Conservative neo-cons in the Bush Administration went for a little trip in Iraq that cost three trillion dollars
It's not three trillion dollars, its about a trillion dollars so far. And, geez, we get, at the end of the day, a democracy in Iraq and improved access to over 50 trillion dollars worth of oil.
I think that, over time, trade with Iraq will wind up recovering the cost of the war. Still, if you want an immediate cash windfall to the government, then, I'd open up Alaska for drilling. There's a trillion dollars of oil sitting in ANWR alone, and that would certainly pay for the war. Then, we get access, for that investment, to all of that oil in Iraq....
Taxing cigarettes is not meant to bring in more revenue. It's meant to reduce cigarette smoking, which places a huge burden on the public health system.
No its not. It's a revenue tool. If it were a revenue tool, states would not be spending the money on their general fund and would be stashing it for the cigarette health care expenses, but that's not what they did. Look at New Jersey. Where's their rainy day fund? They get all that money from cigarettes and they just spent it on all sorts of stupid stuff completely unrelated to the problem you described.
The economy did not fall on its ass because of progressive taxation.
The economy hasn't "fallen on its ass". What has happened was that conservative economics created so much demand for raw materials that, commodities that were once practically free now cost something. That's an adjustment and it indicates that the world economy is doing better, not worse.
So yeah, morons that invested in stocks and questionable securities took a beating because, geez, investors realized that the best way to park your money is to actually park them in commodities, and they've done out well. Farmers are doing better, mines are doing better, oil cos are doing better. It's really only wall street and the whole financial services sector that is taking it on the chin, and since most of us in computing work in financial services, it looks worse than it is.
If you like smoking so much, why don't you legalize marijuana and save on the billions we've spent on the war on drugs? It'd also free up more prison space.
The bulk of people in prison for drugs are not in prison for pot. Pot is already decriminalized in many, if not most states, despite what the Feds say. As for prison space, quite honestly, we shouldn't spend so much per prisoner anyway.
Reaganomics never worked, and never will, because all it does is put more money in the hands of the rich and fucks the poor.
What poor has Reaganomics fucked, prey tell? The poor that now have at least one family car? The poor that have TV's, designer shoes, new clothes, food so much that they are fat, a higher home ownership rate than ever before, playstations, xboxes, ipods, cell phones... do you mean those poor?
America's poor are in some ways arguably richer than the middle class of America was 30 years ago. They have more stuff, and in fact, they have so much more stuff, not only in America, but in every place where capitalism has been put into place, that the biggest complaint from the left wing these days is that the poor actually have too much stuff. When you distill away all the crap and lies about saving the planet, at the very heart of the idea of environmental movement is to make poor people have -less- stuff, not more.
This is just horseshit for one very good reason... the population is expanding! It may not be expanding at the same rate but it continues to do so. Changes in the rate are to be expected. The problem with our entitlements is that the money that's supposed to be for them have been raided by democrats and republicans alike. They are running out of money because politicians take money out inappropriately and don't put it back
The population is not expanding enough, relative to the amount of money being blown on entitlements. And the other thing is, people are living longer and medical care is more exotic and more expensive. It simply isn't.
Let's look at one thing, a heart bypass. That will set you back anywhere from 50k to 200k, depending on what's involved. That's at least a car, if not a house. Now, let's toss in a few months at nursing home for grandma, maybe mom does a year long cancer battle, and you can pretty much see that there's just no way people can afford to pay for all of this.
Your simplistic answer is to just claim, "oh, inequality", and keep going on about national health care... but you lie to the American people and you don't admit that what national health care is, is rationing. Health care will get cheaper, because the government is going to flat out say no to the bypass, no to the exotic drugs, just so everyone can get some care.
First off, its not conservatives that -insist- on capping spending. That's Democrats. Every year you keep putting more and more into medicare and social security until they've gone from consuming 5% of the federal budget to close to %50, with projections to grow all the way until they consume everything.
It's you stupid liberals that can't do basic math. You can't hand 9 people a federal entitlement out of the dole off of the efforts of one man, and that's what you would do. At some point, families have to pay for their own health care, their own retirement, and their own dying, and THAT, my friend, is a lesson that every civilization has known for 6000 years.
Clinton wasn't too bad, fiscal wise, but don't forget that he had a Republican congress that voted no to nearly every single one of his proposals.
Reagan would have been great, if the Dems had shut down the Dept of Education and trimmed entitlements, like he proposed. His tax cuts though, produced a giant increase to the federal treasury.
Bush Jr would have been great, if HIS plans to trim entitlements would have been acted upon. But of course, Democrats just want the entitlements to grow unchecked until the whole wealth of the nation is consumed into a socialist state, which is of course, exactly what they want. Democrats DON'T WANT PEOPLE TO SUCCEED, because, if someone succeeds, that means, to them, that someone else didn't.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. In the context of taxes, it's not a meaningless epithet; the sales tax is not progressive, it is flat
Actually the sales tax is regressive.. but that's another story. I was really thinking more about how income taxes tend to be shifted to the rich. What happens now is that, because the taxes are stacked so much on the wealthy, the revenue stream for the government is wildly unstable.
The thing is, about Republican politics, is that, they haven't honestly told the whole story about how taxation is supposed to work. Really, to get the lowest overall rate, everyone has to pay -some- taxes. But what's happened over the years is that this has been translated into the idea of tax cuts and for the wealthy to get tax cuts, thus, the middle class has to get them, and right now, poor people aren't paying any taxes at all.
If you really wanted to maximize both the size and the stability of the tax stream against all other goals - in other words, without being "nice about it", you should probably have a federal sales tax to tax the poor and criminal classes and enough of one to also be an effective tax increase on the middle class, and then lower the tax rates on the rich so that effectively, everyone is paying the same overall rate. That minimizes the risk to the tax collection portfolio.. oh christ, there I go using that "revenue" term that i just flamed about, by spreading it to the most people.
Then, if taxes are too high for people, then you cut them, but you also have to decide what out of government you don't want. Realistically, at the federal level, this is going to mean BOTH a capping of the entitlements AND a cut to the size of the defense budget.
In the face of that, when you look at the candidates, you can see that both are pretty much retarded. Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich and then tease with a middle class tax cut and take the poor off the roles altogether, completely destabalizing the payment stream. McCain wants to lock in Bush's taxes, which is ok, but he also needs to think about a national sales tax, to hit the poor with. Both sides need to chop spending. In Obama's case, that means saying by by to his big social programs, and in McCain's case, it means that the army shouldn't get Future Combat System and the Navy might need just build more normal ships, and the air force might need to choose one kind of fighter rather than two.
