I've noticed that liberalism has been redefined to include socialism. Liberals used to be guys like Jefferson and Paine
Obama's liberalism is socialism. liberalism in the classic, jefferson / paine sense is really what you would call libertarian... particularly with jefferson.
Bush is more of a conservative socialist, like Hitler.
Except, for well, that democracy part...
If Bush were like Hitler, then, the Michael Moore and Al Gore would not be making billions bashing the guy, but would be in concentration camps. If Bush did what Hitler did, it would be like he would send Dick Cheney to go out and murder Nancy Pelosi to touch off a single night, have Republicans go and murder the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Obama is running with a promise to change America, talking up liberalism, while Bush is actually the biggest liberal this country has had -EVER-. Democrats 100 years of liberal activism, from a financial perspective, pales completely compared to Bush's federal takeover of the entire US mortgage market. I'm looking at drudgereport and I'm just stunned.... I'm almost really drawing a blank trying to imagine what Obama could do that could actually be more socialist then the government absorbing the largest financial part of the USA economy. 8 years of supporting Bush and I wind up getting the biggest liberal in human history. Just reminds me of a scene in Lord of the Rings, when the king says shortly before the battle of Helms Deep "How did it come to this."
Still, I would be surprised if you were lower than 15%. But the rich don't make their money at wages - that's just for petty cash. They make their money (and the vast majority) on investments, which is effortless, and taxed the least. The whole system favors the rich.
I would take exception to the idea that investment is effortless. If investment were effortless, then, the entire middle class that does invest would be billionaires. Remember, Warren Buffett began his investment career by buying and fixing a vending machine and putting it in the right place. He just doubled his money every year and half or so for the rest of his life. If investment is so easy, as you say, why can't you do it? Why can't everyone?
Good investment requires a lot of research, and that takes work.
1) The rich right the laws; they never pay. Why do you think capital gains is 15%. Why do you pay 25-38% on your income tax?
Hmmmm... let's see, for me, once I put on the mortgage interest, the allowances for my wife and son, I think my real federal rate is probably much lower, as it is for most people. If there is a regressive part of the federal tax, it would be in social security tax caps, but even then, the disbursements are also capped...
Everyone seems to be fixated on all of these big banks going out of business, and somehow, well this proves that the rich are evil. But guess what? These were rich banks for rich people and the rich are just taking a beating because they lent out all of their money either via mortgages or credit cards to people that can't possibly pay it back. So, not only do the poor and middle class get, at a minimum free rent in the form of a mortgage they don't pay, and all the stuff that comes from unpaid loans on credit cards, they now also get the benefit of lower prices on real estate nationwide, and, if they play their cards right, they can get themselves into homes for a song.
The failure of a giant corporation can be sad and viewed as a failure, but it is a necessary component to the cycle of money that is capitalism. People call capitalism "trickle down economics", and that's true to an extent, but in that trickle down cycle the collapse of a giant banking institution is just an explosion of money from the rich onto the middle class.
I mean, I'm not going to say that we should tax the rich more or even progressively, because the money is theres and they can do with it what they will. But... if they want to lend me so much of it that if I don't pay it back, I wind up rich and they poor, well, then, that's an entirely different matter either. The rich can keep their loot to do with it what they will, but if they do something stupid with it, well, that's all fair.
Banks should be deregulated even -more-, I say. Why would you want to regulate banks to keep the rich from screwing up even more?
The honest truth is that both Democrats and Republicans want to put every American into a home. Nobody thinks you can have a stable foundation for life without home ownership, long term, and both parties have and will continue to have policies that encourage and support home ownership. In the go-go days of the 1990s, I remember Fannie Mae announcing, with cheers from both the Democrats and Republicans alike, that they were going to radically expand their operations and put 20 million new people into homes, which they did and then some. Now, probably a few million, maybe 10% of them, are in arrears and are in danger of losing their houses, but overall, the vast majority of people are in homes that they would not have had before, thanks to these policies.
Even now, with all of the crap in the mortgage sector, I would be willing to bet that home ownership percentage still is at an all time high. So yeah, there's a hell of a mess on Wall Street right now, but, all in all, this policy has -worked-.
As a Republican, I'm not one who believes in tax laws to steal from the rich, but, by the same token, if the rich make a stupid mistake and lose their fortunes lending money to the poor, then, hell, that's all fair and good. Failures of the businesses of the rich, the collapse of banks, with the poor people either in houses whose mortgages they get off for, is yet another way capitalism recycles itself. Most of the time, it is trickle down economics, but other times, it is just a torrent of stupidity from the rich just blowing loads of money to the middle class. I'll take it. I'm going to wind up buying one of these crashed real estate market houses before too long....
