent and concluded that we should disarm.
Move along. Nothing new to see here....
The US has cut its arsenal down from something like 20K nukes to about 5K, and those are becoming obsolete. Meanwhile, neither Bush nor Obama has been able to keep N. Korea from going nuclear, keep Iran from trying to go nuclear, keep Pakistan from ramping-up production of nuclear bombs and spreading the technology, nor keep China from increasing its arsenal or Russia from modernizing its launchers. Yeah, this sure sounds like a great time to disarm, I'm sure the rest of the world will follow since the history of the world is replete with examples of global peaceful coexistence and cooperation....
Only a moron thinks that a weapon in his own hands is more dangerous than more of the same weapons in the hands of his enemy...which, of course, explains Atlantic Slate and CBS...
The Constitution requires the federal government to provide for the national defense.... but then The Atlantic, Slate, and CBS probably think the Constitution is either quaint and obsolete or a "living document" with words whose meanings can only be discovered via large applications of pot.
Trial by jury, as envisioned by the founders is not such a cost-to-others, see my other post addressing that one
National defense is not a "Constitutional right". The pentagon defends the nation as a whole (and that's a responsibility of the federal government related to the general welfare) but it has no duty to protect each citizen personally as a matter of his/her "rights". Also note that while the federal government has a Constitutional duty related to the general welfare there is no duty to a specific or individual welfare
Education is not a Constitutional right
public defenders are not a Constitutional right. You have a right to bring a defense lawyer into court. You can pay for that lawyer with your own funds, or a charity may provide the funds, or a lawyer may volunteer his/her services. The modern notion that the courts must provide you a lawyer could still be satisfied without public funds. If the government was not automatically funding this, there would be non-profits that would arise to fill the need just as we have groups who fund care for animals, preservation of trees and water, investigations aimed at freeing people from death row, etc.
It's truly sad to see how many people have slipped into the idea that every good thing must be provided by government, and that such good things, once desired, must be provided by forcing others to provide them.
The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shall not covet," and "Thou shall not steal," are not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free. - John Adams
No, education is not "free". The teachers are paid employees and the taxpayers are paying through the nose as we fund these part-time workers with full-time salaries and then provide them with decades of retirement benefits which are better than those of the average taxpayer
Also note: while certain politicians cite education as a "right", it is not in the Constitution as such. Your Constitutional rights are your God-given rights which no government may take away and no other person must provide; they are cited in the Constitution as a list in the form of "thus far and no further" limitations to government power.
Also note: "education" takes many forms. The modern idea of cramming hoardes of children into government-run schools (like injecting blobs of molten plastic into steel molds in a factory assembly line) is not necessarily a good form of "education". Many of our nations best and brightest were in fact not educated this way, while most of the fools who voted for Obama clearly were ;-p
Wrong.
First, "trial by jury" is not an out-of-the-blue societal expense mandated by the Constitution, it is an alternative to trial-without-a-jury. In other words, there is a presumption that government is accusing a person of a crime and that government is going to put that person on trial, so the cost of the courtroom action is going to be incurred anyway (and these expenses are not associated with the "rights" of the defendant), therefore the only part of "trial by jury" which might be said to "cost others" is the cost to the jurors, which bears thoughtful consideration: First, we need to step back from abominations like the Casey Anthony trial; the nation's founders did not create the lunatic asylum that is the modern practice of law.... what we have now is the product of two centuries of lawyers in legislatures, on the bench, and before the bench adding layer upon layer of things the founders never mandated. For example, there is no Constitutionally mandated notion of a sequestered jury, no Constitutional requirement that jurors abandon common sense, not talk to each other at various times, not talk to others, etc. In fact, our founders gave us the jury precisely because the jury would be our peers with typical life experiences and common sense. The founders never mandated juries that would need to travel to the court at any particular expense, never mandated any situation in which jurors would serve at particular times of day (causing them to miss work and lose income) nor even ever mandated that any particular citizen would be forced into jury duty. The founders clearly envisioned a situation in which your fellow citizens would serve on your jury on a volunteer basis, for no wages just out of a sense of civic duty (which many generally did and still do) Unfortunately, as lawyers have gunked things up and made trials take longer and longer while introducing things like sequestration, jury duty has become more costly to jurors, who are now more-likely to try to avoid serving....