Yeah, Wall Street never does poorly in a nationwide recession...
The thing is, the recession isn't nationwide. It's actually concentrated in the financial services and media sectors, so, for reporters, its a lot worse than it really is. The media sector is taking a beating because of tech change.. basically, the media is obsolete. The financial sector is taking a beating because the whole idea of paying someone to carefully manage your stocks and other investments to get a higher rate of return is ridiculous when basic commodities, as it turns out, are the thing that has the most intrinsic value. I mean, there's plenty of labor on the planet to shape a piece of steel into a car, so, ultimately, making cars is, from an investment point of view, almost valueless. But if I've got that piece of steel, coal, iron, or oil, well, that's something.
Most of this generation is used to the ideas of commodities being free, and what we call a recession, is really, well, just an adjustment to commodities -not- being free. Indeed, the whole fiscal idea behind enviro-taxes is to actually make commodities have a price so that we don't waste them. But now, commodities are being priced more of what they are worth, and so, those incentives will naturally follow.
So, yeah, wall street is taking a beating and equities might well take a beating forever. But, if I owned a mine or a farm, I'd probably be making out ok. In fact, you can see that some companies are making money hand over fist - railroads are doing really well, as are all of your farming and mining and drilling concerns.
If you are any kind of economicist you would realize that no functioning economy in the world today taxes at a rate that exceeds the Laffer curve inflection point. Regeanomics is a ridiculous idea
First off, the argument of Reaganomics is that the industrialized world is actually to the -right- of the inflection point, in other words, taxes are too high.
Meanwhile, the rest of the industrialized world has lowered corporate tax rates and investment tax rates below that of the USA. So, yeah, on one hand, you have the Europeans saying that Reaganomics is terrible, and people like you say, "oh yeah, you are so right"... but then, the Europeans lower their taxes, and suddenly the Euro goes sky high because of the flood of investment into the old continent.
Yeah, the EU is saying Reaganomic sucks, but that's not what they did, and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
Hasn't Reganomics been pretty firmly debunked by now?
Reaganomics has been adopted world wide and as such has produced the largest wave of economic expansion, on the planet, in human history. There's two problems with the USA right now. One is short term and the other long. The short term problem is admittedly part of some fiscal stupidity by President Bush, but the long term problem is by fiscal stupidity of liberals.
The long term and fundamental economic problem faced by most governments is that they have exploding costs for entitlements. In the USA this is social security and medicare and medicaid and the various state programs that compliment them. The liberal mistake here, is that they built these entitlements based on the idea that the population would rapidly expand, which is fine because everything worked when the population was expanding. But, then, liberals started passing out birth control and embarked on a program of women's rights, which is a good thing for women, for sure... but, its just, if you don't have a bigger generation coming in, you can't afford to spend lavishly on the previous one.
That's really our problem. We can choose between a lavish entitlements system, or women's rights, but we can't fiscally afford to pick both. To put it another way, if it costs $500 a day to put grammy in a nursing home for a month to get over a flu, then, you know, a single child simply cannot afford that at all... and, even if you did try and plug the gap by taxing the wealthy at exhorbitant rates, all you'd have is a country in total economic free fall because there would be nothing left to invest in the current generation or its children.
Extremely high taxes for the rich also aren't going to prevent them from getting wealthier. Sure, it makes them grumble, but even if you take a whopping 50% off of a $2 million paycheck, you're still left with a hell of a lot of dough
So basically, what you are saying is, that someone who works through college, grad school, works extra hours and gets ahead, or starts a business, now, has to carry the people that just smoked pot in high school and graduated through social promotion. Boy, that's not right. Why not cut some of the slackers on the bottom end loose?
The thing is too, is that, you have this notion that most people like this get a "paycheck". The paycheck they get is related to an investment and that investment has a return. If the return is really low, they aren't even going to bother. To put it another way, if someone has to spend 1.95 million to get the 2 million paycheck, and you just took have that paycheck, you've just killed the investment side and the jobs that went with it.
On the other hand, if your tax cuts for the wealthy really do cause them to spend considerably more, this could in turn induce a wave of inflation, which would absolutely devastate the middle and lower classes.
Actually, in this country, tax cuts for everyone has lead to an increase in the manufacturing capacity of the United States. Right now, USA exports are -higher- than they have ever been.
Misogyny isn't the right word, but it's certainly a long way from fairness.
The point you miss, though is, if you have a woman that is running around punching men as hard as she can, then, she's probably punching and abusing other people as well, so someone needs to actually demonstrate to her that she too needs to pick on someone her own size, or better still, not pick on someone at all.
It's exactly this behavior which has me ( and I believe much of the *rest of the world* ) worried about a large, fading, greedy empire.
I think the rest of the world will be more pissed off when Obama and Co close the doors of trade. They may not like the war in Iraq, but, I guarantee you that when japanese cars, chinese goods, Germans things, are all stuck in their own respective ports, they will be a lot more bitter about the USA than they are today. Some American adventure in a far away land is a bad thing in the abstract, but American policy actions that throw millions of people out of work around the world are surely a lot more concrete.
there's an angry bear for you to take a swing at.
The angry bear needs to learn that from here on out, if it tries to pick on its neighbors, that, they have an uncle whose going to take up for them.
Except they don't want our stuff. They want us out of their affairs, and to stop babying Israel. I say give it to them.
It's a total lie. Haven't you noticed? In the 1980s, we were told that terrorism would stop if we just talked to the them. Well, it didn't. Then we were told that terrorism would stop if we just recognized the them, and it didn't. Then, well, if we just gave the them a country, then, they would stop, and they didn't. In an case you haven't noticed, EVERYTHING is a provocation to the Islamic world and no matter what we do, its always going to be a provocation and an excuse for terrorism right up until they turn the entire planet into a Caliphate.
Arguing that Islamists can be negotiated with, is, in fact, just like asking a battered woman to be more reasonable with her abusive husband. The husband is the problem, not the woman.
How ironic it is, that, we hear a bunch of liberals bitching about those terrible people on Wall Street, in New York, and it turns out those terrible people on Wall Street took such a beating that the state is looking at a nearly billion dollar tax short fall. Thus, in New York we learn the ultimately failing of progressive taxation, just as we have learned nationally. If the rich do not make any money, the government is screwed.
