I still think direct election of the senate was a mistake. The original appointment scheme made them beholden to their states.
It was put in place because of things like what the Governor of Illinois just did - playing favors for seats. There were also states that would leave seats vacant for years because one house was controlled by Republicans and the other by Democrats and they could never agree on who to appoint to the seat. I don't think we want to go back to that kind of situation.
It's interesting that every single person in the article is against it except for a dnc congressman. The end of the article says he bemoans the lack of union growth. Why would he be concerned about union growth? Why would he be so concerned about union growth that he would try and take steps to lower the bar on organizing groups of people who probably don't even want it? Oh yeah - money....
You are right, but it's not just about money, it's also about shoring up the basis of his own power. You see, unionized people are more likely to vote for Democrats, so the more union people you have in the population, the more votes for Democrats you get.
And because of that, Republicans will fight tooth and nail against that legislation.
The same type of scenario played out with the "Social Security Privatization" idea. There was no cross-isle discussion of the merits, because the Democrats know that the more securities a person owns in the market, the more likely they are to vote Republican. So the Democrats were willing to fight tooth and nail against anything like that, which would have produced more Republican votes.
Of course the situation is a little different now, since the Democrats have such a majority, so they may actually be able to get this passed.
I don't know why I was marked a troll. I keep trying Vista as the updates come out and it still seems slower than XP for all the stuff I do.
And my original point still stands. The benchmarks from the referenced article compare real world of the initial release of Vista with the current performance including updates (at least to SP1). In the "PCMark" test, which attempts to replicate common usage, the original release of Vista performs better than the SP1 version, by 45 points.
You posted some benchmarks about gaming performance. I guess that's one place a lot of people use Windows, since most recent popular computer games won't run on anything else. But if you use a computer for what most people use it for (photos, video, music, communication, productivity, etc.), the overall performance is worse.
Umm, that's nearly two years old. Initially Vista performance was worse primarily because of crappy driver support, especially on the part of nVidia, which has been well documented. Benchmarks done a year after release found Vista and XP roughly equal, with Vista occasionally beating XP.
Are you just making stuff up? Did you not see in the article the benchmarks clearly show Vista SP1 *underperforming* Vista RTM?
Try it. You'll be soon warning people away from it, too. C# programming is one thing (it's just a language), but the mono/.NET libraries will have you banging your head against the desk before long.
I might have a skewed perspective. When I started working with mono, the big selling point was that we could use all the tools and processes on Windows (our development environment is standardized for the whole company's development department and has years of process development work in it), then deploy applications on our Linux servers (we were even using SuSE). Not so fast. Some of the data access libraries work different (tests that pass on.NET fail on mono). Most of those nifty widgets and reporting tools you're using in Visual Studio won't work at all, because they rely on GDI or other native Windows services/APIs.
We eventually abandoned mono (and.NET for that matter, other than existing production applications), and we are now mainly using Java (it is the COBOL of the 21st century, after all). Deployments on our JBoss servers work exactly the same, whether they are on Windows, or Linux, and so far we have not encountered a single bug that we had to work around because the vendor's response was "Yes, that's a known issue and will be fixed in the next commercial release." (!!)
AFAIK so far there's no scientific theory to explain "self awareness"/"consciousness", and I suspect it's the very first observation all scientists make - observation of self. Why should there be such a phenomenon in the first place?
I don't know if it would be considered a "scientific" theory or not, but consciousness is often considered to be simply an emergent property of the complexity of the brain. Emergent properties are nothing special - the simple way to describe it is states of matter: A water molecule cannot take on properties like "solid" and "gaseous", but significant numbers of them can, and do.
An interesting illustration of the idea is presented in Verner Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. In it, some dog-like creatures are individually incapable of coherent thought, but can join together in packs, and self-awareness and human-level intelligence emerges. Very interesting treatment.
Nobody thinks twice about talking on their phone in public. Anyone can listen in if they wish, but they usually don't. It's not privacy that most people have issue with, it's being singled out.
As has been said many times, it's not a problem so long as everyone is treated the same way. General trends and statistics are fine, it's being the focus of attention of Big Brother that gets creepy.
