Socialism is like bubonic plague in that you can still find pockets of it of you know where to look, but it no longer has the power to kill millions.
Whatever you say, Feudalist.
no nukes
Putting aside the issue of safety aside, nuclear power is completely unjustifiable based on cost alone. Period. Other forms of energy have a fraction of the price, can be built without billions in government subsidies, and there's no waste to store for the next few thousand years. Yes, yes, you have your vaporware, I mean breeder reactors, but when alternatives are much cheaper, why bother?
no natural gas, at the same time as we're going to required to assume the worst about carbon emissions
Carbon emissions are yet another reason to reduce the use of natural gas. It's a part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Neither could a black guy with a name shared with an infamous middle eastern dictator. Going up against the most powerful family in Democratic politics? The very notion is a joke.
His stance on NAFTA and free trade in general [donaldjtrump.com] is not [nationalinterest.org] supported [nytimes.com] by [usnews.com] most [nationalreview.com] economists.
Right wing neoliberal economists, who should be sent out back with the trickle down wonks, laughed out of polite conversation for getting everything wrong.
He wants to put ground troops in Syria to fight ISIS. America does not need another ground war, especially one that is so politically risky.
I trust your voting for Stein or Johnson, then? Because Hillary will have troops in Syria before she leaves the podium on January 20th.
And what, pray tell, is so awful about Trump? Please, enumerate a few things you find particularly disagreeable.
He's a racist blowhard - but then, so is Hillary. If Trump had learned to keep his mouth shut, the election would be his to lose, as there isn't an in his direction that can't be thrown right back in Hillbot faces.
America's media â" only 7% of them being Republicans
Really? Still playing the "biased liberal media" canard after the 2000 election, where the press relentlessly rat and chickenfucked Al Gore while giving Bush a pass for claiming credit for legislation he vetoed?
What temporarily embarrassed millionaires never bother to think about: companies always set prices to maximize revenue, and they always look to cut costs. It doesn't matter if you pay your workers 25 cents or $250 per hour, those two market forces will remain unchanged.
That's pedantically true
Zero pedantry involved. McDonald's workers could all agree to work for 25 cents on the hour, and the corporation would still lay off workers if meant saving one of those cents per worker hour, or even a fraction of it.
That's why so many small retail businesses support minimum wage hikes on a state and/or national level. It makes it easier for them to pay their workers a decent salary because they know their competition will have to do the same.
And because the sort of workers that patronize minimum wage establishments....tend to make minimum wage themselves. Meaning an increase in the minimum wage means more customers for those businesses, as those people have more money to spend. Meaning those that fearmonger that an increase in the minimum wage will negatively affect those who earn it are full of shit, as they always have been.
That's absurd because the reason for choosing politicians has nothing to do with corruption.
Yes, you willfully missing a simple point is absurd. Politicians are still corrupt, and capitalists are still reckless and greedy. Which is why unions are still needed, to push back against that greed and corruption.
You obviously missed the part where unions have absolutely no power once the company decides to offshore everyone.
You've obviously ignored the fact that corporations have offshored their operations, now matter how rich they are no matter how many concessions their unions make. Americans could cut their wages below the level of destitution, and they still couldn't compete with third world labor, because that third world labor doesn't have the American cost of living.
When the plant closes, and nobody has a job.
What unions do, and you ignore, is make it painful enough for the company that they can't, as a given, do their standard BS of offering two weeks severance pay if the American workers getting laid off agree to train their replacements from Bangladesh over the phone. They might still get away with it - in which case they will still get away with it union or no union - as beholden as both parties are to "free" trade. But unions can and do throw up a roadblock to such efforts. The company may still ship their operations overseas - but it will cost them some lost revenue from strikes and lockouts before the transition is complete.
And the people who should be regulating those Chinese factories to ensure that workers are paid reasonably, are not forced to work unreasonable hours, etc. are the Chinese government.
Hmmm, a side order of red herring to go with that non sequitur. American workers are not responsible for what China does. The U.S. Government, however, is responsible for selling out those workers to monied interests who DGAF about unreasonable hours, etc, in Chinese factories producing crap to ship back to American Wal-Mart's.
They (along with the governments of many other countries) have not done so to nearly the degree that we in the U.S. would prefer, which is a big part of why we have such problems with offshoring in the first place.