I'm sick of hearing everyone try and talk about increasing taxes as "providing revenue". It's an insult to compare the activities of government to the activities of the private sector. Government is basically a collection of pie in the sky power mongers that use the power of the gun, cops directed by the legislature, to impose their financial will on people. By contrast, all a private company do is offer a good or a service in return, and thus they are compelled to offer something back.
New York, in particular, is disgusting. They have a tax policy that reflects decades of liberal orthodoxy and the stupidity of the results just staggers the mind. I mean, they raise taxes on cigarettes, and are suddenly horrified to find that people do not buy cigarettes in New York. Now, what do you think the enlightened liberals do up there? Do you think they set the tax at a more reasonable level? No... they call out the cops and pass even -more- laws designed to try and ban people from cigarettes from out of state.
Now, of course, they reach out and are suing, again, with the barrel of the legislative gun, trying to sue someone outside of the state, like a crab or a cancer spreading and grasping desperately for any piece of loot that it can steal.... and they call this revenue.
If installing a faux democracy in Iraq has reduced terrorism, why are there more terrorists in Iraq now than before under Saddam?
Whose to say that they weren't there under Saddam, just, they were working for him. You know, gassing the kurds and shiites with American weapons, as you so fondly pointed out earlier.
What a stretch. Your whole bizarre argument rests on thinking of Iraq as having a functioning democracy
Um, no. You think my argument rests on a democracy being in Iraq. I think there is and I think that the Iraqi government is asking the USA to leave in 2011 indicates that they think so too.
But... the thrust of my argument is, that, if the USA is responsible for terrorism, by, as you would argue, putting in tyrants and also exploiting the natural resources of third world nations, then, inverting those policies should reduce terrorism, would it not? Similarly, sticking to those horrific policies would in fact continue to foment terrorism.
Terrorism has political and economic components, so the argument goes. There's economic dislocation, or poverty, inflicted by the horrible American exploitation of the third world through low oil prices. Thus, it follows that high oil prices would be good for the third world and I would argue that the hundreds of billions dollars and euros headed towards arabia are not exactly hurting the cause.
Now, again, if Obama lowers the oil prices, then, he would be fomenting terrorism in the region. If he completely cuts off the middle east from importing oil, and thus, starves them all to do death, then don't you think that economic dislocation would cause more terrorism, rather than less?
Similarly, if Obama returns to RealPolitik and lets Iraq collapse, if it does in fact collapse, and then, a dictatorship thus rises -directly because of his decision-, then, is he not, again, fomenting terrorism in the middle east - even more -.
I mean, you can't have your cake and eat it too. IF the middle eastern oil kingdoms are ripping America off, and making out like bandits, as Democrats argue, then how in the hell does that foment terrorism, when they are happy campers?
Indeed, one might make the argument that $100/bbl oil has done more to win the war on terror, particular in Iraq, then has anything else. Even David Petreaus has said as much.
Then, let's see, under Bush, oil prices have gone up, increasing the standard of living in middle eastern states, and, Bush has put in a democracy in Iraq, which, despite all the violence, is actually growing rather dramatically economically.
So.. if, as you say, terrorism is America's fault, then, when Obama comes in, and quits buying foreign oil, or drives oil prices down, then, wouldn't you say that Obama would be fomenting terrorism? I mean, if we cut a people off from their only means of income, wouldn't they be pissed off?
Incidentally, if the Kurds are so pissed off at the USA, then, why has there not been a single American combat casualty in Kurdish Iraq -during the entire war-. Seems to me, that between the no-fly zone first and then the removal of Saddam, second, the Kurds are actually pretty damned happy with the USA. Similarly, the lion's share of American troubles in Iraq were with the Sunnis, who were associated with Saddam. Since the invasion, Bush has restored the marshes, drained by Saddam, that were the economic lifeblood of Shiites, and furthermore, the guys that were elected in the elections brought about by Bush, were in fact, primarily all shiites!
Now your man Obama would say that that was all mistake, that we should have let Saddam continue to oppress the Shiites and the Kurds, excaberating the very problem that YOU claim the USA to have caused.
I mean, if you sincerely believe that the USA's sponsorship of putting in dictatorships in the 1950s was the cause of today's terrorism, then doesn't it make sense that Bush's policy of removing the dictatorships the USA installed, at least in Iraq, seem to be conceptually the right thing to do?
So...guys who say, are only using boxcutters when they try to take over a plane, we treat them as criminals?
Actually, yes. 9/11 wouldn't have happened if they just had better doors on the plane and if the pilot had a piece. Guys with boxcutters, lock the door, dive the plane and shake the terrorists about. Land. Let the cops come in. No 9/11, no need for the war(s).
But once the plane was used as a weapon, well, that's a big boy bomb, and big boy bomb rules apply.
You, my good sir, are the one living in a fantasy world. By attacking "terrorists" as if they are a nation state (which they are NOT, by any definition I've ever read),
We are all nation states now. That's just the thing. Technological advances have made it so that any citizen can effectively wage war. 200 years ago, could a single man bring down a building? No, you needed a bunch of people. Now, a single man with a good truck bomb can take out an entire building with hundreds of people in it, if he wants.
Generally speaking, you are right. Government is by the consent of the governed and simply as a practical matter, when the power of individuals to resist is so high, you have to have the central government make -some- compromises. But, what's happening now is that ever smaller minorities, aided by ever larger advances in technology, are being allowed to bully an ever larger amount of people. This isn't an act of crime, it is an act of war and you have to respond as if it is war.
As far as the Geneva Convention goes, Al Qaeda didn't sign it. If you don't sign the geneva convention, the other party in the war isn't obligated to abide by it either. This didn't just happen in our time. During World War II, the Japanese didn't sign onto the Geneva Convention and really opened the war by essentially killing all the allied POWs. So the USA didn't actually take many prisoners back...
In fact, did you know that, at the end of World War II, Eisenhower was so pissed off when he discovered the death camps that he actually REVOKED the POW status of German soldiers and thus denied them Geneva Convention rights? They got their food and red cross packages per the convention, but the deal was, that, from a perspective of international law, they had no rights at all, and only got what they got in terms of fair treatment by the Allies as a gift, rather than any treaty mandate.
Al Qaeda captured are not US citizens and thus are not afforded the protections of American law. That's pretty simple.
I don't believe that our foreign policy created terrorists. There has been an expansionist and radical component to Islam for 1500 years, and it simply continues to this day. Bin Laden and company might use imagined abuses as an excuse for their acts, but they see themselves more like the conquering caliphs of old, before those caliphs got crushed by the mongols.
