Btw, I seem to remember that Chimpy wanted to impose steel tarrifs in order to protect American industry some time ago? Remember how rapidly those tarrifs evapourated when some not so pleased Europeans decided it was payback time ?
Actually, the steel tariffs evaporated because many US manufacturers actually import their steel. So, when their steel costs went up, that actually screwed American manufacturing. Because exports are so low relative to American imports, retaliatory actions by the EU don't figure much in the American imagination. If anything, EU actions only served to add fuel to the isolationist fire and caused Bush to support the steel tariffs for longer. A lot of people would have supported Bush on this for sheer spite. However, when GM and Ford both said that this was hurting them, Americans quickly turned on the issue and so did Bush.
Ideologically, I would be prone to claim free speech, and leave it at that. However, there's a really large and increasing amount of studies that indicate that yes, violence in video games begets violence in real life. This issue needs to be studied more.
IF it does turn out that violence in the arts causes violence in real life, then doesn't it seem as reasonable to regulate that content, just as much as one now has to regulate carbon emissions, where we didn't think we needed to before? Isn't pretending that violence in the arts doesn't cause violence in people the same as pretending that driving an SUV doesn't have impact on the environment? If we can't live in the 1940s forever because of our understanding of the real impact of cars, then, can we just as well live in the 1980s by continued ignorance of the real impact of video games?
I mean, come on, seriously, if your kid downloaded a video game version of DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (which features a Klan ride), then, wouldn't playing that make the idea of riding in the Klan somehow more acceptable, because they have done it?
don't know if this will make you feel any better, but it could be worse. You still have your family (it sounds like). Santa brought me divorce papers this year:(
I'm really sorry to hear about your divorce. I'm fortunate because even though my wife and I get into some hellacious fights, we always seem to be able to forgive each other and move past them. Its as if, at some point, we're able to just let go of the finger pointing long enough to build bridges, as if, its more important not to affix responsibility, but to gain some understanding of what makes each other work. Not everyone has that, and, in that sense, I'm very fortunate.
In general it is far more efficient and economical to have a mutual ( and with a focus on mutual ) agreement of free tradebetween countries.
The problem with this efficiency is that your determination of efficiency is the investment centric return on the dollar, and investors do not actually add value to the economy. They do not invent, and they do not sell. There's little difference between someone who owns stock and calls himself or herself a capitalist, or a soviet era appartchik collecting his own private tax of corruption on the current 5 year plan.
Free Trade places a premium on the value of the investor in society and completely undermines the value of the inventor. As much as we ballyhoo the efficiency of free enterprise, we always find corporations with a dozen deadweight managers and hangers on for one talented developer that really drives the whole show, and usually does against the best efforts of those busisesses to impose a sort mediocrity that it gets in exchange for some predictability.
In general, free trade has destroyed America's manufacturing base, and, as a consequence, placed the middle class in constant jeopardy. Free trade is like socialism, a nice idea on paper, but one that ultimately didn't work. It just has taken longer for the disaster of free trade to play itself out in the United States than it did for Communism to destroy Russia, but, ultimately, the end result looks increasingly the same.
They are not undermining content or freedom of speech... The format is only a container.
But its not, and that's the thing. All containers are finite things, and therefor, you can only say what the container allows you to say. So, sure, you can make the argument that whatever speech you have is "good enough", but that's really a technocratic approach that, as usual, ignores the limitations of its own technological offerings. It's oppression, pure and simple, and you have to think carefully about oppression, before you do it.
It almost makes me feel like inventing a new proprietary format plus an editing tool, and then patenting it, simply to rebel against the oppression of standardization.
It just seems like mandating a specific and standard set of document formats in a country undermines freedom of speech. If you look at it a certain way, the format itself can be thought of as part of the expressiveness of the content. It -is- the content, so really, what Norway is saying is that only certain tools and the mindset behind those tools is appropriate. If the government were smallish relative to the society, such standardization would not be so bad, but given that European governments tend to be largish affairs, it seems that this sort of regulation will only serve to undermine software and content in the long term.
Makes for a great sci-fi film for sure - a future US civil war over natural resources. But, I think the first realistic thing is to realize that looking at tax transfers is not the only way to look at a value of the state, because taxes are an economic distortion. I have no doubt that central states would take it on the chin, but, they have all the food, oil, water, coal and uranium, so if anything, they would probably just wind up starving the coasts until they were ethnically cleansed, then moving in.
violations - and close off any foreign country escape route from this regulation.