But that's the problem with what is happening to privacy. It's the citizens that are losing their privacy, while governments are keeping more and more secrets, and guarding them fiercely (and with heavy weaponry).
It should be the opposite. Everything the government does should be transparent (at least to their own citizens), and they should be required to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain private information about their citizens. Otherwise, tyranny will inevitably result. As they say "knowledge is power", and gaining knowledge of citizens while denying knowledge of government to the citizens is nothing but a semi-transparent power-grab.
Considering the amount of authority vested in government representatives, we should be demanding much greater transparency, just to level the playing field.
Well, actually, Shane was going to bring along his fishing pole (you know, just in case), but then Heide was like "That's ridiculous, Scott! There aren't going to be any fish up there, for god's sake. There's no room for all your useless toys. I need room for the sandwiches and extra socks. If your socks get wet what good is your stupid fishing pole?"
And so the fishing pole stayed home, and you should have seen the look Steve got as they watched the bag drift away and he suddenly turned to Shane and said "Hey - where is your fishing pole?"
Then let the nations of Europe defend themselves. Why does the US need to be the one defending everyone? IMO, as long as we have carriers, we don't need bases in dozens and dozens of countries around the world, it's a waste of money and just fucking ridiculous.
They can't do that! If those European countries spent their own money for national defense, they couldn't afford all that free health care for their citizens!
... or will he follow sound economic policy. You know, the one that notes that you get deflation in a recession so you need to print more money to combat this?
You're kidding, right? Is that a joke?
Not sure, because it's amazing what economically challenged people think is "sound economic policy". First of all, you don't necessarily get deflation in a recession. Right now gas prices are deflating, but nothing else is. And printing money is a horrible way to deal with that, because it just causes inflation. In fact, if you're printing a lot of money during a recession you're likely to get "stagflation", which means the economy is stagnant or receding (unemployment up, wages stagnant), but prices are still going up. We're avoiding that now because the collapse triggered a pull-back from the oil speculation, so fuel prices are dropping.
Remember that every dollar the government spends it must first borrow from the Federal Reserve Bank, with interest. The only ones benefiting from that are the private banks. It's amazing to me that with all this going on, there is still no serious discussion about getting rid of the Fed and returning to having the government print its own money for free. That would put an awful lot of money back into the real US economy, instead of sending so much to private global banks.
Bush's 5 billion for AIDS in Africa didn't work because it was a shell game with strings attached. There was already money going to Africa that was just diverted for AIDS...however the new wording for the money said that family planning could not happen at the same clinic...Places in Africa were lucky to even have one clinic and Bush wanted them to build two just to receive money.
That's a complete mis-characterization of the policy by pro-abortion advocates. All the policy said was that if a clinic wants the funding, it can't do abortions. It forced them to make a choice in priorities. Do you want to treat AIDS, or do you want to perform abortions?
By my calculation, Obama had 51% of the news articles, 55% of the front pages, and (according to stats that I heard from last week's election) 57% of the vote.
You either heard it wrong, remember it wrong, or maybe you trying to start a disinformation campaign? I know that the media doesn't like to report detailed results (people might wonder about all those 3rd-party votes), but it's really not hard to find. Obama had 52.6% of the popular vote. McCain was 46.1%.
I *highly* doubt that the electorate voted based on who was in the news more.
Umm, did you really just say that?
First, the UK didn't exist in 1215. Second, there is absolutely no way in which you can argue that England has been a republic since 1215.
But you claimed the UK was not a Republic, which I refute. The Magna Carta was the end of any true Monarchy for England, and lead to the current republic-style government of the UK.
The point is, the GP was correct: most countries are actually organized as republics. Your claim about the UK, Australia, et.al. being monarchies is fallacious, because they are MINOs (Monarchies In Name Only).
Switzerland has probably the most Democratic system in the world, but it's not all mob-rule like you're advocating with a real-time, everybody-votes-on-everything system.
Switzerland has a legislature of representatives, and executive, that make most of the laws, which must follow the country's constitution. If people don't like a law that is passed by the legislature, they *can* call for a vote to have it repealed, but they need 50,000 signatures in 100 days, and then there is a rather lengthy process for getting it onto a ballot and having a vote.