No. That's purely due to corporate trade laws, like NAFTA and the TPP, which Obama hopes to ram through Congress in the lame duck session. Third world labor and international shipping existed all the way through the post-WWII era, where the American middle class boomed.
. And the U.S. government hasn't done enough to prevent Chinese companies from dumping goods into American marke
Better than unions, are business structures that lack such a stark opposition in the first place... worker owned and cooperatives,
So....smashing, Socialism, eh comrade?
On the other hand because Unions are meant to counter short-term corporate greed, we should be fairly skeptical of public sector unions either by prohibiting any political activity thereby
Because corporate and monied interests haven't argued they should be exempt from paying for the society in which they live, which has lead to their fortunes? Low taxes have high costs for the public, and public sector workers. Public unions serve as pushpack against those freeloaders.
or allowing public employees that disagree with the overall activity and direction of the union to opt out of all fees.
As long as they are also opting out everything gained by the unions at the same time: compensation, benefits, vacation time, right to due process, health care plans.... Unless you're in favor of scab freeloading, for some reason.
I don't care if he didn't have access to classified intelligence.
So you care more about the storyline than the facts or accountability?
He supported it in 2003-2005.
And why might that be. You only had both parties and the entire establishment media supporting the invasion - shocking development that most Americans also supported the war, given that they weren't privy to the actual intelligence briefings.
Who was privy? Hillary Rodham Clinton. So, yeah, having access to information the common citizen did not does matter. And of course, Trump's 2003 support for the Iraq War made no difference in the invasion - as opposed to the yea vote from a U.S. Senator. And yeah, if Trump had been the one in office at the time while Hillary was a private citizen, the same rules would apply to Trump in her place.
I mean, I guess it would be nice if we elected a president who opposed the war at the time... but after 8 years of a president like that, would we even care about that issue?
We shouldn't care about the possibility of another warmongering fool getting thousands more Americans killed, and between one and two million people getting killed in more illegal wars?
Also, I have no idea why you think Iraq was anything like Syria or Libya.
How were they not like Iraq? Big Ebul Dictator needs to be overthrown and his country made safe for democracy, because he was abusing his own people, clamped down on civil rights, was a threat to his neighbors, blah blah blah. The fake concern over WMD's was copied straight from the Iraq playbook to Syria. Want to say the lack of boots (special forces use moccasins, not boots) and a long occupation makes those two regional instabilities too different from Iraq? Okay....but you know who really wanted boots on the ground in Syria, right?
Unions raise wages at first. The dark side that they don't tell you about is that this causes the companies to try to find other ways to cut costs, and eventually leads to the jobs moving overseas.
What temporarily embarrassed millionaires never bother to think about: companies always set prices to maximize revenue, and they always look to cut costs. It doesn't matter if you pay your workers 25 cents or $250 per hour, those two market forces will remain unchanged.
unions are not the answer. Unions are a hack workaround for a failed government that isn't raising the minimum wage fast enough to keep up with inflation
That's as brilliant as saying the little people no longer need the right to vote, because politicians are no longer corrupt. Or as asinine, I don't remember which. Because unions act as a counter-balance to corporate greed, when the board DGAF if the company goes under, as long as they make 7 figure salaries while the ship is going down. Because unions act as a counter-balance to the bosses power, which makes you as expendable as toilet paper, no matter how big your ego.
So, are there no longer any greedy corporate executives looking to abuse their employees, or is your anti-union line as tired as you accuse unions of being?
Unions work to counter-balance the power wielded by bosses and capitalists. Unions counter-balance the corporate greed of capitalists, who DGAF if they drive the company intro the ground, at the expense of employees and customers, as long as they get rich in the process. Has either the power imbalance or corporate greed disappeared?
No. Which makes you as much of a tool as someone who claims the little people don't need to vote in elections anymore, because politicians are no longer corrupt.
I mean shit, the black lives matter movement is all over the media, but they don't give a shit about an actual black life unless it involves all of 1) a gun 2) a cop 3) a stolen case of cigarettes, a stolen bike, or a stolen car
Willfully obtuse. Willful stupidity. They are protesting because cops are free to straight-up murder people in public, on camera, and suffer no consequences for doing so. But you knew this already.