Given that Miranda was a SCOTUS ruling how exactly would the Republicans "overturn" it, short of a Constitutional Amendment?
Act of Congress. SCOTUS interprets the law, but does not make it. Or, if you really wanted to, you could set up a legal precedent where the President simply told the SCOTUS to go pound sand. That has happened in American history and for that reason SCOTUS is usually careful to not try and act in a way that would compel some sort of action out of the executive branch unless it has some measure of political support.
The Republican party likes to talk about the Bible and responsibility. What happened to "love thy neighbor," and how is monetary greed anything but the shirking of responsibility?
We are responsible for our neighbors, not your crackheads. We use our money that we earn for the streets we walk down, for the schools we send our children to, for the police in our neighborhoods.
I'm sorry, but just because Obama was the descendenat of a slave does not give him the right to make slaves of everyone else.
And quite honestly, all of this social fairness talk is crap from a man who hangs out with hollywood types that sue broke college students for the imagined crime of stealing a song. Let me see Obama come out against RIAA and tell that fat old dike barbara streisand to go f--- herself and then you might make a believer out of me.
I can't wait to run for office as a Republican in the next election, because I am going to make Hollywood howl with my anti-DRM, anti-copyright crusade. Let's see Madonna not get a dime from a CD, DVD or internet download sales and we'll see long before she's talking about her "right to earn a return for her work."
- NOT firing our best Arab linguists when we're at war in the Middle East?
Instead of "best", you mean "gay".
- Providing mandatory healthcare to children?
Why don't we rephrase this for what it is... taxing responsible parents who already pay for health care for their kids to pay for health care for some kids in inner cities so their parents can sit around and smoke crack. If healthcare for children is so important, then parents should pay for it.
Making healthcare affordable but optional for adults?
You can do that by getting rid of lawsuits against doctors and by shifting the ownership of health care plans from corporations to individuals, as John McCain proposes.
- Reforming the tax code so it doesn't take a graduate degree to know how much your bill should be?
From a democrat? That's a joke.
- Investing in science and research so China doesn't kick our asses so handily in the next decade as they have in the past decade?
China is kicking our ass because they are doing well in all the things that don't really require research. Democrats ruined manufacturing in the USA by corrupting the cities, by environmental legislation, excessive safety legislation that, all taken together, suggest that the party's members want to get paid but not work.
- Increasing funding for charter schools so that even poor people can have school choice?
So, to put this another way, after Democrats screwed up all of America's cities through 40 years of misrule, now raise taxes on everyone else, to pay for their mistakes. But oh, by the way, fork over the money to the administrations that ruined those cities to begin with. No way. If you want to have any sort of redistribution of wealth and school choice, then vouchers and privatization absolutely must be on the table.
- Moving race-based affirmative action toward a more socioeconomic-based affirmative action, so that his daughters are judged more fairly compared to a rural white boy with an underfunded school?
Sorry, but it is too important to define excellence by real success rather than by poetic sense of social preferences. While private universities have the right to discriminate and assemble whatever community they like, any public university should accept students based on academic criteria alone.
Ending an immoral war by setting concrete timelines, but recognizing that they may have to be modified depending on the conditions on the ground?
There is no "ending" of a war. You either win them or lose them. Obama isn't choosing to win, so therefor, what is he choosing? In any case, I'm sure that the world will think very highly of the Barrack Hussein Obama when he prematurely withdraws the USA from a mess that it created, and in doing so, touches off a genocidal civil war.
- Reducing the incidence and unfairness of the death penalty, while understanding that certain heinous crimes deserve the full outrage of the nation?
The death penalty is not being applied enough. There has not been a single documented case of the death penalty in the last decade, where in fact, the person executed did not deserve it. I for one, though, bitterly anticipate a Barrack Obama pardon of Mumia Abdul Jabar, or, whatever that cop killing chump calls himself these days.
Better sex education, so that there are fewer unexpected pregnancies, and so that when there are unexpected pregnancies, the women know there are options BESIDES abortion?
Again, if sex education is so important, then parents should teach it. Why should we continue to have our successful culture polluted by the failures of this social wreckage? You know, if 10% of these so-called social advocates on the left wing actually applied themselves as engineers and inventors and created factories, rather than enviro-protests, there wouldn't be any poverty in the USA.