The important part is the Constitution that maintains the rights of the people. It can be amended, but it is difficult to do.
That's a good thing. Because the most important role of government is to protect people's rights from other people. A direct democracy without those protections is still tyranny, it's just tyranny of the majority. When people can vote to decide what rights to take away from which group, no one is safe.
Also, people don't seem to realize there are hardly any real democracies in the world, only republics.
Either you must be using some strange definition for the word republic that I'm not familiar with, or you're excluding countries which certainly are not republics, like the UK, Australia and other countries in the monarchy, and many other countries around the world which are not republics.
Uhh... No. The Magna Carta swept away the monarch's power and made the UK a Republic - that is, requiring the monarch to recognize the rights and powers of Barons and leading to a Parliamentary government. Today, members of the Parliament are voted into office by the citizens, clearly making the UK a Republic. The title of the head of state doesn't matter. Whether there is a King or a Prime Minister or a President, if there is a body of representatives that make laws, and an instrument to hold the head of state as subject to the law (like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution), then you have a Republic.
Australian government is very similar to the US' - they have a parliament made up of a House of Representatives and a Senate, with representatives popularly elected by citizens of the six states. The only difference is in terminology, as they call the head of state the "Queen", not the "President".
These countries often call themselves "Constitutional Monarchy", but in a true monarchy, everything is owned by the monarch, and the monarch provides leases and allowances. That's not how these countries operate. So they are not really monarchies at all - they are Republics.
The Glass-Steagall act probably should be reinstated, but moreover we should kick the greedy bastards out of Wall Street and replace them with the more conservative financial leaders who were slowly pushed out by the instant-gratification morons.
And repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley. It has been proven not to work, as AGI, Bears-Sterns, Goldman-Sachs, et.al. were in compliance but there was still no significant warning that these corporations were so near to collapse. Instead, it provides a multi-million dollar barrier to IPO for any company with a good business plan but in need of capital. We need to encourage new start-ups, not put huge hurtles in their path that serve no useful purpose.
Those with power don't relinquish power without a fight. They won't roll it back. They will just claim that since they are responsible, they won't abuse that power the way their predecessors did. Faux News or not, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Exactly right. In fact I would go a step further and point out that the Democrats in congress, even after they had a majority, didn't challenge all that executive expansion of power precisely because they were looking forward to having a Democratic president in the office that could wield those powers.
It's really telling that many of the people that complained about the executive power-grab didn't have a problem with it in principal, but were only opposed to the party doing the grabbing. Personally, I would much rather see the checks and balances and rule of law supported no matter who is in office. That would be much better than assuming anybody will somehow resist being corrupted by the power.
Your comment is so ill-conceived it's hard to know where to start.
What about the white voters who voted against Obama because of his race? If they had voted with their demographic on other issues, Obama still wins.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. According to PBS's exit polls, the people that sited race as a factor in their voting decision leaned toward Obama. So, if anything, the few white voters that may have voted against Obama because he was black was more than offset by the number of white voters siding *with* Obama because he was black.
That argument doesn't work anymore. Just because Fox News is a right wing tabloid doesn't mean they all have a bias. If the truth doesn't support your reality and the other news organizations won't bend their coverage to support your viewpoint, that doesn't make them biased.
The government is doing it, because without the 'men with guns' that the government supplies to protect the property rights of the rich, this massive wealth redistribution never would have happened.
Seeing as how the top 1% control the vast majority of wealth in the country, they should be the ones paying the vast majority of the taxes. The police, armed forces, and fire departments certainly aren't protecting the nonexistent property of the bum living under the bridge. They are protecting the property of the rich, and therefore the rich should pay.
So the cops, armed forces, and fire departments don't do anything for you, don't protect you, and ignore your fires. But if they weren't there, you would take whatever you want by force. Is that what you are saying? So the rich are the only ones that use the roads, public schools, health services, unemployment insurance, social security (retirement, disability, etc.), and the Food Stamp programs? They are the only ones that benefit from regulations of the FDA, the EPA, the Department of Education, the Corps of Engineers, and the court system.