The best way to get presidential involvement is to be a liar, a cheater, or a petty thug who happened to receive an overzealous (but in many cases, deserved) response. And everybody reading this knows it.
Everyone with two functioning neurons knows that the cops and the school district would have been shouting from the rooftops that Ahmed was engaged in a hoax if they could do so. They didn't, and they wont, because there wasn't a shred of evidence to suggest that was the case, outside the fevered imaginations of puritans wanting to burn the 14 year old witch. This, you also know.
Yes, cops are human. Yes, cops kill innocent people sometimes.
It was an extraordinary achievement when the cop that murdered Oscar Grant was sentenced to prison - the first cop in the history of California to be sent to prison for killing someone 'in the course of his duties'. For all of 18 months. Because 999 times out of a thousand, they get off scot free - just ask Kelly Thomas. Whereas if you shot a cop in the back, after you had handcuffed him and he was lying face down on the ground, how much time do you think you would have served? Could you have caved in a cop's skull with a baton and your fists without consequences? Cops are free to shoot people without warning, shoot people who are complying with their 'lawful orders', shoot people who are restrained, and even beat them to death for being homeless and schizophrenic- yet go right back on the force after taking a paid vacation.
To borrow Clinton's line on the economy, it's the police culture of impunity, shit for brains.
No sane person would believe his story that he invented a clock and wanted to show it off to his teacher at school
As opposed to the sanity of wanting to face violent arrest or even death by trigger happy cop for shits and giggles?
showed it to kids knowing they'd think it could be a bomb
Willful dumbfuckery. Not the kid, you, and the other assholes here overdosing on stupid pills. The cops and the school district would have been the first ones to scream, to anyone and everyone that would listen, that Ahmed was perpetrating a hoax if they could. So they wouldn't look as stupid as the right wingers on Slashdot by doing a full Boston Lite-Brite freakout on a 14 year old kid. They didn't and they wont - because the only people who thought it was a bomb or a hoax are bedwetting jackasses.
Y'all are fucking this chicken like you're trying to form an equal and opposite force to SWJ's, but just ending up equally full of it in the process.
He took a click out of its casing and took it to school at the suggestion of his father, hoping to start a racial incident. They succeeded.
If there was the slightest hint of a possibility of a chance that the kid did this on purpose, the school district and the police department would have been the first ones to go public with that information, so they wouldn't look as pathetically stupid as a right winger on Slashdot pushing a baseless conspiracy theory.
Only if the facts of what he leaked and why are completely ignored, along with his Oath of Office, the definition of Treason, the 4th Amendment...
Certainly what he did violated Federal laws.
Federal laws meant to cover up shredding of our 4th Amendment rights. But hey, we gotta have priorities, like talking about how Snowden must must must face trial, while ignoring the fact that each and every warrantless NSA wiretap is punishable by 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Then you're a fool. The only path for Snowden to have upheld his Oath of Office and defend the Constitution was to do exactly what he did. It's funny, though, how you guys never call for FISA laws to be enforced against government employees, all the way up to the president himself. Up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each warrantless wiretap.
We're talking millions of years in prison and trillions in fines, collectively. Yet the slobbering authoritarians never demand that Obama and the staff of the NSA be sent off to jail.
I can't stand the KOS, but Primaries should be closed.
A frequently heard mantra - mostly after closed primaries helped Clinton - but it's not a justifiable one:
1) You can't hold an election at taxpayer expense and then tell taxpayers they can't vote in it unless they join your little club. It's a non-starter, but it's not the most brazenly arrogant attitude the party has. That would be:
2) Democrats have now spent the better part of 20 years screaming at everyone that will listen that independent Nader voters are responsible for Bush's election in 2000 - even if it's total bullshit. But it takes a Biblical sense of entitlement to tell those voters that they can't vote on a candidate in their primary, then savage them for not voting for their candidate in the general.
3) The two major parties are still the two major parties because they have colluded to exclude third parties on both a national and local levels. Which means, with few exceptions, that aspiring politicians must join the Dems or the GOP. Which means that the vote in the primary is just as important as the vote in the general election.
4) Being limited to candidates for one party limits a voters choices for ad hoc reasons. To go with #3, an otherwise right-wing voter in Pennsylvania who lost his job to NAFTA should not have been barred from voting for Sanders and against the pro-NAFTA-and-TPP Hillary. Just as an otherwise liberal hispanic voter should have been able to vote against Trump in the GOP primary because he's a flaming racist.