I can't think of a single person to support Obama's platform unless you are a lazy soc
Well, last time I checked, raising taxes in the middle of a recession is about the dumbest thing you can possibly due. Let's tighten our money even more when money is scarce. Duh.
Since the time Bush did his tax cut, the rest of the world cut their taxes even more, particularly corporate taxes. As a result, capital is now leaving the USA to invest in companies overseas that have lower tax rates, and THAT is causing the stock market to stagger. The problem is not that Bush cut taxes, but that he did not cut them enough.
They have the balls to claim Democrats will spend more when they currently hold the record for spending!
No argument there. Bush has just been a fiscal disaster. I think the lesson is, never elect a president from Texas again. Honestly, if Hillary had won the nomination, I might have crossed party lines to vote for her because of her husband's economics. I really, really like the way Clinton did the budget. He said he was going to balance the budget and -did-.
Now, I should point out that if Bush had voted the way McCain did over the last 8 years, there would be a budget surplus. Let's see, McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts, voted against the first farm bailout, I can't remember if he caved in on the post 9/11 airline bailout, but.. he voted against medicare prescription drugs and those sort of things have just been budget killers.
I agree with the old school conservative sentiment you share as well. Like, Bush sent me a fundraising card and I wrote a big black note on it: "Quit picking on gays and balance the goddamned budget... you get no money."
Rudy tried to turn NY into a police state... I would consider that to the right of conservatism, but is that liberal politics in the US or NYC?
Police actually always tend to be more Democrats than Republicans. I mean, the FOP endorsed John Kerry, I believe, and they are almost always tempted to endorse the local Democrat first.
The Republican cop perception cane from Nixon and Reagan. They grabbed the law and order chumpy as part of an overall reaction to the 1960s. A large swath of America was unsettled by the 1960s protests and skyrocketing crime and so really, the first party to argue in favor of stiffer sentences . At the same time, the extreme left really pushed through some things that have forever painted Democrats as soft on crime...Miranda, the right to a public lawyer, rights for prisoners, all of that stuff that liberals did really pushed a lot of the country into the conservative camp. But now, everyone is sort of conditioned into accepting miranda and the right to a public attorney, so by the time older Republicans were -finally- in a position to overturn it, the rest of the country didn't care. Meanwhile, you have Democrats suddenly running around and arguing that you need to have a Dept of Homeland Security and ALL of the points of the 9/11 commission, no matter how dumb they were, that there needed to be 100,000 more police, and so on, wheras Republicans are starting to look at mounting prison bills and ask whether it is all worth it.
At the other end of the political spectrum, I think Alan Keyes is at least in the same league at Obama as a gifted
See, I don't really like Keyes that much because he's too religious right for me. I'm more libertarian neo-con right wing. Republicans though, as a rule, are terrible public speakers and we really haven't had a good one since Reagan. I mean, look at the national buzz in our party over Palin. She gave a speech that didn't sound horrible and now she's a conservative rock star.
the consumer, contrary to popular opinion, is not always right
The consumer is right, but the problem is that we've screwed up our educational system K-12, among other things, by arguing over ideological lines rather than practical ones. Extreme liberals want to fill classrooms with a bunch of white guilt stuff about slavery, the indians and the holocaust, and extreme conservatives, want to teach about Jesus. Well, here's the problem. Jesus and the Holocaust are all well and good, but they don't help kids learn how to do anything useful.
The biggest shortfall in our engineering right now is that kids actually aren't learning how to make things and be comfortable doing so from an early age. Every classroom needs to have legos and blocks for the younger ones, and in high school, you need to have CNC machines, CAD systems, chemistry labs and in the very least, every school district should have an electron microscope. People only believe in all of this earth is flat gobbledygook because all the tools that science has may as well be on another planet too, but if you put all of this stuff in kids hands, and from an early age... many can learn to think like engineers and scientists because they will be engineers and scientists. I know this sounds expensive, but, I am all for capping federal spending on entitlements for the elderly so that we can, instead, really just load up on our schools. I have no problem with a redistribution of wealth in education because it is in the best interests of the money'd classes to have smart people to someday become stewards of their corporations, rather than the retards that we have to day.