So all these armed law enforcement and bureaucracies are just for the rich, and perform (in some nebulous fashion) the enrichment of the rich, and if only they weren't in the way, you would just take whatever you want from whoever has it now? Is that your position?
No, that's totally wrong. Having a "representative system" in no way protects people against the tyranny of the majority. If 49 states all decide together that the 50th should house all the nuclear waste for them, that still demonstrates the flaw.
What protects us is the rule of law and the Constitutional limitations on the central government's authority.
Keep whittling away at the constitutional protections because they are "outdated" or "inconvenient" or because it's "too difficult to pass amendments", then soon it won't protect us at all, and then we won't have to worry about things like they tyranny of the majority, because the oligarchs in control will stop listening anyway.
"is really wealth redistribution from the working middle class to the lazy bums"
so how can you vote republican, when what they do is wealth redistribution from everybody else to the richest 1%? Thankfully for you, you have other choices!
Is it the government doing that redistribution, or something else? Is the government actually controlling how each dollar is distributed to each person, and implemented distributions that are heavily skewed? Why would they be doing that?
Well, of course they aren't. In fact, that 1% that you talk about actually carries 40% of the total tax burden. 60% of all income taxes come from the top 5%. So I guess what you are saying is that the Republicans allow people to keep too much of their money?
Ok, let's try that. Let's just raise taxes on earners over $200,000 a year. Uh-oh, that's only about $100 billion, and we need about $1 trillion to cover the Democrat's proposed new spending. And don't forget the government is going to need some of those taxes to administer everything, hire more administrators, etc., etc. To avoid borrowing all the money from China, you need to raise the tax rate on everyone that pays taxes - that's down to around $35,000 per year. If that's not the entire middle class, I don't know what is.
I guess compared to some third world countries, though, those people *are* rich.
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I still think direct election of the senate was a mistake. The original appointment scheme made them beholden to their states.
It was put in place because of things like what the Governor of Illinois just did - playing favors for seats. There were also states that would leave seats vacant for years because one house was controlled by Republicans and the other by Democrats and they could never agree on who to appoint to the seat. I don't think we want to go back to that kind of situation.
It's interesting that every single person in the article is against it except for a dnc congressman. The end of the article says he bemoans the lack of union growth. Why would he be concerned about union growth? Why would he be so concerned about union growth that he would try and take steps to lower the bar on organizing groups of people who probably don't even want it? Oh yeah - money. ...
You are right, but it's not just about money, it's also about shoring up the basis of his own power. You see, unionized people are more likely to vote for Democrats, so the more union people you have in the population, the more votes for Democrats you get.
And because of that, Republicans will fight tooth and nail against that legislation.
The same type of scenario played out with the "Social Security Privatization" idea. There was no cross-isle discussion of the merits, because the Democrats know that the more securities a person owns in the market, the more likely they are to vote Republican. So the Democrats were willing to fight tooth and nail against anything like that, which would have produced more Republican votes.
Of course the situation is a little different now, since the Democrats have such a majority, so they may actually be able to get this passed.
This is why I hate politics.
I Couldn't agree with you more.
No, I am not just making things up.
I don't know why I was marked a troll. I keep trying Vista as the updates come out and it still seems slower than XP for all the stuff I do.
And my original point still stands. The benchmarks from the referenced article compare real world of the initial release of Vista with the current performance including updates (at least to SP1). In the "PCMark" test, which attempts to replicate common usage, the original release of Vista performs better than the SP1 version, by 45 points.
You posted some benchmarks about gaming performance. I guess that's one place a lot of people use Windows, since most recent popular computer games won't run on anything else. But if you use a computer for what most people use it for (photos, video, music, communication, productivity, etc.), the overall performance is worse.
I guess I'm a troll for pointing out the truth.
Umm, that's nearly two years old. Initially Vista performance was worse primarily because of crappy driver support, especially on the part of nVidia, which has been well documented. Benchmarks done a year after release found Vista and XP roughly equal, with Vista occasionally beating XP.
Are you just making stuff up? Did you not see in the article the benchmarks clearly show Vista SP1 *underperforming* Vista RTM?
Oh... wait. uhh... RTFA.