Is that he should have just told Hillary to stuff it at the convention and put a muzzle on her husband. Yes, I understand the need for unity and to make everyone happy, but, Democrats are foolish to pretend that someone who is an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton is going to be voting Republican anyway. She shouldn't be getting huge spots on the convention and neither should he. There shouldn't be a big roll call - he won the nomination and this is his event.
And who decides what the line is between "criminals" who get a day in court and "terrorists" who you feel should be shot on sight? You? George Bush? Whoever has the gun?
That's a pretty damned good question, I'll give you that.
How about this. IF we say that someone who has a rifle is a criminal, they get tried like a criminal, but if they are coming at you with a big bomb of some kind, you kill them.
The thing about terrorism is that it's just a function of technological advance. It used to be that you had to have a nation state to wage a war, but now, just like anyone can print 100 books at home, anyone can start a war. So, I would say, if they've got a big ass bomb, then yeah, you just assume the declaration of war and kill them. If they got a pistol and are just shooting up a 7-11 to get some crack, they get a trial and jail. IT's two entirely different things.
The weapon of choice determines the scale. Crime - little weapons - terrorists - big weapons, get it?
The difference between Ike and LBJ is that, as you pointed out, in Ike's Vietnam, the Vietnamese did the fighting, but in LBJ's Vietnam, it was the United States.
I mean, saying Ike invaded Vietnam is like saying that Bill Clinton invaded Iraq first. It's just a gross distortion of history.
Yeah, I read the Maliki thing too. I'm like, if he wants out on 2011, why not say, "hell yes." I think this is ultimately what's going to happen... but, I think there's some theater going on where we have to make Maliki really look like he's kicking us out so his government doesn't immediately collapse into civil war after we leave.
Where's Dick Armey and Jack Kemp, when you need them? When those two got out of politics, that's really when the Republican Party went to the shitter.
The thing is, the deregulation of the banking market was well intended. The Republicans wanted to see everyone who wanted to have a house, get a house. To do that required money. To get that money, without raising taxes, they allowed investment banks to get into the mortgage business. Since mortgages promise a guaranteed return on the investment to a lender that exceeds most other instruments - even some stocks and many bonds, there was a flood of money into the mortgage space, and everyone who wanted a house, pretty much got a house. Of course, in that starry eyed vision of deciding that everyone should have a house, Republicans never asked, "hey, should everyone -really- have a house?"
As far as civil liberties go, I think, in total, you could make the argument that people are more free today than they were under Clinton. Yes, there is the likely chance that the NSA is reading all of our email (encrypted or not), but, the IRS has been demanding all of our financial transactions for more than our lifetimes and that's way, way worse. At least, under Bush, IRS enforcement has been chopped and new taxpayer rights were enacted. And, taxes were cut.
SO yeah, under Bush, and ostensibly McCain, the government reads all my email, but, at least I still have the right to more of my money and the right to invest where -I- think it should be invested. Conversely, Obama actually has not promised to stop reading my email, but, taxes are going to up and there's going to be all sorts of regulation, plus, he's going to try and take away my guns at some point.
All in all, I would prefer if Republicans actually got back to favoring limited government. At this point, I think we could probably attract some tech types by throwing the FBI and ATF onto the chopping block along with the IRS, Dept of Education and Environment.
Fighting terrorists is like getting hit by a woman. If she hits you like a man, you hit her back like a man. If a terrorist hits you like a nation state, then you hit them back, like a nation state. That means, no courts, no tribunals, only war and death for them.
So yeah, I would almost agree that the torture of three Al Qaeda operatives was bad morally. We should have killed them on site!
You need to stop pretending that terrorism is a criminal act. Criminals don't seek to destroy a government or a people - as they ultimately are a sort of parasite that needs its host to live. Terrorists want to destroy the state and take over. You seem to want to live in a fantasy world where boundaries of the world's nations matter. They don't. They don't matter to software developers, corporations, leftists, rightists, and they certainly don't matter to terrorists.
You and your kind keep intimidating that the best course for the USA is to cut some sort of a deal with radical Islam. Perhaps we should reason with them. Well, maybe you should have spared everyone 50 million dead and not guaranteed Polish neutrality in 1939 or perhaps just handed Singapore over to the Imperial Japanese Army. Quite often, people that want to kill you and take your stuff aren't interested in reason, they are only interested in your stuff, and your life is just a trouble to them. But be that as it may, what sort of compromises with Al Qaeda should we make? Where was the criminal court for the WTC occupants, for Daniel Pearl and for all the Iraqi people they beheaded? There wasn't any. These people are evil and there's no negotiating with them.
So tell us, what compromise in the name of peace in our time should we make with Al Qaeda and other radical islamic groups? Shall we permit men to beat their wives? Shall we allow polygamy? Maybe we should encourage illiteracy. What other book do you need besides the Koran. I've read enough of your police state + compromise with Islam crap in the UK and I can see that it is absolute crap. You can turn London into Al London if you like, but I prefer Washington DC to stay Washington DC, and if the Muzzies don't like it, then fuck them. They've already shit up their own part of the world and can't even put together a meaningful economy despite loads of oil money, and we're supposed to adopt elements of that failed culture?
I still think white people are basically a cross between homo sapiens and neanderthals. Like, somewhere along the way, super strong neanderthal dudes came in, grabbed the homo sapiens women, and thus, white people were born. I think there's no other possible explanation for our horrific sense of fashion and penchant for shiny metal objects. I'm just about to tell my wife, that, I can't help my need for a quad motherboard and a 400 hp sportscar... I'm just genetically doomed because of my neanderthal genes.
You know, since it is the government, I think we should probably let them know that sending around DVD's with Terrorists.mdb is probably not the thing to do. I wonder what will happen when they have more than 2gb of suspects?
You know, I'm not a big fan of the Democrats, but you guys need to chill out. Not every single thing the party does is a political statement of some kind and people need to stop getting so heads up into politics that they would think this is the case. What's next, there's some statement about Charmin because they used that kind of toilet paper?
It used be that the DNC was probably a really good time (this conservative notes that liberals are always fun to party with) but the interests of political correctness has completely turned into a horrible sounding green statement with terrible food and multiple warnings about drinking too much.
Seriously, just because a drunk delegate takes a gas guzzling cab to get back to the hotel doesn't mean that they aren't in favor of raising CAFE standards.