I mean, just imagine a classroom where you integrated engineering with algebra and then calculus so that, people can grasp and visualize things. You could easily show multiplication as an area and a volume problem with legos and show how calculating lets you know much material you need before you make it. You can use smaller and smaller blocks to plant the seeds of understanding limits and then calculus and then work in building shapes out of various curves and using the calculus to know how many blocks you need. Kids can learn about atoms and molecules by actually looking at them in an STM, and could have real chemistry sets and real motors and real generators and yes, lets cap lawsuits against public schools because some kids are going to get hurt playing with this stuff, but, such occasional injury is the risk that we have to accept to become a society of learning how to do things. But, at the end of the day, a young man or woman coming out of high school should have built their own electric motor, their own internal and external combustion engine, their own simple logical gate, their own computer, and synthesized a couple of different kinds of complex chemicals. I mean, I think teflon is something you could make.
None of this is even really out of the ordinary from what Americans had a century ago. Kids back then worked on farms and so got a good sense of how to fix things and make things because well, there wasn't like a Best Buy you would just return something too and things were so valuable that you just couldn't throw them away to get a new one. We need to put the positive aspects of that environment in place too.
Also, we really need to stop it with this first amendment crap taken to an extreme and get all of the junk off of the media. Parental responsbility is all well and good, but just about everyone is a parent, and you know there is a larger societal responsibility to not be programming ourselves with a steady diet of bad human behavior, violence, and smut.
Even though I'm a Republican, I have to concede that Obama is one of the most gifted speakers to come along for quite some time. He's an absolutely magnetic speaker and a great advocate for that which he believes, and when I watch him, I almost have to smack myself to snap out of it. I can't stand the guy's politics, but I am proud that he's an American.
Ok, let's forget about the partisan debate for a second and call this election for what it is... in a time of pretty steep national crisis we have picked the worst candidates to represent the respective parties...
I mean, there's no one with any real executive experience on either ticket. Sure, Palin has some as governor, but if Obama would have had some brains and put any Democratic governor from a state he needs to win on the ticket, Palin's "experience" becomes a joke.
Sarah Palin is scary, and Anonymous is doing us a favor. Only the light of scrutiny will reform our government.
Then, lets have it all out. You know who is scary? Everyone on the left wing. You have a bunch of blue states with cities from New York to Philadelphia to Cleveland that have, through utter ineptness of 4 generations of Democratic rule, have replaced manufacturing greatness with crackhouses, and we would prefer our red states to not look like this. I mean, you can rag on our appalachia as back woods as much as you want, but at least when we wake up, we see beautiful hills and forests wheras you people have traffic and streets that smell like piss.
Yeah, we red states want to look like that. Go OBama.. Make the rest of the USA look like Chicago...
I was under the impression that houses were the main cause of the problem- and with the possible exception of some ludicrously techie piles built by multi-billionaires, they aren't really "tech" items and they certainly don't go obsolete within four or five years.
Think : Home Equity Loans...
besides, if banks have a million reposessed houses...how much are they worth if no one will buy them?
Here's the real problem. Everything the banks have lent money to people to buy are kinda valueless because they are obsolete. Technology keeps advancing such that there is no such thing as collateral any more and thus all the banks are worthless... to some extent you might argue that in a regime of high commodity prices, tech change is so fast that borrowing money to buy a good essentially reduces the money supply. So, since its the Fed's job to pump up the money supply, we need to think about how it really does that.
Hi! I'm a programmer for Lehman brothers and I'm looking for work. I was the designer of Assett Manager 1.0, a powerful tool that allowed our brokers to get values of our contracts....it's not a bad program, but it had a couple of bugs in it that I would like to have fixed.
I actually wound up with Vista because I needed an OS to do some development on. I tried to install Vista x64 on my machine but my SATA controller is not supported because there are no signed drivers for it. Mind you, Linux x64 has been running, oh, since SELinux 10, Ubuntu 7 and now Ubuntu 8, on that very same controller like a champ.
Still, once I did get Vista up and rolling in Virtual Box OSE session, I found myself rather liking it. So, I wound up adding a partition to my Linux box to dual boot Vista x32 with and Linux. I'm still -very- bitter about the x64 drivers, but I do like Vista.
Like the linux kernel developers are any better...every OS maker is greedy about increased CPU power. I first ran Linux in 1995 and it isn't that much faster now.
Well, I guess if you want to go back to pine for mail, it might be pretty quick.
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I've noticed that liberalism has been redefined to include socialism. Liberals used to be guys like Jefferson and Paine
Obama's liberalism is socialism. liberalism in the classic, jefferson / paine sense is really what you would call libertarian... particularly with jefferson.