However, the position of the sun does get transmitted to the earth faster than the speed of light.
No it doesn't.
And aberration has absolutely nothing to do with gravity - it's caused by the relative velocity of the earth in the light cone of the sun.
Try it. You'll be soon warning people away from it, too. C# programming is one thing (it's just a language), but the mono/.NET libraries will have you banging your head against the desk before long.
I might have a skewed perspective. When I started working with mono, the big selling point was that we could use all the tools and processes on Windows (our development environment is standardized for the whole company's development department and has years of process development work in it), then deploy applications on our Linux servers (we were even using SuSE). Not so fast. Some of the data access libraries work different (tests that pass on .NET fail on mono). Most of those nifty widgets and reporting tools you're using in Visual Studio won't work at all, because they rely on GDI or other native Windows services/APIs.
We eventually abandoned mono (and .NET for that matter, other than existing production applications), and we are now mainly using Java (it is the COBOL of the 21st century, after all). Deployments on our JBoss servers work exactly the same, whether they are on Windows, or Linux, and so far we have not encountered a single bug that we had to work around because the vendor's response was "Yes, that's a known issue and will be fixed in the next commercial release." (!!)
AFAIK so far there's no scientific theory to explain "self awareness"/"consciousness", and I suspect it's the very first observation all scientists make - observation of self. Why should there be such a phenomenon in the first place?
I don't know if it would be considered a "scientific" theory or not, but consciousness is often considered to be simply an emergent property of the complexity of the brain. Emergent properties are nothing special - the simple way to describe it is states of matter: A water molecule cannot take on properties like "solid" and "gaseous", but significant numbers of them can, and do.
An interesting illustration of the idea is presented in Verner Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. In it, some dog-like creatures are individually incapable of coherent thought, but can join together in packs, and self-awareness and human-level intelligence emerges. Very interesting treatment.
That's been around for years. That's why I use a browser with a "close-the-door-before-more-clowns-get-out" feature. Also known as a pop-up blocker.
Nobody thinks twice about talking on their phone in public. Anyone can listen in if they wish, but they usually don't. It's not privacy that most people have issue with, it's being singled out. As has been said many times, it's not a problem so long as everyone is treated the same way. General trends and statistics are fine, it's being the focus of attention of Big Brother that gets creepy.
But that's the problem with what is happening to privacy. It's the citizens that are losing their privacy, while governments are keeping more and more secrets, and guarding them fiercely (and with heavy weaponry).
It should be the opposite. Everything the government does should be transparent (at least to their own citizens), and they should be required to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain private information about their citizens. Otherwise, tyranny will inevitably result. As they say "knowledge is power", and gaining knowledge of citizens while denying knowledge of government to the citizens is nothing but a semi-transparent power-grab.
Considering the amount of authority vested in government representatives, we should be demanding much greater transparency, just to level the playing field.
Well, actually, Shane was going to bring along his fishing pole (you know, just in case), but then Heide was like "That's ridiculous, Scott! There aren't going to be any fish up there, for god's sake. There's no room for all your useless toys. I need room for the sandwiches and extra socks. If your socks get wet what good is your stupid fishing pole?"
And so the fishing pole stayed home, and you should have seen the look Steve got as they watched the bag drift away and he suddenly turned to Shane and said "Hey - where is your fishing pole?"
Then let the nations of Europe defend themselves. Why does the US need to be the one defending everyone? IMO, as long as we have carriers, we don't need bases in dozens and dozens of countries around the world, it's a waste of money and just fucking ridiculous.
They can't do that! If those European countries spent their own money for national defense, they couldn't afford all that free health care for their citizens!
... or will he follow sound economic policy. You know, the one that notes that you get deflation in a recession so you need to print more money to combat this?
You're kidding, right? Is that a joke?
Not sure, because it's amazing what economically challenged people think is "sound economic policy". First of all, you don't necessarily get deflation in a recession. Right now gas prices are deflating, but nothing else is. And printing money is a horrible way to deal with that, because it just causes inflation. In fact, if you're printing a lot of money during a recession you're likely to get "stagflation", which means the economy is stagnant or receding (unemployment up, wages stagnant), but prices are still going up. We're avoiding that now because the collapse triggered a pull-back from the oil speculation, so fuel prices are dropping.