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Conservative neo-cons in the Bush Administration went for a little trip in Iraq that cost three trillion dollars
It's not three trillion dollars, its about a trillion dollars so far. And, geez, we get, at the end of the day, a democracy in Iraq and improved access to over 50 trillion dollars worth of oil.
I think that, over time, trade with Iraq will wind up recovering the cost of the war. Still, if you want an immediate cash windfall to the government, then, I'd open up Alaska for drilling. There's a trillion dollars of oil sitting in ANWR alone, and that would certainly pay for the war. Then, we get access, for that investment, to all of that oil in Iraq....
Taxing cigarettes is not meant to bring in more revenue. It's meant to reduce cigarette smoking, which places a huge burden on the public health system.
No its not. It's a revenue tool. If it were a revenue tool, states would not be spending the money on their general fund and would be stashing it for the cigarette health care expenses, but that's not what they did. Look at New Jersey. Where's their rainy day fund? They get all that money from cigarettes and they just spent it on all sorts of stupid stuff completely unrelated to the problem you described.
In short, your post was stupid
My post was brilliant!
The economy did not fall on its ass because of progressive taxation.
The economy hasn't "fallen on its ass". What has happened was that conservative economics created so much demand for raw materials that, commodities that were once practically free now cost something. That's an adjustment and it indicates that the world economy is doing better, not worse.
So yeah, morons that invested in stocks and questionable securities took a beating because, geez, investors realized that the best way to park your money is to actually park them in commodities, and they've done out well. Farmers are doing better, mines are doing better, oil cos are doing better. It's really only wall street and the whole financial services sector that is taking it on the chin, and since most of us in computing work in financial services, it looks worse than it is.
If you like smoking so much, why don't you legalize marijuana and save on the billions we've spent on the war on drugs? It'd also free up more prison space.
The bulk of people in prison for drugs are not in prison for pot. Pot is already decriminalized in many, if not most states, despite what the Feds say. As for prison space, quite honestly, we shouldn't spend so much per prisoner anyway.
Reaganomics never worked, and never will, because all it does is put more money in the hands of the rich and fucks the poor.
What poor has Reaganomics fucked, prey tell? The poor that now have at least one family car? The poor that have TV's, designer shoes, new clothes, food so much that they are fat, a higher home ownership rate than ever before, playstations, xboxes, ipods, cell phones... do you mean those poor?
America's poor are in some ways arguably richer than the middle class of America was 30 years ago. They have more stuff, and in fact, they have so much more stuff, not only in America, but in every place where capitalism has been put into place, that the biggest complaint from the left wing these days is that the poor actually have too much stuff. When you distill away all the crap and lies about saving the planet, at the very heart of the idea of environmental movement is to make poor people have -less- stuff, not more.
This is just horseshit for one very good reason... the population is expanding! It may not be expanding at the same rate but it continues to do so. Changes in the rate are to be expected. The problem with our entitlements is that the money that's supposed to be for them have been raided by democrats and republicans alike. They are running out of money because politicians take money out inappropriately and don't put it back
The population is not expanding enough, relative to the amount of money being blown on entitlements. And the other thing is, people are living longer and medical care is more exotic and more expensive. It simply isn't.
Let's look at one thing, a heart bypass. That will set you back anywhere from 50k to 200k, depending on what's involved. That's at least a car, if not a house. Now, let's toss in a few months at nursing home for grandma, maybe mom does a year long cancer battle, and you can pretty much see that there's just no way people can afford to pay for all of this.
Your simplistic answer is to just claim, "oh, inequality", and keep going on about national health care... but you lie to the American people and you don't admit that what national health care is, is rationing. Health care will get cheaper, because the government is going to flat out say no to the bypass, no to the exotic drugs, just so everyone can get some care.
First off, its not conservatives that -insist- on capping spending. That's Democrats. Every year you keep putting more and more into medicare and social security until they've gone from consuming 5% of the federal budget to close to %50, with projections to grow all the way until they consume everything.
It's you stupid liberals that can't do basic math. You can't hand 9 people a federal entitlement out of the dole off of the efforts of one man, and that's what you would do. At some point, families have to pay for their own health care, their own retirement, and their own dying, and THAT, my friend, is a lesson that every civilization has known for 6000 years.
Clinton wasn't too bad, fiscal wise, but don't forget that he had a Republican congress that voted no to nearly every single one of his proposals.
Reagan would have been great, if the Dems had shut down the Dept of Education and trimmed entitlements, like he proposed. His tax cuts though, produced a giant increase to the federal treasury.
Bush Jr would have been great, if HIS plans to trim entitlements would have been acted upon. But of course, Democrats just want the entitlements to grow unchecked until the whole wealth of the nation is consumed into a socialist state, which is of course, exactly what they want. Democrats DON'T WANT PEOPLE TO SUCCEED, because, if someone succeeds, that means, to them, that someone else didn't.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. In the context of taxes, it's not a meaningless epithet; the sales tax is not progressive, it is flat
Actually the sales tax is regressive.. but that's another story. I was really thinking more about how income taxes tend to be shifted to the rich. What happens now is that, because the taxes are stacked so much on the wealthy, the revenue stream for the government is wildly unstable.
The thing is, about Republican politics, is that, they haven't honestly told the whole story about how taxation is supposed to work. Really, to get the lowest overall rate, everyone has to pay -some- taxes. But what's happened over the years is that this has been translated into the idea of tax cuts and for the wealthy to get tax cuts, thus, the middle class has to get them, and right now, poor people aren't paying any taxes at all.
If you really wanted to maximize both the size and the stability of the tax stream against all other goals - in other words, without being "nice about it", you should probably have a federal sales tax to tax the poor and criminal classes and enough of one to also be an effective tax increase on the middle class, and then lower the tax rates on the rich so that effectively, everyone is paying the same overall rate. That minimizes the risk to the tax collection portfolio.. oh christ, there I go using that "revenue" term that i just flamed about, by spreading it to the most people.
Then, if taxes are too high for people, then you cut them, but you also have to decide what out of government you don't want. Realistically, at the federal level, this is going to mean BOTH a capping of the entitlements AND a cut to the size of the defense budget.
In the face of that, when you look at the candidates, you can see that both are pretty much retarded. Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich and then tease with a middle class tax cut and take the poor off the roles altogether, completely destabalizing the payment stream. McCain wants to lock in Bush's taxes, which is ok, but he also needs to think about a national sales tax, to hit the poor with. Both sides need to chop spending. In Obama's case, that means saying by by to his big social programs, and in McCain's case, it means that the army shouldn't get Future Combat System and the Navy might need just build more normal ships, and the air force might need to choose one kind of fighter rather than two.
