Dissent is only a threat if it comes from the right. If it comes to the left, it's the highest expression of patriotism. That's why people like William Ayers are iconic on the left, who, at the end of the day, isn't all that different than Timothy McVeigh...except that William Ayers had richer and politically connected parents, and was a Marxist, so even today fellow Marxists go to bat for him and his "legacy". It helps to have a good friend as the President (of the country and political system he was trying to overthrow) as well.
So rather than throw their hands up and say that it couldn't be passed, they bargained, they gave things up, they compromised.
That's an awfully long winded way of saying they bribed several wavering Senators.
Discussion and compromise are not necessarily signs of perfect authortarian Marxism.
That wasn't exactly what I claimed. What I claimed is that this idea of inter-party Democrat dissent vs the monolithic Republican party is largely a myth, and the reality is closer to the opposite.
The interesting thing about the Democrat ability to wrangle votes is that a lot of Democrats that were elected in 2006 and 2008 ran to the right of their Republican opponents, and won in traditionally Republican districts. These were ostensibly conservative Democrats that were tired of the Republican corruption of the previous years and wanted a return to fiscal responsibility. Har, har, har. But the voters still fell for it, and now we $1.4 trillion deficits are the new normal.
Ronnie didn't use it for every damn speech though. Reagan, as opposed to Obama, really was a gifted public speaker, especially in his governor days.
I certainly am not in the "Obama is dumb" crowd, but his oratory prowess has been grossly overstated. Cult of personality more than capability in this case.
Forgot one other point about Bush (and by extension, Obama). It's easy to be a critic and laugh about how dumb Bush or Obama are is because one constantly fumbles words in a speech or because the other can't give a speech without reading it from a teleprompter. In short, people that make assessments of Presidents based on their perceived intelligence are idiots themselves. It's like the town retard calling the someone else stupid. They should probably look in the mirror before opening their mouth, but it's pile on day, and everyone in the left bought into the "Bush is dumb" meme (which, funny enough, is the meme trotted out for just about every Republican President back to Eisenhower with the possible exception of Tricky Dick).
Ah, a reasonable discussion on Slashdot, what am I to do.
And the problem with achievement is that achievement isn't necessarily productive or wholly worthwhile. Look at Mao, for example. On the one hand, he did radically propel China forward into being a strongly developing country. On the other hand, his clear lack of experience and overconfidence in the ability to micromanage such a large country resulted in massive famine and strife.
In comparison to Mao, I think Bush was not all that different than Clinton and his father before him...largely a maintainer of the status quo. He certainly was not the transformative character that Mao was and Obama apparently is trying to be.
No, what did that for him was a collection of individuals who have done the same thing for countless other individuals (including Bush's father). Bush was a face and a personality and while he certainly shaped the campaigns that gained him Governorship and Presidentship--and he certainly exercised significant power when elected--, he was far from "the decider" or in a position where most people weren't sheltered even if he made grossly large mistakes in procedure. I'm not saying he didn't accomplish something extraordinary, but I'd almost argue that getting a PhD is a greater achievement because it's less based upon a popularity contest and more on actual ability. Certainly, that's not the basis for Bush being elected.
All Presidents are figureheads to a large degree, by virtue of the demands of the office. Where they influence things is in the people that they appoint to run the country. Sure, GWB filled his cabinet and the rest of the administration with retreads from prior administrations, but these were people largely with a decent amount of policy experience within the mainstream of society. For all of the rancor that was thrown there way, people like Ashcroft really were not that bad. When push came to shove, Ashcroft defended the Constitution.
I'm curious of what you speak in this regard. I would definitely say that Obama has certainly been in the news more and did more in the first year than Bush did (well, prior to 9/11). Beyond that, I'm not sure where you've actually pragmatically seen what any of Bush or Obama has done to you. And ideologically, Bush authorized or was otherwise reasonably culpable for authorizing a number of horrible things (warrantless wiretapping, kidnapping, torture, and indefinite imprisonment); Obama isn't much better, continuing about half the mentioned practices. In any case, I'd love to hear an elaboration.
The economy would be a good start. Obama took a structural $450 billion a year deficit under Bush (which was hardly anything to be proud about) and has turned it into a structural $1.4 trillion annual deficit. This is simply unrecoverable without severe austerity. It ends in ruination. At the end of Obama's term, we will have doubled the national debt at the same time that Social Security and Medicare goes into the red. In my opinion, this is what you get when you nominate a bunch of socialist and marxist retreads to your cabinet. They really have no clue on how to run an economy. Turbo Tax Timmy couldn't even balance his own taxes correctly, but now he's running the Treasury Department trying to fix the entire economy (Turbo Tax Timmy is a good example of where academic achievement doesn't necessarily confer real world success and achievement). Obama's mismanagement of the economy is almost enough for me to really believe he's an adherent of the Cloward-Piven strategy of collapsing the system to bring on socialism at the national level.