The party is selecting it's nominee, those not part of the party should not have any say.
Which would be a very reasonable position - if it was the nominee to chair the DNC. But not for the the President of the United States of America, who will represent all voters and the federal government.
When the various party nominee's then run for the office in question. At that point it's open to everybody.
Only after you've closed off access to the most meaningful vote. Republicans had 17 choices for president before the general election. The Democrats had half a dozen high-profile candidates to choose from in 2008 - only one this cycle, due to the corrupt party establishment clearing it for Hillary. Whereas independent voters are left with the functional choice of the two most incompetent, unpopular candidates in living memory - or "throwing their vote away" on a third party.
That, or join the corrupt and insular Democratic Party, or the corrupt and insular GOP.
Open primaries allow the other side to choose the weakest candidate. Had the first 10 or so primaries been closed Trump likely would not be the nominee.
Trump isn't a sign of a problem with open primaries. Trump is a sign that the right is as fed up with establishment politics of the left, and that the unhinged Bircher/NRA/Tebaggerization of the GOP has fully metastasized.
The only way his answer is any better than Hillary's is if (a) you ignore history or (b) if you get Hillary confused with "If I knew then what I know now I would still support the war" Jeb
Except c) that dog still don't hunt. Trump wasn't privy to classified intelligence as a U.S. Senator - Hillary was, she just didn't bother to read it. John Edwards had an unequivocal "yeah, I fucked up that vote" confession back in 2005. Whereas right now Hillary still engages in the chickenshit cop-out of blaming Bush, when she was too lazy to read the briefings she was given. And she can't blame Bush for repeating the Iraq clusterfuck in Syria and Libya, which she did as SOS. So, any way you wish to split the hair, Trump is better than Hillary on the Iraq War.
What most folks don't realize is that even though it's carried out in the public eye with public funds - the primary election isn't a public election.
Then they can pay for their primary election with private funds, too. The worst are the chicken-fuckers over at dailykos, who scream that that primaries should be closed to party members only (conveniently, the type that gave Hillary much of her margin of "victory"), yet are happy to use taxpayer funds to run them.
Because the primary was rigged. A laughable number of debates compared to 2008, and scheduled to air at times guaranteed to have few viewers. A primary schedule front-loaded with conservative southern states (most of which would never vote for Hillary in the general) to give the conservative candidate an early claim to "frontrunner" status. And that was right out in the open, before any of the DNC's outright ratfucking was revealed.
No, there was no chance. There never was
That's what Hillbots said in 2008, too. Sanders has a solid record and his positions are popular with far more voters than Hillary. Whereas Hillary's record is solid shit, and her positions are unpopular with voters. But hey, waddya know - when you start with the Mt. Everest of name recognition, have the banks/media/neocons/party bosses all lined up behind you - it is possible to beat a senator that most Americans had never heard of eight months ago!
At least Bernie was big enough to realize that however much he might personally dislike Clinton, she remains by a wide margin a better presidential candidate than Trump.
Hillbots keep saying that too, but the Dem candidate is no lesser evil, not this time. Trump attacks the Iraq war as a stupid idea; Hillary replicated it in Syria and Libya. Hillary loves the TPP, Trump does not.
And every attack that can be made against Trump can be thrown right back in Hillbot faces. He's a racist? So is she - superpredators and deporting children - to the country she helped overthrow - to "send a message to their parents". He's corrupt? Cattle futures, pay-to-play with the Clinton Foundation, Goldman Sachs speeches, and so on.
The Clintons are not a "wealthy right-wing family" by any stretch of the imagination
The are the most successful right-wing family in the United States, far beyond the Bush's. Clinton passed corporate trade laws, deregulation and the gutting of welfare that Reagan could have only dreamed of. Monica Lewinsky is the reason your Social Security benefits weren't blown up in the 2008 economic collapse, as Bill wanted to privatize it long before Dubbya wanted to.
As for Hillary, she exported fracking to the world, loves corporate trade, starting a new cold war with Russia, and has ever met a regime change or regional conflict she didn't love, or a brutal dictator she wouldn't sell arms to, as long as they play ball with "American interests".
Hillary is so far left she has a self-avowed socialist for a running mate.