So, does this also mean that you would support my call for the Death Penalty for spammers? If I supported the Death Penalty for non-compliance in discovery, and you supported the Death Penalty for spammers, we could eliminate corporate evil and spammers. Heck, why not have the Death Penalty for DUI and Rape. We would have the perfect society, at least until we killed a shitpot full of people and still got spam from evil corporations and got raped by a drunk driver on the way home.
This sort of thinking is just stupid.
The problem with society is that there are so many laws that it undermines the public trust, in well, the public.
No, I dont see the point since you are retaining your launch capability. I wasn't saying that countries shouldn't be fully autonomous, but I also dont see the point in this case of keeping these shuttles as a stopgap measure, when an alternative is already available until NASA has their new fleet sorted out.
Free trade has been good for the world, but a net failure for the United States. Now that a more realistic currency valuation means that the USA can't subsidize Europe any more, we'll see the Europeans learn this lesson as well. Let's see how well Germany loves the world when her exports dry up in the face of withering international competition, and those cushy union jobs go the same way they went in the USA. It's already happening to France.
Agro states jack up the prices of wheat, and tax overland transport between the coasts. Oh, and, where does California get its water from, once Colorado turns off the tap.
Thankfully, in a free and democratic republic, we can vote and express our will
The Constitution is a treaty among the states that gives a federal goverment limited powers. If some set of people decide that they are allowed to invent new powers for the government, they are voiding the treaty, and therefor, states that don't agree with your will ought to be able to secede. If you are't willing to abide by the terms of the treaty, why should anyone else?
when corporations misbehave the only way to spank them is to take enough of their money that they remember how much it hurt the next time they consider doing something shady
And give it to who, yourselves? Because... that's what happens, and, it makes me think that 90% of the time, lawyers simply say that corporations misbehave simply so they can get rich without actually having to produce anything.
Seems hard to compare the open (and failed) legislative attempt "that the FBI have all keys to any crypto system" to this closed, covert system that appears to have be in violation of laws currently already on the books. One I disagreed with, the other looks illegal. Big difference
The illegality isn't the point, and we both know it. Do you seriously argue that "poof", its ok for the government to spy on you if it declares it to be legal?
the point is that it's out of the hands of those who conspired to violate our Constitutional rights.
No its not. It's just a socialist joke. The Democrats HAVE had companies do the same things themselves, and, in point of fact, demanded legislation to allow far more draconian searches than Bush has ever envisioned. You do recall Clinton's insistence that the FBI have all keys to any crypto system.
So, searches are going to go on. They aren't going to stop. And what's going to happen is that Dems are going to kill two birds with one stone - first, they'll keep the power of the government, because at the end of the day, that's what they want, and they'll eliminate another business and create yet another class of sheeples dependent on government services, to gain even more power.
It's just about power, and if you think its anything else, about "your constitutional rights", then, the proof is very simple: Let's see Democrats introduce legislation to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act. WHERE THE HELL IS IT? WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR A F--ING YEAR FOR IT.
So really, what's at stake here is not actually ending the practice of wiretaps, its about a bunch of lawyers wanting to cash in and sue the people that did it. What's the net result to any single plaintiff? 50 cents per email read? Yet, a bunch of telecoms will go belly up so lawyers can get rich.
Way to go, Democrats. One of the few industries we have left in the USA not destroyed by litigation, and now, that's all going down the shitter to. I think its obvious that the issue here is not the companies that obeyed a request from the guy in the oval office, its the guy in the oval office. What's even more amazing, at the end of the day, is that Democrats will ultimately create a legal framework that says a corporation doesn't actually even have to listen to the government at all, unless the government provides legal immunity for lawsuits. So... from here on out, we will have to immunize firms for complying with every other federal act, which is to say everything.
Anyway, your comment was basically saying that Germany or some other country in Europe was going to start another world war by invading another European country
You think its so unthinkable? I doubt it. But honestly, I'm all in favor of the USA withdrawing from NATO. The USA is a continent in its own right.... we don't -need- Europe for anything.
Whaaa?! In the midst of what appears to be an appeal to personal liberties above all else, this claim is disingenuous
Well it is, I'll give you that. I'm more libertarian but I was playing the devil's advocate to try and explain how some people see the issue, even if its not necessarily I see it. The way I see it is that in the short term immigration is expensive, and yeah, you have a lot of people walking around that don't speak english and its annoying. But, in the longer term, their kids go to public school, grow up with a bit of spanish in the house (just like I had hungarian), and wind up speaking perfect english and are fully Americanized... whatever that means.