In case you are now thinking that the defense lawyer is a right which costs somebody else, again you need to put the modern corrupted form of court out of mind. The founders would probably be shocked by the modern practice of multi-million dollar prosecutions and defenses in multi-year cases which enrich the members of the legal profession on all sides. There is no Constitutional requirement that any particular lawyer would have to provide his/her services to a defendant at no cost. Our founders assumed that a defendant would pay for his own defense if he could (just as a person would pay to publish his own words, etc) or that others would provide funds as a charitable act for that defense if needed, and that there would be lawyers who would also step-up and volunteer their services as needed.
Our courts with their defense lawyers and jurors would indeed guarantee your rights without forcing costs onto any other person if things were as the founders established them. The alternative is to have rights which do force costs onto others, which is, in effect, servitude. That might be rational and you might want that, but it is not what the Constitution contemplates and it leads to a big fight where we break into groups who each demand that the things we want are "rights" and that people in the other groups must pay for them. Oh, wait, that's where we have been going with all this post-1960's "rights" talk......
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams
Our survey says.... ding ding ding:
The IMF!
The gas bags who run the various unaccountable globalist organizations need to learn to keep a low profile. They do not win friends among their funders by continually poking fingers in their eyes, and they certainly cannot be winning friends among the world's poor as they lend money to dictators and later demand austerity from the poor who suffered under those same dictators...while wining-and-dining each-other in high-end facilities from New York to Paris. It's not much money relative to the U.S. economy, but as an American taxpayer who is tired of being lectured by flakey euro quasi-intellectual crypto-socialist jerks who can never see an end to the good things they can do to the poor of the world with my money I would get some measure of satisfaction from seeing the IMF on the chopping block.... I Think I will call my congresscritter in the morning....
When these statistics are cited this way it is extremely misleading, and generally intentionally so
Yes, the rates have been very high at times in the past, but there were also massive loopholes that people like the Rockefellers could sail their yachts through. Historically, the government has taken about 19% of GDP every year (a bit more during WWII) but with the massive increase in spending under Obama we are headed to about 40% in 2075 by the govt's own admission. If you are under the age of 30, you should be very worried about how you will support yourself and your kids in the future; taxes on everybody will need to rise dramatically and Social Security and Medicare will be bankrupt long before you see a penny from them unless they are radically re-structured. The illusion that the left always dangles in front of the masses is that everybody can have goodies payed for by "taxing the rich"; the truth is that while there are some obscenely wealthy people, there are simply not enough of them. The real money is and always has been in the middle class people who each have only limited assets but who exist in great numbers. Part of the deal Reagan made with the Democrats in the 80s was to lower the rates and remove many of the loopholes; that held for a few years, but then the politicians started cutting new loopholes for their backers and started calling for rate increases to deal with it.
Funny, when Reagan used to run $200B annual deficits, the Democrats used to scream that he was evil and irresponsible and dooming the country.... but now with Obama running $1600B annual deficits, we hear crickets from the Dems
As Maggie Thatcher once warned: Sooner or later you run out of other people's money
First, how could you login to examine your "account"? You have no PIN number...heck the social security people are so screwed-up they cannot tell the difference between you and an illegal immigrant with a different name and living in a different city who is using your number!!!!! On those occasions where an illegal uses somebody's number with a legitimate employer, and the employer makes payments to the govt using that "account number", the govt does not see the double payments under two names from multiple locations as a sign that anything is wrong!!!!