Remember that every dollar the government spends it must first borrow from the Federal Reserve Bank, with interest. The only ones benefiting from that are the private banks. It's amazing to me that with all this going on, there is still no serious discussion about getting rid of the Fed and returning to having the government print its own money for free. That would put an awful lot of money back into the real US economy, instead of sending so much to private global banks.
Bush's 5 billion for AIDS in Africa didn't work because it was a shell game with strings attached. There was already money going to Africa that was just diverted for AIDS...however the new wording for the money said that family planning could not happen at the same clinic...Places in Africa were lucky to even have one clinic and Bush wanted them to build two just to receive money.
That's a complete mis-characterization of the policy by pro-abortion advocates. All the policy said was that if a clinic wants the funding, it can't do abortions. It forced them to make a choice in priorities. Do you want to treat AIDS, or do you want to perform abortions?
By my calculation, Obama had 51% of the news articles, 55% of the front pages, and (according to stats that I heard from last week's election) 57% of the vote.
You either heard it wrong, remember it wrong, or maybe you trying to start a disinformation campaign? I know that the media doesn't like to report detailed results (people might wonder about all those 3rd-party votes), but it's really not hard to find. Obama had 52.6% of the popular vote. McCain was 46.1%.
I *highly* doubt that the electorate voted based on who was in the news more.
I think you overestimate the US electorate.
Umm, did you really just say that? First, the UK didn't exist in 1215. Second, there is absolutely no way in which you can argue that England has been a republic since 1215.
But you claimed the UK was not a Republic, which I refute. The Magna Carta was the end of any true Monarchy for England, and lead to the current republic-style government of the UK.
The point is, the GP was correct: most countries are actually organized as republics. Your claim about the UK, Australia, et.al. being monarchies is fallacious, because they are MINOs (Monarchies In Name Only).
Switzerland has probably the most Democratic system in the world, but it's not all mob-rule like you're advocating with a real-time, everybody-votes-on-everything system.
Switzerland has a legislature of representatives, and executive, that make most of the laws, which must follow the country's constitution. If people don't like a law that is passed by the legislature, they *can* call for a vote to have it repealed, but they need 50,000 signatures in 100 days, and then there is a rather lengthy process for getting it onto a ballot and having a vote.
The important part is the Constitution that maintains the rights of the people. It can be amended, but it is difficult to do.
That's a good thing. Because the most important role of government is to protect people's rights from other people. A direct democracy without those protections is still tyranny, it's just tyranny of the majority. When people can vote to decide what rights to take away from which group, no one is safe.
Also, people don't seem to realize there are hardly any real democracies in the world, only republics.
Either you must be using some strange definition for the word republic that I'm not familiar with, or you're excluding countries which certainly are not republics, like the UK, Australia and other countries in the monarchy, and many other countries around the world which are not republics.
Uhh... No. The Magna Carta swept away the monarch's power and made the UK a Republic - that is, requiring the monarch to recognize the rights and powers of Barons and leading to a Parliamentary government. Today, members of the Parliament are voted into office by the citizens, clearly making the UK a Republic. The title of the head of state doesn't matter. Whether there is a King or a Prime Minister or a President, if there is a body of representatives that make laws, and an instrument to hold the head of state as subject to the law (like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution), then you have a Republic.
Australian government is very similar to the US' - they have a parliament made up of a House of Representatives and a Senate, with representatives popularly elected by citizens of the six states. The only difference is in terminology, as they call the head of state the "Queen", not the "President".
These countries often call themselves "Constitutional Monarchy", but in a true monarchy, everything is owned by the monarch, and the monarch provides leases and allowances. That's not how these countries operate. So they are not really monarchies at all - they are Republics.
The Glass-Steagall act probably should be reinstated, but moreover we should kick the greedy bastards out of Wall Street and replace them with the more conservative financial leaders who were slowly pushed out by the instant-gratification morons.
And repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley. It has been proven not to work, as AGI, Bears-Sterns, Goldman-Sachs, et.al. were in compliance but there was still no significant warning that these corporations were so near to collapse. Instead, it provides a multi-million dollar barrier to IPO for any company with a good business plan but in need of capital. We need to encourage new start-ups, not put huge hurtles in their path that serve no useful purpose.
Those with power don't relinquish power without a fight. They won't roll it back. They will just claim that since they are responsible, they won't abuse that power the way their predecessors did. Faux News or not, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Exactly right. In fact I would go a step further and point out that the Democrats in congress, even after they had a majority, didn't challenge all that executive expansion of power precisely because they were looking forward to having a Democratic president in the office that could wield those powers.
It's really telling that many of the people that complained about the executive power-grab didn't have a problem with it in principal, but were only opposed to the party doing the grabbing. Personally, I would much rather see the checks and balances and rule of law supported no matter who is in office. That would be much better than assuming anybody will somehow resist being corrupted by the power.
Your comment is so ill-conceived it's hard to know where to start.
What about the white voters who voted against Obama because of his race? If they had voted with their demographic on other issues, Obama still wins.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. According to PBS's exit polls, the people that sited race as a factor in their voting decision leaned toward Obama. So, if anything, the few white voters that may have voted against Obama because he was black was more than offset by the number of white voters siding *with* Obama because he was black.
That argument doesn't work anymore. Just because Fox News is a right wing tabloid doesn't mean they all have a bias. If the truth doesn't support your reality and the other news organizations won't bend their coverage to support your viewpoint, that doesn't make them biased.
And yet... they ARE.
The government is doing it, because without the 'men with guns' that the government supplies to protect the property rights of the rich, this massive wealth redistribution never would have happened.
Seeing as how the top 1% control the vast majority of wealth in the country, they should be the ones paying the vast majority of the taxes. The police, armed forces, and fire departments certainly aren't protecting the nonexistent property of the bum living under the bridge. They are protecting the property of the rich, and therefore the rich should pay.
So the cops, armed forces, and fire departments don't do anything for you, don't protect you, and ignore your fires. But if they weren't there, you would take whatever you want by force. Is that what you are saying? So the rich are the only ones that use the roads, public schools, health services, unemployment insurance, social security (retirement, disability, etc.), and the Food Stamp programs? They are the only ones that benefit from regulations of the FDA, the EPA, the Department of Education, the Corps of Engineers, and the court system.
So all these armed law enforcement and bureaucracies are just for the rich, and perform (in some nebulous fashion) the enrichment of the rich, and if only they weren't in the way, you would just take whatever you want from whoever has it now? Is that your position?
No, that's totally wrong. Having a "representative system" in no way protects people against the tyranny of the majority. If 49 states all decide together that the 50th should house all the nuclear waste for them, that still demonstrates the flaw.
What protects us is the rule of law and the Constitutional limitations on the central government's authority.
Keep whittling away at the constitutional protections because they are "outdated" or "inconvenient" or because it's "too difficult to pass amendments", then soon it won't protect us at all, and then we won't have to worry about things like they tyranny of the majority, because the oligarchs in control will stop listening anyway.
"is really wealth redistribution from the working middle class to the lazy bums"
so how can you vote republican, when what they do is wealth redistribution from everybody else to the richest 1%? Thankfully for you, you have other choices!
Is it the government doing that redistribution, or something else? Is the government actually controlling how each dollar is distributed to each person, and implemented distributions that are heavily skewed? Why would they be doing that?
Well, of course they aren't. In fact, that 1% that you talk about actually carries 40% of the total tax burden. 60% of all income taxes come from the top 5%. So I guess what you are saying is that the Republicans allow people to keep too much of their money?
Ok, let's try that. Let's just raise taxes on earners over $200,000 a year. Uh-oh, that's only about $100 billion, and we need about $1 trillion to cover the Democrat's proposed new spending. And don't forget the government is going to need some of those taxes to administer everything, hire more administrators, etc., etc. To avoid borrowing all the money from China, you need to raise the tax rate on everyone that pays taxes - that's down to around $35,000 per year. If that's not the entire middle class, I don't know what is.
I guess compared to some third world countries, though, those people *are* rich.
You are just being selfish and unpatriotic. What, do you hate America?