I would think that whatever we do with immigration, we need to fix the nonsense that denies educated people from around the world the opportunity to make a home in the USA. The USA is a continent - there's plenty of land. And, if it does get crowded, we could always buy part of Canada or build some sort of a moonbase or something.
It's the war-between-cultures scaremongering that irked me; seeing
Ok. On that, we have complete agreement. I absolutely do not like the culture wars of the Republicans. I really don't. Yeah, I bash gays a bit on the board, more than I should and more than is right, but it seems to me that when our manufacturing base is gutted, we have enormous twin deficits, we're in the middle of a war, our most likely economic rival has 4 times our population, that, whether or not a gay guy gets married or "In God We Trust" is on our coins seems stupendously out of place.
Please, can we have Republicans that are more libertarians in the mold of Gingrich, Armey, etc...?
It's like, I'd like to be tempted to Democrats, but, their proposals are just absurd.
Really, when I say that the left wing is so caught up in their cause that they are doing everything they said they would be against, its not like I'm saying that the right wing doesn't. We goofed big time with Bush. Yeah, he may well pull this war out of his ass and go down as one of the greatest American presidents ever, (and thus prevent the Republican Party from sinking into total ruin), and yeah, his civil liberties restrictions in wartime are really minor compared to what other presidents have done. But, Republicans are supposed to be the party that deeply distrusts government, and I see so many right wingers that were correctly outraged over CLIPPER and the likes suddenly rolling over on USA PATRIOT and FISA, and I just want to scream. And then, to make matters worse, I see liberals getting all frothed up the same way we were over Clinton, and they are about to make the same damn mistakes that we made, and I am utterly disillusioned.
It's really basic - we need a manufacturing base, we need to recognize that people doing things with their hands, working machines and tools, bring an inventiveness to the table that drives this country and stop throwing them overseas. We need to focus less on rewarding those that invest and more on those who invent, and we need to have a serious dialog about whether we want to remain the number 1 nation on the planet. If so, then we need to rethink our hostility to immigration. We need bodies to keep up with the Chinese. And for f---ks sake, I can't believe that there's not some 500 billion dollar thing we could buy that could get us off of foreign oil.
Global warming, the environment, evolution, even national health care, all of those are important issues, but the guts of the country are in a pretty big rot right now, and that needs to be fixed first.. and the worst is, everyone on the street in the USA seems to know it. IT's the basics that are screwed up, fundamentally, and no one wants to come up with a plan to fix it.
Sorry packeteer, but I'm not gay. It's ok if you are though, but I'm just not interested in you and your kind. You'll have to go someplace else. If you go anywhere near my son by the way, I'll murder your entire family.
What do you think is going to happen if the US withdrew its forces? Germany going to invade France again? Russia going to roll into Poland? First world countries don't go to war against each other anymore
I really don't care what would happen. But probably, yeah, a war would break out in Europe. Europe is incapable of being peaceful on its own.
In any event -- no administration is perfect, but any claim that they're all identical is broken in the extreme. We didn't have torture under Clinton 1 (and I do hope we won't have Clinton 2), and we wouldn't have it under Obama. If
You had torture in Clinton 1 - they played loudspeaker music at Waco to do a form of sleep deprivation, then they burned everyone in the building alive. But they were religious fruitcakes and that was ok. Of course, we still won't know what we really had in Clinton 1, because you have Sandy Berger deleting national archives and all of that lost email.
one group was talking up a war between cultures (and taxation, immigration, and the like), while another was universally focused on domestic betterment -- education, healthcare and such.
And there you go. You assume that one set of values is better. Taxation is a form of slavery, so yeah, its important. And illegal immigration is a form of theft. It just is. That is important to some people. It's important. A lot of we people have health care, and earned education, and a lot of what you talk about it stealing from someone else to line your own pockets while providing whatever reduced socialist health care you'll come up with.
It's just a power grab, and nothing more. It's Republican thugs, and Democratic thugs.
Honestly, you can't make the argument that you are in favor of freedom, when you keep promising to pass more laws. You're just too dense to see that.
Slashdot Mirror
Btw, I seem to remember that Chimpy wanted to impose steel tarrifs in order to protect American industry some time ago? Remember how rapidly those tarrifs evapourated when some not so pleased Europeans decided it was payback time ?