Bush is more of a conservative socialist, like Hitler.
Except, for well, that democracy part...
If Bush were like Hitler, then, the Michael Moore and Al Gore would not be making billions bashing the guy, but would be in concentration camps. If Bush did what Hitler did, it would be like he would send Dick Cheney to go out and murder Nancy Pelosi to touch off a single night, have Republicans go and murder the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Obama is running with a promise to change America, talking up liberalism, while Bush is actually the biggest liberal this country has had -EVER-. Democrats 100 years of liberal activism, from a financial perspective, pales completely compared to Bush's federal takeover of the entire US mortgage market. I'm looking at drudgereport and I'm just stunned.... I'm almost really drawing a blank trying to imagine what Obama could do that could actually be more socialist then the government absorbing the largest financial part of the USA economy. 8 years of supporting Bush and I wind up getting the biggest liberal in human history. Just reminds me of a scene in Lord of the Rings, when the king says shortly before the battle of Helms Deep "How did it come to this."
Still, I would be surprised if you were lower than 15%. But the rich don't make their money at wages - that's just for petty cash. They make their money (and the vast majority) on investments, which is effortless, and taxed the least. The whole system favors the rich.
I would take exception to the idea that investment is effortless. If investment were effortless, then, the entire middle class that does invest would be billionaires. Remember, Warren Buffett began his investment career by buying and fixing a vending machine and putting it in the right place. He just doubled his money every year and half or so for the rest of his life. If investment is so easy, as you say, why can't you do it? Why can't everyone?
Good investment requires a lot of research, and that takes work.
1) The rich right the laws; they never pay. Why do you think capital gains is 15%. Why do you pay 25-38% on your income tax?
Hmmmm... let's see, for me, once I put on the mortgage interest, the allowances for my wife and son, I think my real federal rate is probably much lower, as it is for most people. If there is a regressive part of the federal tax, it would be in social security tax caps, but even then, the disbursements are also capped...
Everyone seems to be fixated on all of these big banks going out of business, and somehow, well this proves that the rich are evil. But guess what? These were rich banks for rich people and the rich are just taking a beating because they lent out all of their money either via mortgages or credit cards to people that can't possibly pay it back. So, not only do the poor and middle class get, at a minimum free rent in the form of a mortgage they don't pay, and all the stuff that comes from unpaid loans on credit cards, they now also get the benefit of lower prices on real estate nationwide, and, if they play their cards right, they can get themselves into homes for a song.
The failure of a giant corporation can be sad and viewed as a failure, but it is a necessary component to the cycle of money that is capitalism. People call capitalism "trickle down economics", and that's true to an extent, but in that trickle down cycle the collapse of a giant banking institution is just an explosion of money from the rich onto the middle class.
I mean, I'm not going to say that we should tax the rich more or even progressively, because the money is theres and they can do with it what they will. But... if they want to lend me so much of it that if I don't pay it back, I wind up rich and they poor, well, then, that's an entirely different matter either. The rich can keep their loot to do with it what they will, but if they do something stupid with it, well, that's all fair.
Banks should be deregulated even -more-, I say. Why would you want to regulate banks to keep the rich from screwing up even more?
The honest truth is that both Democrats and Republicans want to put every American into a home. Nobody thinks you can have a stable foundation for life without home ownership, long term, and both parties have and will continue to have policies that encourage and support home ownership. In the go-go days of the 1990s, I remember Fannie Mae announcing, with cheers from both the Democrats and Republicans alike, that they were going to radically expand their operations and put 20 million new people into homes, which they did and then some. Now, probably a few million, maybe 10% of them, are in arrears and are in danger of losing their houses, but overall, the vast majority of people are in homes that they would not have had before, thanks to these policies.
Even now, with all of the crap in the mortgage sector, I would be willing to bet that home ownership percentage still is at an all time high.
So yeah, there's a hell of a mess on Wall Street right now, but, all in all, this policy has -worked-.
As a Republican, I'm not one who believes in tax laws to steal from the rich, but, by the same token, if the rich make a stupid mistake and lose their fortunes lending money to the poor, then, hell, that's all fair and good. Failures of the businesses of the rich, the collapse of banks, with the poor people either in houses whose mortgages they get off for, is yet another way capitalism recycles itself. Most of the time, it is trickle down economics, but other times, it is just a torrent of stupidity from the rich just blowing loads of money to the middle class. I'll take it. I'm going to wind up buying one of these crashed real estate market houses before too long....