In some other planet where she picked Sanders to be her running mate, rather than colluding with the DNC to cheat him out of the primaries? Tim Kaine is another pro-corporate shill who loves right-to-work laws and could easily appoint a pro-life justice to SCOTUS, if he were to become president.
Y'alls need to ignore party labels and speeches and look at what politicians do.
Two countries. You're using that word, "bordered", but it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Russia, a country who's leader once vowed to bury us with nuclear bombs.
In retaliatory strikes. Dig through just about any fear-mongering statement against Iran, North Korea et all and you'll find a threat to fight back if they are attacked first.
And it's not Putin who's bombing countries on the other side of the world for him for completely bullshit reasons.
It's not Putin trying to hack every communication from every person on the planet.
It's not Putin spending a trillion dollars to modernize Russia's nuclear arsenal.
It's not Putin expanding the Warsaw pact to Canada and Mexico, after promising the first Bush that he wouldn't do that.
It takes gratuitous level of willful dumbfuckery to pretend Russia is the aggressive imperial power, here.
Cuba, a country that once hosted some of those nuclear bombs.
In response to Turkey hosting nuclear missiles for the United States. That part is invariably left out of the American Exceptionalist storyline, though.
Dude seriously what does statehood have to do with being part of the US
Everything.
Currently, there are a total of sixteen territories of the United States, five of which are inhabited: Puerto Rico
And at one point India was a territory of Britain. Would an invasion - which still didn't happen in Alaska, so feel free to stop fucking this chicken at any time - of India meant that Britain had suffered an invasion? Of course not.
Name one democracy the U.S. overthrew to prevent a genocide or a regional war,
has me perplexed, weren't you arguing that the US should stop using it's military power to influence world events, now you seem to be saying it's Okay as long as you approve of it.
Now you're just being stupid. To defend America's record of overthrowing democracies, you throw out the canard that not all democracies are good (careful, you're bordering on self-awareness there) and thus some were okay to overthrow. So which, democracies, exactly, did the United States overthrow to prevent genocide and war (two things that Germany, who you brought up, started in the 30's). It's a simple enough question.
That depends on where you live. In Europe, a "liberal" is a libertarian. In America, a "liberal" is a progressive, or what Europeans would call a social democrat. In Australia, a "liberal" is a conservative.
That's some nice pedantry, but it's a non-response to the cross-eyed Randianism being called out in your first post:
Liberals believe in the power of government to affect people's lives. They want you to have a "relationship with your government", like it's a girlfriend or something. They expand, expand, expand the power of government because they believe it to be positive and NOT subject to corruption or any of those yucky things.
Liberals in America are right-wing conservatives who spend a lot of time lying to themselves about the positions and politicians they support. Phil Ochs wrote a little ditty about them that still applies to this day.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever you say, Feudalist.
Putting aside the issue of safety aside, nuclear power is completely unjustifiable based on cost alone. Period. Other forms of energy have a fraction of the price, can be built without billions in government subsidies, and there's no waste to store for the next few thousand years. Yes, yes, you have your vaporware, I mean breeder reactors, but when alternatives are much cheaper, why bother?
Carbon emissions are yet another reason to reduce the use of natural gas. It's a part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Neither could a black guy with a name shared with an infamous middle eastern dictator. Going up against the most powerful family in Democratic politics? The very notion is a joke.
Right wing neoliberal economists, who should be sent out back with the trickle down wonks, laughed out of polite conversation for getting everything wrong.
I trust your voting for Stein or Johnson, then? Because Hillary will have troops in Syria before she leaves the podium on January 20th.
He's a racist blowhard - but then, so is Hillary. If Trump had learned to keep his mouth shut, the election would be his to lose, as there isn't an in his direction that can't be thrown right back in Hillbot faces.
Really? Still playing the "biased liberal media" canard after the 2000 election, where the press relentlessly rat and chickenfucked Al Gore while giving Bush a pass for claiming credit for legislation he vetoed?
Zero pedantry involved. McDonald's workers could all agree to work for 25 cents on the hour, and the corporation would still lay off workers if meant saving one of those cents per worker hour, or even a fraction of it.
And because the sort of workers that patronize minimum wage establishments....tend to make minimum wage themselves. Meaning an increase in the minimum wage means more customers for those businesses, as those people have more money to spend. Meaning those that fearmonger that an increase in the minimum wage will negatively affect those who earn it are full of shit, as they always have been.