Actually, the steel tariffs evaporated because many US manufacturers actually import their steel. So, when their steel costs went up, that actually screwed American manufacturing. Because exports are so low relative to American imports, retaliatory actions by the EU don't figure much in the American imagination. If anything, EU actions only served to add fuel to the isolationist fire and caused Bush to support the steel tariffs for longer. A lot of people would have supported Bush on this for sheer spite. However, when GM and Ford both said that this was hurting them, Americans quickly turned on the issue and so did Bush.
Ideologically, I would be prone to claim free speech, and leave it at that. However, there's a really large and increasing amount of studies that indicate that yes, violence in video games begets violence in real life. This issue needs to be studied more.
IF it does turn out that violence in the arts causes violence in real life, then doesn't it seem as reasonable to regulate that content, just as much as one now has to regulate carbon emissions, where we didn't think we needed to before? Isn't pretending that violence in the arts doesn't cause violence in people the same as pretending that driving an SUV doesn't have impact on the environment? If we can't live in the 1940s forever because of our understanding of the real impact of cars, then, can we just as well live in the 1980s by continued ignorance of the real impact of video games?
I mean, come on, seriously, if your kid downloaded a video game version of DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (which features a Klan ride), then, wouldn't playing that make the idea of riding in the Klan somehow more acceptable, because they have done it?
don't know if this will make you feel any better, but it could be worse. You still have your family (it sounds like). Santa brought me divorce papers this year :(
I'm really sorry to hear about your divorce. I'm fortunate because even though my wife and I get into some hellacious fights, we always seem to be able to forgive each other and move past them. Its as if, at some point, we're able to just let go of the finger pointing long enough to build bridges, as if, its more important not to affix responsibility, but to gain some understanding of what makes each other work. Not everyone has that, and, in that sense, I'm very fortunate.
In general it is far more efficient and economical to have a mutual ( and with a focus on mutual ) agreement of free tradebetween countries.
The problem with this efficiency is that your determination of efficiency is the investment centric return on the dollar, and investors do not actually add value to the economy. They do not invent, and they do not sell. There's little difference between someone who owns stock and calls himself or herself a capitalist, or a soviet era appartchik collecting his own private tax of corruption on the current 5 year plan.
Free Trade places a premium on the value of the investor in society and completely undermines the value of the inventor. As much as we ballyhoo the efficiency of free enterprise, we always find corporations with a dozen deadweight managers and hangers on for one talented developer that really drives the whole show, and usually does against the best efforts of those busisesses to impose a sort mediocrity that it gets in exchange for some predictability.
In general, free trade has destroyed America's manufacturing base, and, as a consequence, placed the middle class in constant jeopardy. Free trade is like socialism, a nice idea on paper, but one that ultimately didn't work. It just has taken longer for the disaster of free trade to play itself out in the United States than it did for Communism to destroy Russia, but, ultimately, the end result looks increasingly the same.
They are not undermining content or freedom of speech... The format is only a container.
But its not, and that's the thing. All containers are finite things, and therefor, you can only say what the container allows you to say. So, sure, you can make the argument that whatever speech you have is "good enough", but that's really a technocratic approach that, as usual, ignores the limitations of its own technological offerings. It's oppression, pure and simple, and you have to think carefully about oppression, before you do it.
It almost makes me feel like inventing a new proprietary format plus an editing tool, and then patenting it, simply to rebel against the oppression of standardization.
It just seems like mandating a specific and standard set of document formats in a country undermines freedom of speech. If you look at it a certain way, the format itself can be thought of as part of the expressiveness of the content. It -is- the content, so really, what Norway is saying is that only certain tools and the mindset behind those tools is appropriate. If the government were smallish relative to the society, such standardization would not be so bad, but given that European governments tend to be largish affairs, it seems that this sort of regulation will only serve to undermine software and content in the long term.
Yes but who will be the Fremen?
Everyone knows that the Fremen are in Cleveland, Ohio!
The water wars are returning...
Makes for a great sci-fi film for sure - a future US civil war over natural resources. But, I think the first realistic thing is to realize that looking at tax transfers is not the only way to look at a value of the state, because taxes are an economic distortion. I have no doubt that central states would take it on the chin, but, they have all the food, oil, water, coal and uranium, so if anything, they would probably just wind up starving the coasts until they were ethnically cleansed, then moving in.
violations - and close off any foreign country escape route from this regulation.