Yeah, Wall Street never does poorly in a nationwide recession...
The thing is, the recession isn't nationwide. It's actually concentrated in the financial services and media sectors, so, for reporters, its a lot worse than it really is. The media sector is taking a beating because of tech change.. basically, the media is obsolete. The financial sector is taking a beating because the whole idea of paying someone to carefully manage your stocks and other investments to get a higher rate of return is ridiculous when basic commodities, as it turns out, are the thing that has the most intrinsic value. I mean, there's plenty of labor on the planet to shape a piece of steel into a car, so, ultimately, making cars is, from an investment point of view, almost valueless. But if I've got that piece of steel, coal, iron, or oil, well, that's something.
Most of this generation is used to the ideas of commodities being free, and what we call a recession, is really, well, just an adjustment to commodities -not- being free. Indeed, the whole fiscal idea behind enviro-taxes is to actually make commodities have a price so that we don't waste them. But now, commodities are being priced more of what they are worth, and so, those incentives will naturally follow.
So, yeah, wall street is taking a beating and equities might well take a beating forever. But, if I owned a mine or a farm, I'd probably be making out ok. In fact, you can see that some companies are making money hand over fist - railroads are doing really well, as are all of your farming and mining and drilling concerns.
Commodities cost something. Get used to it.
If you are any kind of economicist you would realize that no functioning economy in the world today taxes at a rate that exceeds the Laffer curve inflection point. Regeanomics is a ridiculous idea
First off, the argument of Reaganomics is that the industrialized world is actually to the -right- of the inflection point, in other words, taxes are too high.
Meanwhile, the rest of the industrialized world has lowered corporate tax rates and investment tax rates below that of the USA. So, yeah, on one hand, you have the Europeans saying that Reaganomics is terrible, and people like you say, "oh yeah, you are so right"... but then, the Europeans lower their taxes, and suddenly the Euro goes sky high because of the flood of investment into the old continent.
Yeah, the EU is saying Reaganomic sucks, but that's not what they did, and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
Hasn't Reganomics been pretty firmly debunked by now?
Reaganomics has been adopted world wide and as such has produced the largest wave of economic expansion, on the planet, in human history. There's two problems with the USA right now. One is short term and the other long. The short term problem is admittedly part of some fiscal stupidity by President Bush, but the long term problem is by fiscal stupidity of liberals.
The long term and fundamental economic problem faced by most governments is that they have exploding costs for entitlements. In the USA this is social security and medicare and medicaid and the various state programs that compliment them. The liberal mistake here, is that they built these entitlements based on the idea that the population would rapidly expand, which is fine because everything worked when the population was expanding. But, then, liberals started passing out birth control and embarked on a program of women's rights, which is a good thing for women, for sure... but, its just, if you don't have a bigger generation coming in, you can't afford to spend lavishly on the previous one.
That's really our problem. We can choose between a lavish entitlements system, or women's rights, but we can't fiscally afford to pick both. To put it another way, if it costs $500 a day to put grammy in a nursing home for a month to get over a flu, then, you know, a single child simply cannot afford that at all... and, even if you did try and plug the gap by taxing the wealthy at exhorbitant rates, all you'd have is a country in total economic free fall because there would be nothing left to invest in the current generation or its children.
Extremely high taxes for the rich also aren't going to prevent them from getting wealthier. Sure, it makes them grumble, but even if you take a whopping 50% off of a $2 million paycheck, you're still left with a hell of a lot of dough
So basically, what you are saying is, that someone who works through college, grad school, works extra hours and gets ahead, or starts a business, now, has to carry the people that just smoked pot in high school and graduated through social promotion. Boy, that's not right. Why not cut some of the slackers on the bottom end loose?
The thing is too, is that, you have this notion that most people like this get a "paycheck". The paycheck they get is related to an investment and that investment has a return. If the return is really low, they aren't even going to bother. To put it another way, if someone has to spend 1.95 million to get the 2 million paycheck, and you just took have that paycheck, you've just killed the investment side and the jobs that went with it.
On the other hand, if your tax cuts for the wealthy really do cause them to spend considerably more, this could in turn induce a wave of inflation, which would absolutely devastate the middle and lower classes.
Actually, in this country, tax cuts for everyone has lead to an increase in the manufacturing capacity of the United States. Right now, USA exports are -higher- than they have ever been.
Misogyny isn't the right word, but it's certainly a long way from fairness.
The point you miss, though is, if you have a woman that is running around punching men as hard as she can, then, she's probably punching and abusing other people as well, so someone needs to actually demonstrate to her that she too needs to pick on someone her own size, or better still, not pick on someone at all.
It's exactly this behavior which has me ( and I believe much of the *rest of the world* ) worried about a large, fading, greedy empire.
I think the rest of the world will be more pissed off when Obama and Co close the doors of trade. They may not like the war in Iraq, but, I guarantee you that when japanese cars, chinese goods, Germans things, are all stuck in their own respective ports, they will be a lot more bitter about the USA than they are today. Some American adventure in a far away land is a bad thing in the abstract, but American policy actions that throw millions of people out of work around the world are surely a lot more concrete.
there's an angry bear for you to take a swing at.
The angry bear needs to learn that from here on out, if it tries to pick on its neighbors, that, they have an uncle whose going to take up for them.
Except they don't want our stuff. They want us out of their affairs, and to stop babying Israel. I say give it to them.
It's a total lie. Haven't you noticed? In the 1980s, we were told that terrorism would stop if we just talked to the them. Well, it didn't. Then we were told that terrorism would stop if we just recognized the them, and it didn't. Then, well, if we just gave the them a country, then, they would stop, and they didn't. In an case you haven't noticed, EVERYTHING is a provocation to the Islamic world and no matter what we do, its always going to be a provocation and an excuse for terrorism right up until they turn the entire planet into a Caliphate.
Arguing that Islamists can be negotiated with, is, in fact, just like asking a battered woman to be more reasonable with her abusive husband. The husband is the problem, not the woman.
How ironic it is, that, we hear a bunch of liberals bitching about those terrible people on Wall Street, in New York, and it turns out those terrible people on Wall Street took such a beating that the state is looking at a nearly billion dollar tax short fall. Thus, in New York we learn the ultimately failing of progressive taxation, just as we have learned nationally. If the rich do not make any money, the government is screwed.