Yes, you willfully missing a simple point is absurd. Politicians are still corrupt, and capitalists are still reckless and greedy. Which is why unions are still needed, to push back against that greed and corruption.
You've obviously ignored the fact that corporations have offshored their operations, now matter how rich they are no matter how many concessions their unions make. Americans could cut their wages below the level of destitution, and they still couldn't compete with third world labor, because that third world labor doesn't have the American cost of living.
What unions do, and you ignore, is make it painful enough for the company that they can't, as a given, do their standard BS of offering two weeks severance pay if the American workers getting laid off agree to train their replacements from Bangladesh over the phone. They might still get away with it - in which case they will still get away with it union or no union - as beholden as both parties are to "free" trade. But unions can and do throw up a roadblock to such efforts. The company may still ship their operations overseas - but it will cost them some lost revenue from strikes and lockouts before the transition is complete.
Hmmm, a side order of red herring to go with that non sequitur. American workers are not responsible for what China does. The U.S. Government, however, is responsible for selling out those workers to monied interests who DGAF about unreasonable hours, etc, in Chinese factories producing crap to ship back to American Wal-Mart's.
No. That's purely due to corporate trade laws, like NAFTA and the TPP, which Obama hopes to ram through Congress in the lame duck session. Third world labor and international shipping existed all the way through the post-WWII era, where the American middle class boomed.
So....smashing, Socialism, eh comrade?
Because corporate and monied interests haven't argued they should be exempt from paying for the society in which they live, which has lead to their fortunes? Low taxes have high costs for the public, and public sector workers. Public unions serve as pushpack against those freeloaders.
As long as they are also opting out everything gained by the unions at the same time: compensation, benefits, vacation time, right to due process, health care plans.... Unless you're in favor of scab freeloading, for some reason.
I live the smell of pure projection in the morning..smells like ad-hoc western exceptionalist wankery.
Hint: the whistelblower DGAF if he's already dead, slick. Next excuse to throw Assange under the bus?
So you care more about the storyline than the facts or accountability?
And why might that be. You only had both parties and the entire establishment media supporting the invasion - shocking development that most Americans also supported the war, given that they weren't privy to the actual intelligence briefings.
Who was privy? Hillary Rodham Clinton. So, yeah, having access to information the common citizen did not does matter. And of course, Trump's 2003 support for the Iraq War made no difference in the invasion - as opposed to the yea vote from a U.S. Senator. And yeah, if Trump had been the one in office at the time while Hillary was a private citizen, the same rules would apply to Trump in her place.
We shouldn't care about the possibility of another warmongering fool getting thousands more Americans killed, and between one and two million people getting killed in more illegal wars?
How were they not like Iraq? Big Ebul Dictator needs to be overthrown and his country made safe for democracy, because he was abusing his own people, clamped down on civil rights, was a threat to his neighbors, blah blah blah. The fake concern over WMD's was copied straight from the Iraq playbook to Syria. Want to say the lack of boots (special forces use moccasins, not boots) and a long occupation makes those two regional instabilities too different from Iraq? Okay....but you know who really wanted boots on the ground in Syria, right?
HRC.
What temporarily embarrassed millionaires never bother to think about: companies always set prices to maximize revenue, and they always look to cut costs. It doesn't matter if you pay your workers 25 cents or $250 per hour, those two market forces will remain unchanged.
That's as brilliant as saying the little people no longer need the right to vote, because politicians are no longer corrupt. Or as asinine, I don't remember which. Because unions act as a counter-balance to corporate greed, when the board DGAF if the company goes under, as long as they make 7 figure salaries while the ship is going down. Because unions act as a counter-balance to the bosses power, which makes you as expendable as toilet paper, no matter how big your ego.
So, are there no longer any greedy corporate executives looking to abuse their employees, or is your anti-union line as tired as you accuse unions of being?
Unions work to counter-balance the power wielded by bosses and capitalists. Unions counter-balance the corporate greed of capitalists, who DGAF if they drive the company intro the ground, at the expense of employees and customers, as long as they get rich in the process. Has either the power imbalance or corporate greed disappeared?