I could really care less if Obama was born in the United States or not. He won with 53% of the vote, it pretty much settled any questions around his citizenship.
If a gay man married a woman, they would have the same benefits as any other married couple. Now, if you want to fucking REDEFINE MARRIAGE from what it's been in Western civilization for the last 3000 years, by all means, go ahead. But don't call it some sort of equal protection bullshit. It's just the continual leftist desire to turn society on it's head.
But, yes, let's pretend it's all a matter of how well one does on an IQ test.
Which is why I stuck achievement in there. You are right, it's not about performance on an IQ test...presumably a lot of the basement dwellers on Slashdot would do quite well on that account, while accomplishing very little productive in their lives, at least at present.
Bush, like him or hate him, does have a body of accomplishment that is better than the vast majority of people out there. He didn't get elected President because his daddy was President. He was actually an effective and popular governor of Texas. And he got to be governor of Texas by defeating Ann Richards. His daddy didn't do that for him either.
There is certainly a lot of truth that a lot of doors were opened up for GWB due to who his father was, and if you take the same guy, and plop him into a lower middle class pedigree, the outcome would have been far different. Them's the breaks. We don't like in a perfect meritocracy. Those don't actually exist.
And as far as the job he did as President...I think Obama is finding out just how hard that job is. Because Bush fucked up things less in 8 years than Obama did his first year in.
Cool, my very own cyber stalker. And it wasn't a straw man, dick. I shouldn't be punished for your bad choices, and you shouldn't be rewarded out of my pocket book.
The Republicans didn't manage to bully the Democrats into anything. Most of the Democrats tripped all over each other in voting for the Iraq war in trying to look "strong" in defense, and then tripped over each other a year later backbiting the President over the decision.
The Supreme Court is limited to deciding real-life "cases and controversies."
This is a dodge. Nominees to the Supreme Court are explicitly coached to avoid addressing decisions that may come before the Supreme Court.
The question regarding whether or not the government has the power to tell you what to eat is another way of asking the nominee if there are any restraints or limits to the power of the Federal government. Since our entire government system was founded on the basis of limited government, the situation where a judicial nominee cannot articulate the limits of government mean that candidate is singularly unqualified to serve. However, now that we have an agenda based imperial judiciary whose primary purpose is subverting the will of the people, this is the type of judicial nominee you are going to get from the Democrats from now on.
As another example, Sotomayor, that wise Latina, was unable to articulate whether or not people have a right to self defense. You know, that's only something that has existed in English Common Law for some 900 years or so. But the concept was completely foreign to her.
As a self-taught software developer without a CS degree, I've come to recognize that the better and more efficient developers are those that are self-taught, with real-world experience. I've worked with CS grads with their bachelors degrees that cannot stand toe-to-toe with some guy lacking equal credentials, doing their job equal to the time that grad spent in the classroom.
As a self-taught software developer without a CS degree I think you may be engaging in selection bias. The reality is that the software developers without degrees or CS degrees have to be good and typically have to have a track record to get hired that CS-grads do not. Larger pool of CS grads mean they tend to look worse comparatively, but there are some very good developers that managed to graduate with CS degrees.
Exactly. Tell me again why someone sitting around doing nothing but drinking and drug abusing their life away and is somehow entitled to part of my paycheck because I happen to go to work and make a decent living because I chose to do that instead of drinking and drug abusing my life away.
So he had practice ripping off the public to line his pockets.
Can't hold a candle to Obama and Rezko in that regard. Or Clinton and Whitewater for that matter. Or Al Gore and Global Warming. Republicans are amateurs when it comes to ripping off the public compared to the Democrats.
Maybe not, but there is a preponderance of other evidence supporting that claim.
I'd be willing to bet a substantial sum of money that GWB is smarter than 95% of the people claiming he's an idiot. Measured by way of accomplishment or IQ, he's done a hell of a lot more than the basement dwellers on Slashdot have.
Slashdot Mirror
Dissent is only a threat if it comes from the right. If it comes to the left, it's the highest expression of patriotism. That's why people like William Ayers are iconic on the left, who, at the end of the day, isn't all that different than Timothy McVeigh...except that William Ayers had richer and politically connected parents, and was a Marxist, so even today fellow Marxists go to bat for him and his "legacy". It helps to have a good friend as the President (of the country and political system he was trying to overthrow) as well.