Given that Miranda was a SCOTUS ruling how exactly would the Republicans "overturn" it, short of a Constitutional Amendment?
Act of Congress. SCOTUS interprets the law, but does not make it. Or, if you really wanted to, you could set up a legal precedent where the President simply told the SCOTUS to go pound sand. That has happened in American history and for that reason SCOTUS is usually careful to not try and act in a way that would compel some sort of action out of the executive branch unless it has some measure of political support.
The Republican party likes to talk about the Bible and responsibility. What happened to "love thy neighbor," and how is monetary greed anything but the shirking of responsibility?
We are responsible for our neighbors, not your crackheads. We use our money that we earn for the streets we walk down, for the schools we send our children to, for the police in our neighborhoods.
I'm sorry, but just because Obama was the descendenat of a slave does not give him the right to make slaves of everyone else.
And quite honestly, all of this social fairness talk is crap from a man who hangs out with hollywood types that sue broke college students for the imagined crime of stealing a song. Let me see Obama come out against RIAA and tell that fat old dike barbara streisand to go f--- herself and then you might make a believer out of me.
I can't wait to run for office as a Republican in the next election, because I am going to make Hollywood howl with my anti-DRM, anti-copyright crusade. Let's see Madonna not get a dime from a CD, DVD or internet download sales and we'll see long before she's talking about her "right to earn a return for her work."
- NOT firing our best Arab linguists when we're at war in the Middle East?
Instead of "best", you mean "gay".
- Providing mandatory healthcare to children?
Why don't we rephrase this for what it is... taxing responsible parents who already pay for health care for their kids to pay for health care for some kids in inner cities so their parents can sit around and smoke crack. If healthcare for children is so important, then parents should pay for it.
Making healthcare affordable but optional for adults?
You can do that by getting rid of lawsuits against doctors and by shifting the ownership of health care plans from corporations to individuals, as John McCain proposes.
- Reforming the tax code so it doesn't take a graduate degree to know how much your bill should be?
From a democrat? That's a joke.
- Investing in science and research so China doesn't kick our asses so handily in the next decade as they have in the past decade?
China is kicking our ass because they are doing well in all the things that don't really require research. Democrats ruined manufacturing in the USA by corrupting the cities, by environmental legislation, excessive safety legislation that, all taken together, suggest that the party's members want to get paid but not work.
- Increasing funding for charter schools so that even poor people can have school choice?
So, to put this another way, after Democrats screwed up all of America's cities through 40 years of misrule, now raise taxes on everyone else, to pay for their mistakes. But oh, by the way, fork over the money to the administrations that ruined those cities to begin with. No way. If you want to have any sort of redistribution of wealth and school choice, then vouchers and privatization absolutely must be on the table.
- Moving race-based affirmative action toward a more socioeconomic-based affirmative action, so that his daughters are judged more fairly compared to a rural white boy with an underfunded school?
Sorry, but it is too important to define excellence by real success rather than by poetic sense of social preferences. While private universities have the right to discriminate and assemble whatever community they like, any public university should accept students based on academic criteria alone.
Ending an immoral war by setting concrete timelines, but recognizing that they may have to be modified depending on the conditions on the ground?
There is no "ending" of a war. You either win them or lose them. Obama isn't choosing to win, so therefor, what is he choosing? In any case, I'm sure that the world will think very highly of the Barrack Hussein Obama when he prematurely withdraws the USA from a mess that it created, and in doing so, touches off a genocidal civil war.
- Reducing the incidence and unfairness of the death penalty, while understanding that certain heinous crimes deserve the full outrage of the nation?
The death penalty is not being applied enough. There has not been a single documented case of the death penalty in the last decade, where in fact, the person executed did not deserve it. I for one, though, bitterly anticipate a Barrack Obama pardon of Mumia Abdul Jabar, or, whatever that cop killing chump calls himself these days.
Better sex education, so that there are fewer unexpected pregnancies, and so that when there are unexpected pregnancies, the women know there are options BESIDES abortion?
Again, if sex education is so important, then parents should teach it. Why should we continue to have our successful culture polluted by the failures of this social wreckage? You know, if 10% of these so-called social advocates on the left wing actually applied themselves as engineers and inventors and created factories, rather than enviro-protests, there wouldn't be any poverty in the USA.
I can't think of a single person to support Obama's platform unless you are a lazy soc
Well, last time I checked, raising taxes in the middle of a recession is about the dumbest thing you can possibly due. Let's tighten our money even more when money is scarce. Duh.