So, does this also mean that you would support my call for the Death Penalty for spammers? If I supported the Death Penalty for non-compliance in discovery, and you supported the Death Penalty for spammers, we could eliminate corporate evil and spammers. Heck, why not have the Death Penalty for DUI and Rape. We would have the perfect society, at least until we killed a shitpot full of people and still got spam from evil corporations and got raped by a drunk driver on the way home.
This sort of thinking is just stupid.
The problem with society is that there are so many laws that it undermines the public trust, in well, the public.
No, I dont see the point since you are retaining your launch capability. I wasn't saying that countries shouldn't be fully autonomous, but I also dont see the point in this case of keeping these shuttles as a stopgap measure, when an alternative is already available until NASA has their new fleet sorted out.
Free trade has been good for the world, but a net failure for the United States. Now that a more realistic currency valuation means that the USA can't subsidize Europe any more, we'll see the Europeans learn this lesson as well. Let's see how well Germany loves the world when her exports dry up in the face of withering international competition, and those cushy union jobs go the same way they went in the USA. It's already happening to France.
I would say they have succeeded.
I wonder what they do when the kite falls into the ocean?
Hard to imagine Kansas going it alone...
Agro states jack up the prices of wheat, and tax overland transport between the coasts. Oh, and, where does California get its water from, once Colorado turns off the tap.
Thankfully, in a free and democratic republic, we can vote and express our will
The Constitution is a treaty among the states that gives a federal goverment limited powers. If some set of people decide that they are allowed to invent new powers for the government, they are voiding the treaty, and therefor, states that don't agree with your will ought to be able to secede. If you are't willing to abide by the terms of the treaty, why should anyone else?
when corporations misbehave the only way to spank them is to take enough of their money that they remember how much it hurt the next time they consider doing something shady
And give it to who, yourselves? Because... that's what happens, and, it makes me think that 90% of the time, lawyers simply say that corporations misbehave simply so they can get rich without actually having to produce anything.
Seems hard to compare the open (and failed) legislative attempt "that the FBI have all keys to any crypto system" to this closed, covert system that appears to have be in violation of laws currently already on the books. One I disagreed with, the other looks illegal. Big difference
The illegality isn't the point, and we both know it. Do you seriously argue that "poof", its ok for the government to spy on you if it declares it to be legal?
When is USA PATRIOT going to be repealed?
the point is that it's out of the hands of those who conspired to violate our Constitutional rights.
No its not. It's just a socialist joke. The Democrats HAVE had companies do the same things themselves, and, in point of fact, demanded legislation to allow far more draconian searches than Bush has ever envisioned. You do recall Clinton's insistence that the FBI have all keys to any crypto system.
So, searches are going to go on. They aren't going to stop. And what's going to happen is that Dems are going to kill two birds with one stone - first, they'll keep the power of the government, because at the end of the day, that's what they want, and they'll eliminate another business and create yet another class of sheeples dependent on government services, to gain even more power.
It's just about power, and if you think its anything else, about "your constitutional rights", then, the proof is very simple: Let's see Democrats introduce legislation to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act. WHERE THE HELL IS IT? WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR A F--ING YEAR FOR IT.
So really, what's at stake here is not actually ending the practice of wiretaps, its about a bunch of lawyers wanting to cash in and sue the people that did it. What's the net result to any single plaintiff? 50 cents per email read? Yet, a bunch of telecoms will go belly up so lawyers can get rich.
Way to go, Democrats. One of the few industries we have left in the USA not destroyed by litigation, and now, that's all going down the shitter to. I think its obvious that the issue here is not the companies that obeyed a request from the guy in the oval office, its the guy in the oval office. What's even more amazing, at the end of the day, is that Democrats will ultimately create a legal framework that says a corporation doesn't actually even have to listen to the government at all, unless the government provides legal immunity for lawsuits. So... from here on out, we will have to immunize firms for complying with every other federal act, which is to say everything.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Anyway, your comment was basically saying that Germany or some other country in Europe was going to start another world war by invading another European country
You think its so unthinkable? I doubt it. But honestly, I'm all in favor of the USA withdrawing from NATO. The USA is a continent in its own right.... we don't -need- Europe for anything.
Whaaa?! In the midst of what appears to be an appeal to personal liberties above all else, this claim is disingenuous
Well it is, I'll give you that. I'm more libertarian but I was playing the devil's advocate to try and explain how some people see the issue, even if its not necessarily I see it. The way I see it is that in the short term immigration is expensive, and yeah, you have a lot of people walking around that don't speak english and its annoying. But, in the longer term, their kids go to public school, grow up with a bit of spanish in the house (just like I had hungarian), and wind up speaking perfect english and are fully Americanized... whatever that means.