Second, Nobody used to get such "statements". The Clinton administration started sending them out in 2000 after some public polling indicated that young people had more belief in UFOs than in the solvency of social security; The federal govt panicked and generated these "statements" to try to convince younger workers that they had "accounts" just like they got statements from the bank on their bank accounts. All Ponzi schemes fall apart when the younger generation of "investors" start to suspect that all their money is being handed out to the earlier investors and not invested in some manner so that it will be there when they try to get it back. The Politicians cannot survive the wrath of a bunch of elderly voters whose checks are cut-off because the young workers lose faith and stop paying in. The time for young workers to really start to panic will be if the debt limit is increased (signalling that the feds have every intent of going bankrupt by continuing to borrow and spend until the world's investors stop lending) If we keep at this until the world's investors stop investing in our debt, then there will be no funds available to pay young workers when they retire and no way to try to push it off onto an even younger generation.
No, it is NOT an account.
First, the courts have already ruled on this. According to the Supreme court, the federal government gets to decide each year whether it will pay-out to social security recipients and how much to pay. There is nothing other than public outrage that forces the Federal govt to pay you anything from social security when you retire (they ARE required to pay things like retirement packages of retired govt employees)
Second, if that was an actual account, then why do you not have a PIN number????? (Hint: it's not actually your money, and there is not any actual money there)
Third, IF it is an actual account and IF you own it, then why do your heirs not get to inherit it?
While Obama should've gone back and gotten authorization from Congress to extend the mission in Libya, he acted properly initially
No, as Libya had not attacked us he had no right to attack them without going to congress FIRST
because otherwise there'd be a lot of blood on our hands (see: Bush Sr. in Iraq)
The two situations have nothing in common. When Bush41 went into Iraq it was with BOTH the UN AND Congress giving prior approval for him to kick a foreign invader (Iraq) out of another country (Kuwait, which was also a UN member entitled to UN support in that circumstance). In Libya, a civil war has broken out, and the rebels are asking us to help topple a government that the US hates but has long recognized as the government of the country.
as the resistance capital Benghazi was about to fall had we not intervened.
We do not know this, and we had no treaty obligations nor strategic interests...what we had was European allies who depend upon Libyan oil but have allowed their own military forces to shrivel over the years as they depended on their friends in the US to back them in event of a real emergency
And if you want to be technical, Congress has not passed a bill declaring war on anyone since World War II. It's all "authorization to use force", which is more of the kind of Orwellian terminology in use post-WWII, such as changing the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
There's no magic password required... If the President asks for the authority and the funds and the congress grants both, then the requirements are met
The birthers are idiots........ however, even an idiot can get close to some truth even if by pure accident. We do not know how Obama got into law school, how he paid for it, or what grades he got. (Other presidents, like Bush41, Bush43, Clinton, Carter, etc have disclosed this stuff as do most candidates) There IS something we now know however: All that talk about him as a "Constitutional Law Professor" was as bogus as the greek columshe had in Denver. The man did indeed teach a class involving the Constitution and its relation to community organizing.... but he did not have a professorship, nor was he teaching classes about "Constitutional Law" as his supporters implied.
We should all be clear about what a "birther" is; Birthers are the idiots who think Obama was born in Kenya or some such place and no evidence will change their mind. People who are not wedded to that notion, but simply wanted Obama to show the same info about their backgrounds that other candidates and Presidents have shown (including a birth certificate which removes any doubts about eligibility) should not be called "birthers". The Obama team is trying to keep anybody from asking any questions about his background by calling them all "birthers". Frankly, I'd like to see all candidates line-up and file certain documents to prove their eligibilty before they get on the ballot, just as average Americans must show certain documents before they can get a driver's license, or buy a gun, etc (this would have killed any birther garbage before it could have taken root)
Oh, and we've already had a Democrat president say, under oath in a court, "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" so maybe it depends on what the meaning of the words "drone", "strike" and "hostile" are....