I'm sick of hearing everyone try and talk about increasing taxes as "providing revenue". It's an insult to compare the activities of government to the activities of the private sector. Government is basically a collection of pie in the sky power mongers that use the power of the gun, cops directed by the legislature, to impose their financial will on people. By contrast, all a private company do is offer a good or a service in return, and thus they are compelled to offer something back.
New York, in particular, is disgusting. They have a tax policy that reflects decades of liberal orthodoxy and the stupidity of the results just staggers the mind. I mean, they raise taxes on cigarettes, and are suddenly horrified to find that people do not buy cigarettes in New York. Now, what do you think the enlightened liberals do up there? Do you think they set the tax at a more reasonable level? No... they call out the cops and pass even -more- laws designed to try and ban people from cigarettes from out of state.
Now, of course, they reach out and are suing, again, with the barrel of the legislative gun, trying to sue someone outside of the state, like a crab or a cancer spreading and grasping desperately for any piece of loot that it can steal.... and they call this revenue.
If installing a faux democracy in Iraq has reduced terrorism, why are there more terrorists in Iraq now than before under Saddam?
Whose to say that they weren't there under Saddam, just, they were working for him. You know, gassing the kurds and shiites with American weapons, as you so fondly pointed out earlier.
What a stretch. Your whole bizarre argument rests on thinking of Iraq as having a functioning democracy
Um, no. You think my argument rests on a democracy being in Iraq. I think there is and I think that the Iraqi government is asking the USA to leave in 2011 indicates that they think so too.
But... the thrust of my argument is, that, if the USA is responsible for terrorism, by, as you would argue, putting in tyrants and also exploiting the natural resources of third world nations, then, inverting those policies should reduce terrorism, would it not? Similarly, sticking to those horrific policies would in fact continue to foment terrorism.
Terrorism has political and economic components, so the argument goes. There's economic dislocation, or poverty, inflicted by the horrible American exploitation of the third world through low oil prices. Thus, it follows that high oil prices would be good for the third world and I would argue that the hundreds of billions dollars and euros headed towards arabia are not exactly hurting the cause.
Now, again, if Obama lowers the oil prices, then, he would be fomenting terrorism in the region. If he completely cuts off the middle east from importing oil, and thus, starves them all to do death, then don't you think that economic dislocation would cause more terrorism, rather than less?
Similarly, if Obama returns to RealPolitik and lets Iraq collapse, if it does in fact collapse, and then, a dictatorship thus rises -directly because of his decision-, then, is he not, again, fomenting terrorism in the middle east - even more -.
I mean, you can't have your cake and eat it too. IF the middle eastern oil kingdoms are ripping America off, and making out like bandits, as Democrats argue, then how in the hell does that foment terrorism, when they are happy campers?
Indeed, one might make the argument that $100/bbl oil has done more to win the war on terror, particular in Iraq, then has anything else. Even David Petreaus has said as much.
Then, let's see, under Bush, oil prices have gone up, increasing the standard of living in middle eastern states, and, Bush has put in a democracy in Iraq, which, despite all the violence, is actually growing rather dramatically economically.
So.. if, as you say, terrorism is America's fault, then, when Obama comes in, and quits buying foreign oil, or drives oil prices down, then, wouldn't you say that Obama would be fomenting terrorism? I mean, if we cut a people off from their only means of income, wouldn't they be pissed off?
Incidentally, if the Kurds are so pissed off at the USA, then, why has there not been a single American combat casualty in Kurdish Iraq -during the entire war-. Seems to me, that between the no-fly zone first and then the removal of Saddam, second, the Kurds are actually pretty damned happy with the USA. Similarly, the lion's share of American troubles in Iraq were with the Sunnis, who were associated with Saddam. Since the invasion, Bush has restored the marshes, drained by Saddam, that were the economic lifeblood of Shiites, and furthermore, the guys that were elected in the elections brought about by Bush, were in fact, primarily all shiites!
Now your man Obama would say that that was all mistake, that we should have let Saddam continue to oppress the Shiites and the Kurds, excaberating the very problem that YOU claim the USA to have caused.
I mean, if you sincerely believe that the USA's sponsorship of putting in dictatorships in the 1950s was the cause of today's terrorism, then doesn't it make sense that Bush's policy of removing the dictatorships the USA installed, at least in Iraq, seem to be conceptually the right thing to do?
So...guys who say, are only using boxcutters when they try to take over a plane, we treat them as criminals?
Actually, yes. 9/11 wouldn't have happened if they just had better doors on the plane and if the pilot had a piece. Guys with boxcutters, lock the door, dive the plane and shake the terrorists about. Land. Let the cops come in. No 9/11, no need for the war(s).
But once the plane was used as a weapon, well, that's a big boy bomb, and big boy bomb rules apply.
You, my good sir, are the one living in a fantasy world. By attacking "terrorists" as if they are a nation state (which they are NOT, by any definition I've ever read),
We are all nation states now. That's just the thing. Technological advances have made it so that any citizen can effectively wage war. 200 years ago, could a single man bring down a building? No, you needed a bunch of people. Now, a single man with a good truck bomb can take out an entire building with hundreds of people in it, if he wants.
Generally speaking, you are right. Government is by the consent of the governed and simply as a practical matter, when the power of individuals to resist is so high, you have to have the central government make -some- compromises. But, what's happening now is that ever smaller minorities, aided by ever larger advances in technology, are being allowed to bully an ever larger amount of people. This isn't an act of crime, it is an act of war and you have to respond as if it is war.
As far as the Geneva Convention goes, Al Qaeda didn't sign it. If you don't sign the geneva convention, the other party in the war isn't obligated to abide by it either. This didn't just happen in our time. During World War II, the Japanese didn't sign onto the Geneva Convention and really opened the war by essentially killing all the allied POWs. So the USA didn't actually take many prisoners back...
In fact, did you know that, at the end of World War II, Eisenhower was so pissed off when he discovered the death camps that he actually REVOKED the POW status of German soldiers and thus denied them Geneva Convention rights? They got their food and red cross packages per the convention, but the deal was, that, from a perspective of international law, they had no rights at all, and only got what they got in terms of fair treatment by the Allies as a gift, rather than any treaty mandate.
Al Qaeda captured are not US citizens and thus are not afforded the protections of American law. That's pretty simple.
I don't believe that our foreign policy created terrorists. There has been an expansionist and radical component to Islam for 1500 years, and it simply continues to this day. Bin Laden and company might use imagined abuses as an excuse for their acts, but they see themselves more like the conquering caliphs of old, before those caliphs got crushed by the mongols.