Since the time Bush did his tax cut, the rest of the world cut their taxes even more, particularly corporate taxes. As a result, capital is now leaving the USA to invest in companies overseas that have lower tax rates, and THAT is causing the stock market to stagger. The problem is not that Bush cut taxes, but that he did not cut them enough.
They have the balls to claim Democrats will spend more when they currently hold the record for spending!
No argument there. Bush has just been a fiscal disaster. I think the lesson is, never elect a president from Texas again. Honestly, if Hillary had won the nomination, I might have crossed party lines to vote for her because of her husband's economics. I really, really like the way Clinton did the budget. He said he was going to balance the budget and -did-.
Now, I should point out that if Bush had voted the way McCain did over the last 8 years, there would be a budget surplus. Let's see, McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts, voted against the first farm bailout, I can't remember if he caved in on the post 9/11 airline bailout, but.. he voted against medicare prescription drugs and those sort of things have just been budget killers.
I agree with the old school conservative sentiment you share as well. Like, Bush sent me a fundraising card and I wrote a big black note on it: "Quit picking on gays and balance the goddamned budget... you get no money."
Rudy tried to turn NY into a police state... I would consider that to the right of conservatism, but is that liberal politics in the US or NYC?
Police actually always tend to be more Democrats than Republicans. I mean, the FOP endorsed John Kerry, I believe, and they are almost always tempted to endorse the local Democrat first.
The Republican cop perception cane from Nixon and Reagan. They grabbed the law and order chumpy as part of an overall reaction to the 1960s. A large swath of America was unsettled by the 1960s protests and skyrocketing crime and so really, the first party to argue in favor of stiffer sentences . At the same time, the extreme left really pushed through some things that have forever painted Democrats as soft on crime...Miranda, the right to a public lawyer, rights for prisoners, all of that stuff that liberals did really pushed a lot of the country into the conservative camp. But now, everyone is sort of conditioned into accepting miranda and the right to a public attorney, so by the time older Republicans were -finally- in a position to overturn it, the rest of the country didn't care. Meanwhile, you have Democrats suddenly running around and arguing that you need to have a Dept of Homeland Security and ALL of the points of the 9/11 commission, no matter how dumb they were, that there needed to be 100,000 more police, and so on, wheras Republicans are starting to look at mounting prison bills and ask whether it is all worth it.
At the other end of the political spectrum, I think Alan Keyes is at least in the same league at Obama as a gifted
See, I don't really like Keyes that much because he's too religious right for me. I'm more libertarian neo-con right wing. Republicans though, as a rule, are terrible public speakers and we really haven't had a good one since Reagan. I mean, look at the national buzz in our party over Palin. She gave a speech that didn't sound horrible and now she's a conservative rock star.
the consumer, contrary to popular opinion, is not always right
The consumer is right, but the problem is that we've screwed up our educational system K-12, among other things, by arguing over ideological lines rather than practical ones. Extreme liberals want to fill classrooms with a bunch of white guilt stuff about slavery, the indians and the holocaust, and extreme conservatives, want to teach about Jesus. Well, here's the problem. Jesus and the Holocaust are all well and good, but they don't help kids learn how to do anything useful.
The biggest shortfall in our engineering right now is that kids actually aren't learning how to make things and be comfortable doing so from an early age. Every classroom needs to have legos and blocks for the younger ones, and in high school, you need to have CNC machines, CAD systems, chemistry labs and in the very least, every school district should have an electron microscope. People only believe in all of this earth is flat gobbledygook because all the tools that science has may as well be on another planet too, but if you put all of this stuff in kids hands, and from an early age... many can learn to think like engineers and scientists because they will be engineers and scientists. I know this sounds expensive, but, I am all for capping federal spending on entitlements for the elderly so that we can, instead, really just load up on our schools. I have no problem with a redistribution of wealth in education because it is in the best interests of the money'd classes to have smart people to someday become stewards of their corporations, rather than the retards that we have to day.
I mean, just imagine a classroom where you integrated engineering with algebra and then calculus so that, people can grasp and visualize things. You could easily show multiplication as an area and a volume problem with legos and show how calculating lets you know much material you need before you make it. You can use smaller and smaller blocks to plant the seeds of understanding limits and then calculus and then work in building shapes out of various curves and using the calculus to know how many blocks you need. Kids can learn about atoms and molecules by actually looking at them in an STM, and could have real chemistry sets and real motors and real generators and yes, lets cap lawsuits against public schools because some kids are going to get hurt playing with this stuff, but, such occasional injury is the risk that we have to accept to become a society of learning how to do things. But, at the end of the day, a young man or woman coming out of high school should have built their own electric motor, their own internal and external combustion engine, their own simple logical gate, their own computer, and synthesized a couple of different kinds of complex chemicals. I mean, I think teflon is something you could make.