Some day, liberals will learn that every precedent, every rule, every regulation, and every agency that they are excited to see their guys put in place will be there and available for some conservative to use some day. Conservatives understand that the reverse is true, which is why they so often grumble when a Republican (like Nixon or Bush43) sets-up a new agency (like EPA or DHS) or a new benefit (like Medicare-D), or appoints a goofy judge. When they learn this, some of them will become libertarians. Who knows, maybe Romney will get elected and use Obama's "I can make everybody buy health insurance" precedent to make everybody buy a book of Mormon.... or maybe Herman Cain can get elected and require everyone to buy several Godfather's Pizzas every week... or Bachman can get elected and require everyone to adopt a bunch of kids (surely THAT is both an economic activity and its arguably good for society)
Oh, please.... this stuff did not "happen" to this president.... Barry is the one doing these things
The only true "warmongering hawk president" we ever had was T.R. I'm not a big Bush fan, but I am a big fan of accurate history. Bush did not roll some dice or pick a card or some such thing to select a war because he was itching to wage a war. He went into afghanistan because that was the origin of the 9-11 attacks... had he done nothing in response to 9-11 he would have been impeached. He went into Iraq because were already at war with Saddam (Gulf war ended with a conditional cease fire whose terms Saddam was violating) and he was sitting on reports from most of the intelligence services of the US and our allies who said Saddam had WMDs (and Saddam had a history of using them on his own citizens)
So-called free speech zones did not originate with Bush. All politicians always try to control the visibility of their opponents, and such zones have been getting gradually worse since the 72 election cycle. Of course, the protesters have been getting more obnoxious all along as well, so they are the ones who enable the politicians by being so ill-mannered that average citizens WANT them to be shut-up and hidden-away
Bush did not block scientific papers; his administration DID insist that such papers go uphill (so the politicians would be aware of their contents and not be blind-sided in some press conference) before those papers were published. Remember that during these years, there was a constant flow of research papers shouting about life being discovered on mars rocks, sea levels rising to flood New York and Florida, etc. and Bush people were frequently stepping to a press podium and getting asked about such papers, with certain members of the press trying to build a press narrative about the dummies in the admin not knowing this or that. Many Bush people came from the business world, where it is considered unacceptable for low-level employees to blind-side the boss the way people in various agencies were blind siding the Bush people. I will admit that there were indeed some examples of mid-level administration people who wanted some language moderated in several reports, this behavior was neither universal nor is it unique to the Bush administration. In fact, team Obama has been caught doing the exact same thing. I disapprove of both admins for any edits, but somehow I suspect you are fine with Obama doing it. There was an active political effort which began before the 2004 election to have liberals claim that Bush was suppressing science, which is why for example James Hanson spent so much of his time talking to the press saying he was being muzzled; he clearly counted on most people not noticing that nobody was blocking him from all those conversations about how blocked he was...
As for inventing BS from thin air and setting legal precedents... too late. Barry has set all the precedent the next LBJ or Nixon could ever wish for. The funniest part of all is that he duped the young into voting for him! Obama's youngest supporters are the ones who will pay the highest price; most of them will pay higher taxes over their lives than any other generation while getting fewer benefits than any recent generation just to pay for his massive ramp-up in spending. They will live with higher unemployment and less growth due to his thousands of new regulations. Obama is running out of other people's money
You are wrong. Mustard gas is a classic WMD. Weapons of Mass Destruction used to be called "NBC" weapons (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) and their use used to be referred to as NBC warfare. The reason they are in a special category is not that they are super-destructive.... rather, they are placed into a special category because their effects cannot be easily limited to combatants on a battlefield; if you deploy chemicals or bio weapons, they can blow around and end-up killing civilians and even the troops who deployed them. The weather, the terrain, etc can have as much to do with who is killed as the people who unleash these things. Nuclear falls into this class as well, NOT because of the bright flash and the heat, but because the fallout, like bio and chem weapons, is essentially uncontrollable. Indeed, the use of mustard gas in WWI was one of the reasons that the NBC/WMD category and the revulsion for such weapons arose.
The constitution says that only congress may declare war, but from the beginning, the US has engaged in conflicts without declaring war. In fact, congress has only declared war five times.
Wrong, and frequently cited by people who, well, just are not very deep thinkers
The Constitution does not say that congress must pass a bill with a certain magical set of wizard words which will then invoke a war. When a president goes to congress and says, in effect, "I believe we need to go bomb or shoot some other country" and the congress answers, in effect, "we agree, here's the money, and you are authorized to go blow something up", the Constitution has been satisfied. The congress is not required to issue a proclamation that starts with "We the people of the United States do hereby declare war..."