Is that he should have just told Hillary to stuff it at the convention and put a muzzle on her husband. Yes, I understand the need for unity and to make everyone happy, but, Democrats are foolish to pretend that someone who is an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton is going to be voting Republican anyway. She shouldn't be getting huge spots on the convention and neither should he. There shouldn't be a big roll call - he won the nomination and this is his event.
And who decides what the line is between "criminals" who get a day in court and "terrorists" who you feel should be shot on sight? You? George Bush? Whoever has the gun?
That's a pretty damned good question, I'll give you that.
How about this. IF we say that someone who has a rifle is a criminal, they get tried like a criminal, but if they are coming at you with a big bomb of some kind, you kill them.
The thing about terrorism is that it's just a function of technological advance. It used to be that you had to have a nation state to wage a war, but now, just like anyone can print 100 books at home, anyone can start a war. So, I would say, if they've got a big ass bomb, then yeah, you just assume the declaration of war and kill them. If they got a pistol and are just shooting up a 7-11 to get some crack, they get a trial and jail. IT's two entirely different things.
The weapon of choice determines the scale. Crime - little weapons - terrorists - big weapons, get it?
The difference between Ike and LBJ is that, as you pointed out, in Ike's Vietnam, the Vietnamese did the fighting, but in LBJ's Vietnam, it was the United States.
I mean, saying Ike invaded Vietnam is like saying that Bill Clinton invaded Iraq first. It's just a gross distortion of history.
Yeah, I read the Maliki thing too. I'm like, if he wants out on 2011, why not say, "hell yes." I think this is ultimately what's going to happen... but, I think there's some theater going on where we have to make Maliki really look like he's kicking us out so his government doesn't immediately collapse into civil war after we leave.
Where's Dick Armey and Jack Kemp, when you need them? When those two got out of politics, that's really when the Republican Party went to the shitter.
The thing is, the deregulation of the banking market was well intended. The Republicans wanted to see everyone who wanted to have a house, get a house. To do that required money. To get that money, without raising taxes, they allowed investment banks to get into the mortgage business. Since mortgages promise a guaranteed return on the investment to a lender that exceeds most other instruments - even some stocks and many bonds, there was a flood of money into the mortgage space, and everyone who wanted a house, pretty much got a house. Of course, in that starry eyed vision of deciding that everyone should have a house, Republicans never asked, "hey, should everyone -really- have a house?"
As far as civil liberties go, I think, in total, you could make the argument that people are more free today than they were under Clinton. Yes, there is the likely chance that the NSA is reading all of our email (encrypted or not), but, the IRS has been demanding all of our financial transactions for more than our lifetimes and that's way, way worse. At least, under Bush, IRS enforcement has been chopped and new taxpayer rights were enacted. And, taxes were cut.
SO yeah, under Bush, and ostensibly McCain, the government reads all my email, but, at least I still have the right to more of my money and the right to invest where -I- think it should be invested. Conversely, Obama actually has not promised to stop reading my email, but, taxes are going to up and there's going to be all sorts of regulation, plus, he's going to try and take away my guns at some point.
All in all, I would prefer if Republicans actually got back to favoring limited government. At this point, I think we could probably attract some tech types by throwing the FBI and ATF onto the chopping block along with the IRS, Dept of Education and Environment.
Fighting terrorists is like getting hit by a woman. If she hits you like a man, you hit her back like a man. If a terrorist hits you like a nation state, then you hit them back, like a nation state. That means, no courts, no tribunals, only war and death for them.
So yeah, I would almost agree that the torture of three Al Qaeda operatives was bad morally. We should have killed them on site!
You need to stop pretending that terrorism is a criminal act. Criminals don't seek to destroy a government or a people - as they ultimately are a sort of parasite that needs its host to live. Terrorists want to destroy the state and take over. You seem to want to live in a fantasy world where boundaries of the world's nations matter. They don't. They don't matter to software developers, corporations, leftists, rightists, and they certainly don't matter to terrorists.
You and your kind keep intimidating that the best course for the USA is to cut some sort of a deal with radical Islam. Perhaps we should reason with them. Well, maybe you should have spared everyone 50 million dead and not guaranteed Polish neutrality in 1939 or perhaps just handed Singapore over to the Imperial Japanese Army. Quite often, people that want to kill you and take your stuff aren't interested in reason, they are only interested in your stuff, and your life is just a trouble to them. But be that as it may, what sort of compromises with Al Qaeda should we make? Where was the criminal court for the WTC occupants, for Daniel Pearl and for all the Iraqi people they beheaded? There wasn't any. These people are evil and there's no negotiating with them.
So tell us, what compromise in the name of peace in our time should we make with Al Qaeda and other radical islamic groups? Shall we permit men to beat their wives? Shall we allow polygamy? Maybe we should encourage illiteracy. What other book do you need besides the Koran. I've read enough of your police state + compromise with Islam crap in the UK and I can see that it is absolute crap. You can turn London into Al London if you like, but I prefer Washington DC to stay Washington DC, and if the Muzzies don't like it, then fuck them. They've already shit up their own part of the world and can't even put together a meaningful economy despite loads of oil money, and we're supposed to adopt elements of that failed culture?
Get real.
I rate it unlikely that homo sapiens dudes would get sticky with neanderthal women,
Depends on when they invented beer, I guess.
I still think white people are basically a cross between homo sapiens and neanderthals. Like, somewhere along the way, super strong neanderthal dudes came in, grabbed the homo sapiens women, and thus, white people were born. I think there's no other possible explanation for our horrific sense of fashion and penchant for shiny metal objects. I'm just about to tell my wife, that, I can't help my need for a quad motherboard and a 400 hp sportscar... I'm just genetically doomed because of my neanderthal genes.
You know, since it is the government, I think we should probably let them know that sending around DVD's with Terrorists.mdb is probably not the thing to do. I wonder what will happen when they have more than 2gb of suspects?
You know, I'm not a big fan of the Democrats, but you guys need to chill out. Not every single thing the party does is a political statement of some kind and people need to stop getting so heads up into politics that they would think this is the case. What's next, there's some statement about Charmin because they used that kind of toilet paper?
It used be that the DNC was probably a really good time (this conservative notes that liberals are always fun to party with) but the interests of political correctness has completely turned into a horrible sounding green statement with terrible food and multiple warnings about drinking too much.
Seriously, just because a drunk delegate takes a gas guzzling cab to get back to the hotel doesn't mean that they aren't in favor of raising CAFE standards.