So rather than throw their hands up and say that it couldn't be passed, they bargained, they gave things up, they compromised.
That's an awfully long winded way of saying they bribed several wavering Senators.
Discussion and compromise are not necessarily signs of perfect authortarian Marxism.
That wasn't exactly what I claimed. What I claimed is that this idea of inter-party Democrat dissent vs the monolithic Republican party is largely a myth, and the reality is closer to the opposite.
The interesting thing about the Democrat ability to wrangle votes is that a lot of Democrats that were elected in 2006 and 2008 ran to the right of their Republican opponents, and won in traditionally Republican districts. These were ostensibly conservative Democrats that were tired of the Republican corruption of the previous years and wanted a return to fiscal responsibility. Har, har, har. But the voters still fell for it, and now we $1.4 trillion deficits are the new normal.
The only person who could fuck up an interview worse than Ronnie is Palin.
Oh, I'm pretty sure Biden has them both beat.
Ronnie didn't use it for every damn speech though. Reagan, as opposed to Obama, really was a gifted public speaker, especially in his governor days.
I certainly am not in the "Obama is dumb" crowd, but his oratory prowess has been grossly overstated. Cult of personality more than capability in this case.
Forgot one other point about Bush (and by extension, Obama). It's easy to be a critic and laugh about how dumb Bush or Obama are is because one constantly fumbles words in a speech or because the other can't give a speech without reading it from a teleprompter. In short, people that make assessments of Presidents based on their perceived intelligence are idiots themselves. It's like the town retard calling the someone else stupid. They should probably look in the mirror before opening their mouth, but it's pile on day, and everyone in the left bought into the "Bush is dumb" meme (which, funny enough, is the meme trotted out for just about every Republican President back to Eisenhower with the possible exception of Tricky Dick).
Ah, a reasonable discussion on Slashdot, what am I to do.
And the problem with achievement is that achievement isn't necessarily productive or wholly worthwhile. Look at Mao, for example. On the one hand, he did radically propel China forward into being a strongly developing country. On the other hand, his clear lack of experience and overconfidence in the ability to micromanage such a large country resulted in massive famine and strife.
In comparison to Mao, I think Bush was not all that different than Clinton and his father before him...largely a maintainer of the status quo. He certainly was not the transformative character that Mao was and Obama apparently is trying to be.
No, what did that for him was a collection of individuals who have done the same thing for countless other individuals (including Bush's father). Bush was a face and a personality and while he certainly shaped the campaigns that gained him Governorship and Presidentship--and he certainly exercised significant power when elected--, he was far from "the decider" or in a position where most people weren't sheltered even if he made grossly large mistakes in procedure. I'm not saying he didn't accomplish something extraordinary, but I'd almost argue that getting a PhD is a greater achievement because it's less based upon a popularity contest and more on actual ability. Certainly, that's not the basis for Bush being elected.
All Presidents are figureheads to a large degree, by virtue of the demands of the office. Where they influence things is in the people that they appoint to run the country. Sure, GWB filled his cabinet and the rest of the administration with retreads from prior administrations, but these were people largely with a decent amount of policy experience within the mainstream of society. For all of the rancor that was thrown there way, people like Ashcroft really were not that bad. When push came to shove, Ashcroft defended the Constitution.
I'm curious of what you speak in this regard. I would definitely say that Obama has certainly been in the news more and did more in the first year than Bush did (well, prior to 9/11). Beyond that, I'm not sure where you've actually pragmatically seen what any of Bush or Obama has done to you. And ideologically, Bush authorized or was otherwise reasonably culpable for authorizing a number of horrible things (warrantless wiretapping, kidnapping, torture, and indefinite imprisonment); Obama isn't much better, continuing about half the mentioned practices. In any case, I'd love to hear an elaboration.
The economy would be a good start. Obama took a structural $450 billion a year deficit under Bush (which was hardly anything to be proud about) and has turned it into a structural $1.4 trillion annual deficit. This is simply unrecoverable without severe austerity. It ends in ruination. At the end of Obama's term, we will have doubled the national debt at the same time that Social Security and Medicare goes into the red. In my opinion, this is what you get when you nominate a bunch of socialist and marxist retreads to your cabinet. They really have no clue on how to run an economy. Turbo Tax Timmy couldn't even balance his own taxes correctly, but now he's running the Treasury Department trying to fix the entire economy (Turbo Tax Timmy is a good example of where academic achievement doesn't necessarily confer real world success and achievement). Obama's mismanagement of the economy is almost enough for me to really believe he's an adherent of the Cloward-Piven strategy of collapsing the system to bring on socialism at the national level.