I would think that whatever we do with immigration, we need to fix the nonsense that denies educated people from around the world the opportunity to make a home in the USA. The USA is a continent - there's plenty of land. And, if it does get crowded, we could always buy part of Canada or build some sort of a moonbase or something.
It's the war-between-cultures scaremongering that irked me; seeing
Ok. On that, we have complete agreement. I absolutely do not like the culture wars of the Republicans. I really don't. Yeah, I bash gays a bit on the board, more than I should and more than is right, but it seems to me that when our manufacturing base is gutted, we have enormous twin deficits, we're in the middle of a war, our most likely economic rival has 4 times our population, that, whether or not a gay guy gets married or "In God We Trust" is on our coins seems stupendously out of place.
Please, can we have Republicans that are more libertarians in the mold of Gingrich, Armey, etc...?
It's like, I'd like to be tempted to Democrats, but, their proposals are just absurd.
Really, when I say that the left wing is so caught up in their cause that they are doing everything they said they would be against, its not like I'm saying that the right wing doesn't. We goofed big time with Bush. Yeah, he may well pull this war out of his ass and go down as one of the greatest American presidents ever, (and thus prevent the Republican Party from sinking into total ruin), and yeah, his civil liberties restrictions in wartime are really minor compared to what other presidents have done. But, Republicans are supposed to be the party that deeply distrusts government, and I see so many right wingers that were correctly outraged over CLIPPER and the likes suddenly rolling over on USA PATRIOT and FISA, and I just want to scream. And then, to make matters worse, I see liberals getting all frothed up the same way we were over Clinton, and they are about to make the same damn mistakes that we made, and I am utterly disillusioned.
It's really basic - we need a manufacturing base, we need to recognize that people doing things with their hands, working machines and tools, bring an inventiveness to the table that drives this country and stop throwing them overseas. We need to focus less on rewarding those that invest and more on those who invent, and we need to have a serious dialog about whether we want to remain the number 1 nation on the planet. If so, then we need to rethink our hostility to immigration. We need bodies to keep up with the Chinese. And for f---ks sake, I can't believe that there's not some 500 billion dollar thing we could buy that could get us off of foreign oil.
Global warming, the environment, evolution, even national health care, all of those are important issues, but the guts of the country are in a pretty big rot right now, and that needs to be fixed first.. and the worst is, everyone on the street in the USA seems to know it. IT's the basics that are screwed up, fundamentally, and no one wants to come up with a plan to fix it.
Do you have any idea what Europe is like today?
One word : Bosnia.
Defense rests.
I shouldn't have written that. I'm sorry. I'm not going to hurt anyone. I just wish I could have a better christmas for my family. Everything sucks.
I heard tjstork is an admitted transexual.
Sorry packeteer, but I'm not gay. It's ok if you are though, but I'm just not interested in you and your kind. You'll have to go someplace else. If you go anywhere near my son by the way, I'll murder your entire family.
What do you think is going to happen if the US withdrew its forces? Germany going to invade France again? Russia going to roll into Poland? First world countries don't go to war against each other anymore
I really don't care what would happen. But probably, yeah, a war would break out in Europe. Europe is incapable of being peaceful on its own.
In any event -- no administration is perfect, but any claim that they're all identical is broken in the extreme. We didn't have torture under Clinton 1 (and I do hope we won't have Clinton 2), and we wouldn't have it under Obama. If
You had torture in Clinton 1 - they played loudspeaker music at Waco to do a form of sleep deprivation, then they burned everyone in the building alive. But they were religious fruitcakes and that was ok. Of course, we still won't know what we really had in Clinton 1, because you have Sandy Berger deleting national archives and all of that lost email.
one group was talking up a war between cultures (and taxation, immigration, and the like), while another was universally focused on domestic betterment -- education, healthcare and such.
And there you go. You assume that one set of values is better. Taxation is a form of slavery, so yeah, its important. And illegal immigration is a form of theft. It just is. That is important to some people. It's important. A lot of we people have health care, and earned education, and a lot of what you talk about it stealing from someone else to line your own pockets while providing whatever reduced socialist health care you'll come up with.
It's just a power grab, and nothing more. It's Republican thugs, and Democratic thugs.
Honestly, you can't make the argument that you are in favor of freedom, when you keep promising to pass more laws. You're just too dense to see that.