None of this is even really out of the ordinary from what Americans had a century ago. Kids back then worked on farms and so got a good sense of how to fix things and make things because well, there wasn't like a Best Buy you would just return something too and things were so valuable that you just couldn't throw them away to get a new one. We need to put the positive aspects of that environment in place too.
Also, we really need to stop it with this first amendment crap taken to an extreme and get all of the junk off of the media. Parental responsbility is all well and good, but just about everyone is a parent, and you know there is a larger societal responsibility to not be programming ourselves with a steady diet of bad human behavior, violence, and smut.
Even though I'm a Republican, I have to concede that Obama is one of the most gifted speakers to come along for quite some time. He's an absolutely magnetic speaker and a great advocate for that which he believes, and when I watch him, I almost have to smack myself to snap out of it. I can't stand the guy's politics, but I am proud that he's an American.
More specifically it's because I'm a biologist dependant on federal funding
Why can't you make something useful and sell it? Being dependent on the federal government especially does not entitle you to run any portion of it.
Ok, let's forget about the partisan debate for a second and call this election for what it is... in a time of pretty steep national crisis we have picked the worst candidates to represent the respective parties...
I mean, there's no one with any real executive experience on either ticket. Sure, Palin has some as governor, but if Obama would have had some brains and put any Democratic governor from a state he needs to win on the ticket, Palin's "experience" becomes a joke.
Sarah Palin is scary, and Anonymous is doing us a favor. Only the light of scrutiny will reform our government.
Then, lets have it all out. You know who is scary? Everyone on the left wing. You have a bunch of blue states with cities from New York to Philadelphia to Cleveland that have, through utter ineptness of 4 generations of Democratic rule, have replaced manufacturing greatness with crackhouses, and we would prefer our red states to not look like this. I mean, you can rag on our appalachia as back woods as much as you want, but at least when we wake up, we see beautiful hills and forests wheras you people have traffic and streets that smell like piss.
Yeah, we red states want to look like that. Go OBama.. Make the rest of the USA look like Chicago...
I was under the impression that houses were the main cause of the problem- and with the possible exception of some ludicrously techie piles built by multi-billionaires, they aren't really "tech" items and they certainly don't go obsolete within four or five years.
Think : Home Equity Loans...
besides, if banks have a million reposessed houses...how much are they worth if no one will buy them?
Here's the real problem. Everything the banks have lent money to people to buy are kinda valueless because they are obsolete. Technology keeps advancing such that there is no such thing as collateral any more and thus all the banks are worthless... to some extent you might argue that in a regime of high commodity prices, tech change is so fast that borrowing money to buy a good essentially reduces the money supply. So, since its the Fed's job to pump up the money supply, we need to think about how it really does that.
Hi! I'm a programmer for Lehman brothers and I'm looking for work. I was the designer of Assett Manager 1.0, a powerful tool that allowed our brokers to get values of our contracts....it's not a bad program, but it had a couple of bugs in it that I would like to have fixed.
I actually wound up with Vista because I needed an OS to do some development on. I tried to install Vista x64 on my machine but my SATA controller is not supported because there are no signed drivers for it. Mind you, Linux x64 has been running, oh, since SELinux 10, Ubuntu 7 and now Ubuntu 8, on that very same controller like a champ.
Still, once I did get Vista up and rolling in Virtual Box OSE session, I found myself rather liking it. So, I wound up adding a partition to my Linux box to dual boot Vista x32 with and Linux. I'm still -very- bitter about the x64 drivers, but I do like Vista.
In November, the city withdrew its demand that Reisinger not link to city government sites.
SO um, what's the issue?
Like the linux kernel developers are any better...every OS maker is greedy about increased CPU power. I first ran Linux in 1995 and it isn't that much faster now.
Well, I guess if you want to go back to pine for mail, it might be pretty quick.
I mean, come on, this thing's probably gotta play some pretty good games....
Let's see Toms Hardware and Anandtech put one of these babies through their paces!
My question is, how big does your Word document have to be for it to take a second to scroll from the top to the bottom of the document.