No. Which makes you as much of a tool as someone who claims the little people don't need to vote in elections anymore, because politicians are no longer corrupt.
Willfully obtuse. Willful stupidity. They are protesting because cops are free to straight-up murder people in public, on camera, and suffer no consequences for doing so. But you knew this already.
Everyone with two functioning neurons knows that the cops and the school district would have been shouting from the rooftops that Ahmed was engaged in a hoax if they could do so. They didn't, and they wont, because there wasn't a shred of evidence to suggest that was the case, outside the fevered imaginations of puritans wanting to burn the 14 year old witch. This, you also know.
It was an extraordinary achievement when the cop that murdered Oscar Grant was sentenced to prison - the first cop in the history of California to be sent to prison for killing someone 'in the course of his duties'. For all of 18 months. Because 999 times out of a thousand, they get off scot free - just ask Kelly Thomas. Whereas if you shot a cop in the back, after you had handcuffed him and he was lying face down on the ground, how much time do you think you would have served? Could you have caved in a cop's skull with a baton and your fists without consequences? Cops are free to shoot people without warning, shoot people who are complying with their 'lawful orders', shoot people who are restrained, and even beat them to death for being homeless and schizophrenic- yet go right back on the force after taking a paid vacation.
To borrow Clinton's line on the economy, it's the police culture of impunity, shit for brains.
As opposed to the sanity of wanting to face violent arrest or even death by trigger happy cop for shits and giggles?
Willful dumbfuckery. Not the kid, you, and the other assholes here overdosing on stupid pills. The cops and the school district would have been the first ones to scream, to anyone and everyone that would listen, that Ahmed was perpetrating a hoax if they could. So they wouldn't look as stupid as the right wingers on Slashdot by doing a full Boston Lite-Brite freakout on a 14 year old kid. They didn't and they wont - because the only people who thought it was a bomb or a hoax are bedwetting jackasses.
Y'all are fucking this chicken like you're trying to form an equal and opposite force to SWJ's, but just ending up equally full of it in the process.
Yes, because it's everyone's life dream to face violent arrest and even death by cop for shits and giggles. At the age of 14.
If there was the slightest hint of a possibility of a chance that the kid did this on purpose, the school district and the police department would have been the first ones to go public with that information, so they wouldn't look as pathetically stupid as a right winger on Slashdot pushing a baseless conspiracy theory.
Only if the facts of what he leaked and why are completely ignored, along with his Oath of Office, the definition of Treason, the 4th Amendment...
Federal laws meant to cover up shredding of our 4th Amendment rights. But hey, we gotta have priorities, like talking about how Snowden must must must face trial, while ignoring the fact that each and every warrantless NSA wiretap is punishable by 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Pedantic distinction without a difference. The government of the colonies was British - a government that was overthrown. In the colonies.
Then you're a fool. The only path for Snowden to have upheld his Oath of Office and defend the Constitution was to do exactly what he did. It's funny, though, how you guys never call for FISA laws to be enforced against government employees, all the way up to the president himself. Up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each warrantless wiretap.
We're talking millions of years in prison and trillions in fines, collectively. Yet the slobbering authoritarians never demand that Obama and the staff of the NSA be sent off to jail.
A frequently heard mantra - mostly after closed primaries helped Clinton - but it's not a justifiable one:
Which would be a very reasonable position - if it was the nominee to chair the DNC. But not for the the President of the United States of America, who will represent all voters and the federal government.
Only after you've closed off access to the most meaningful vote. Republicans had 17 choices for president before the general election. The Democrats had half a dozen high-profile candidates to choose from in 2008 - only one this cycle, due to the corrupt party establishment clearing it for Hillary. Whereas independent voters are left with the functional choice of the two most incompetent, unpopular candidates in living memory - or "throwing their vote away" on a third party.
That, or join the corrupt and insular Democratic Party, or the corrupt and insular GOP.
Trump isn't a sign of a problem with open primaries. Trump is a sign that the right is as fed up with establishment politics of the left, and that the unhinged Bircher/NRA/Tebaggerization of the GOP has fully metastasized.
Except c) that dog still don't hunt. Trump wasn't privy to classified intelligence as a U.S. Senator - Hillary was, she just didn't bother to read it. John Edwards had an unequivocal "yeah, I fucked up that vote" confession back in 2005. Whereas right now Hillary still engages in the chickenshit cop-out of blaming Bush, when she was too lazy to read the briefings she was given. And she can't blame Bush for repeating the Iraq clusterfuck in Syria and Libya, which she did as SOS. So, any way you wish to split the hair, Trump is better than Hillary on the Iraq War.
No lesser evil. Not this time.
Then they can pay for their primary election with private funds, too. The worst are the chicken-fuckers over at dailykos, who scream that that primaries should be closed to party members only (conveniently, the type that gave Hillary much of her margin of "victory"), yet are happy to use taxpayer funds to run them.
Because the primary was rigged. A laughable number of debates compared to 2008, and scheduled to air at times guaranteed to have few viewers. A primary schedule front-loaded with conservative southern states (most of which would never vote for Hillary in the general) to give the conservative candidate an early claim to "frontrunner" status. And that was right out in the open, before any of the DNC's outright ratfucking was revealed.
That's what Hillbots said in 2008, too. Sanders has a solid record and his positions are popular with far more voters than Hillary. Whereas Hillary's record is solid shit, and her positions are unpopular with voters. But hey, waddya know - when you start with the Mt. Everest of name recognition, have the banks/media/neocons/party bosses all lined up behind you - it is possible to beat a senator that most Americans had never heard of eight months ago!
Hillbots keep saying that too, but the Dem candidate is no lesser evil, not this time. Trump attacks the Iraq war as a stupid idea; Hillary replicated it in Syria and Libya. Hillary loves the TPP, Trump does not.
And every attack that can be made against Trump can be thrown right back in Hillbot faces. He's a racist? So is she - superpredators and deporting children - to the country she helped overthrow - to "send a message to their parents". He's corrupt? Cattle futures, pay-to-play with the Clinton Foundation, Goldman Sachs speeches, and so on.
The are the most successful right-wing family in the United States, far beyond the Bush's. Clinton passed corporate trade laws, deregulation and the gutting of welfare that Reagan could have only dreamed of. Monica Lewinsky is the reason your Social Security benefits weren't blown up in the 2008 economic collapse, as Bill wanted to privatize it long before Dubbya wanted to.
As for Hillary, she exported fracking to the world, loves corporate trade, starting a new cold war with Russia, and has ever met a regime change or regional conflict she didn't love, or a brutal dictator she wouldn't sell arms to, as long as they play ball with "American interests".
In some other planet where she picked Sanders to be her running mate, rather than colluding with the DNC to cheat him out of the primaries? Tim Kaine is another pro-corporate shill who loves right-to-work laws and could easily appoint a pro-life justice to SCOTUS, if he were to become president.
Y'alls need to ignore party labels and speeches and look at what politicians do.
Two countries. You're using that word, "bordered", but it doesn't mean what you think it means.
In retaliatory strikes. Dig through just about any fear-mongering statement against Iran, North Korea et all and you'll find a threat to fight back if they are attacked first.
And it's not Putin who's bombing countries on the other side of the world for him for completely bullshit reasons.
It's not Putin trying to hack every communication from every person on the planet.
It's not Putin spending a trillion dollars to modernize Russia's nuclear arsenal.
It's not Putin expanding the Warsaw pact to Canada and Mexico, after promising the first Bush that he wouldn't do that.
It takes gratuitous level of willful dumbfuckery to pretend Russia is the aggressive imperial power, here.
In response to Turkey hosting nuclear missiles for the United States. That part is invariably left out of the American Exceptionalist storyline, though.
Everything.
And at one point India was a territory of Britain. Would an invasion - which still didn't happen in Alaska, so feel free to stop fucking this chicken at any time - of India meant that Britain had suffered an invasion? Of course not.
Now you're just being stupid. To defend America's record of overthrowing democracies, you throw out the canard that not all democracies are good (careful, you're bordering on self-awareness there) and thus some were okay to overthrow. So which, democracies, exactly, did the United States overthrow to prevent genocide and war (two things that Germany, who you brought up, started in the 30's). It's a simple enough question.
One you simply wont be able to answer.
That's some nice pedantry, but it's a non-response to the cross-eyed Randianism being called out in your first post:
Liberals in America are right-wing conservatives who spend a lot of time lying to themselves about the positions and politicians they support. Phil Ochs wrote a little ditty about them that still applies to this day.