Wow, thanks for pointing this out for me. We narrowly averted a police state.
I could really care less if Obama was born in the United States or not. He won with 53% of the vote, it pretty much settled any questions around his citizenship.
He's right. You're wrong.
Your opinion and contribution to this thread is about as valuable as the toilet paper I wipe my ass with.
If a gay man married a woman, they would have the same benefits as any other married couple. Now, if you want to fucking REDEFINE MARRIAGE from what it's been in Western civilization for the last 3000 years, by all means, go ahead. But don't call it some sort of equal protection bullshit. It's just the continual leftist desire to turn society on it's head.
What is that, 4 or 5 posts now where you've followed me around?
But, yes, let's pretend it's all a matter of how well one does on an IQ test.
Which is why I stuck achievement in there. You are right, it's not about performance on an IQ test...presumably a lot of the basement dwellers on Slashdot would do quite well on that account, while accomplishing very little productive in their lives, at least at present.
Bush, like him or hate him, does have a body of accomplishment that is better than the vast majority of people out there. He didn't get elected President because his daddy was President. He was actually an effective and popular governor of Texas. And he got to be governor of Texas by defeating Ann Richards. His daddy didn't do that for him either.
There is certainly a lot of truth that a lot of doors were opened up for GWB due to who his father was, and if you take the same guy, and plop him into a lower middle class pedigree, the outcome would have been far different. Them's the breaks. We don't like in a perfect meritocracy. Those don't actually exist.
And as far as the job he did as President...I think Obama is finding out just how hard that job is. Because Bush fucked up things less in 8 years than Obama did his first year in.
What makes you think they are equal?
What makes you think they are treated equally under the law in other situations?
Example: you have two intoxicated people, a woman and a man. They have sexual intercourse. The man can be prosecuted for rape, but not the woman.
Cool, my very own cyber stalker. And it wasn't a straw man, dick. I shouldn't be punished for your bad choices, and you shouldn't be rewarded out of my pocket book.
The Republicans didn't manage to bully the Democrats into anything. Most of the Democrats tripped all over each other in voting for the Iraq war in trying to look "strong" in defense, and then tripped over each other a year later backbiting the President over the decision.
The Supreme Court is limited to deciding real-life "cases and controversies."
This is a dodge. Nominees to the Supreme Court are explicitly coached to avoid addressing decisions that may come before the Supreme Court.
The question regarding whether or not the government has the power to tell you what to eat is another way of asking the nominee if there are any restraints or limits to the power of the Federal government. Since our entire government system was founded on the basis of limited government, the situation where a judicial nominee cannot articulate the limits of government mean that candidate is singularly unqualified to serve. However, now that we have an agenda based imperial judiciary whose primary purpose is subverting the will of the people, this is the type of judicial nominee you are going to get from the Democrats from now on.
As another example, Sotomayor, that wise Latina, was unable to articulate whether or not people have a right to self defense. You know, that's only something that has existed in English Common Law for some 900 years or so. But the concept was completely foreign to her.
As a self-taught software developer without a CS degree, I've come to recognize that the better and more efficient developers are those that are self-taught, with real-world experience. I've worked with CS grads with their bachelors degrees that cannot stand toe-to-toe with some guy lacking equal credentials, doing their job equal to the time that grad spent in the classroom.
As a self-taught software developer without a CS degree I think you may be engaging in selection bias. The reality is that the software developers without degrees or CS degrees have to be good and typically have to have a track record to get hired that CS-grads do not. Larger pool of CS grads mean they tend to look worse comparatively, but there are some very good developers that managed to graduate with CS degrees.
How is that any different than liberals trying to remove 600 year old crosses off of hill sides in California?
Name one time when the First Amendment was suppressed under Bush.
Exactly. Tell me again why someone sitting around doing nothing but drinking and drug abusing their life away and is somehow entitled to part of my paycheck because I happen to go to work and make a decent living because I chose to do that instead of drinking and drug abusing my life away.
So he had practice ripping off the public to line his pockets.
Can't hold a candle to Obama and Rezko in that regard. Or Clinton and Whitewater for that matter. Or Al Gore and Global Warming. Republicans are amateurs when it comes to ripping off the public compared to the Democrats.
You misspelled murderers. You know, people that killed someone else with a certain level of depravity necessary to get the death penalty.
Maybe not, but there is a preponderance of other evidence supporting that claim.
I'd be willing to bet a substantial sum of money that GWB is smarter than 95% of the people claiming he's an idiot. Measured by way of accomplishment or IQ, he's done a hell of a lot more than the basement dwellers on Slashdot have.
They probably have the "Separate but equal" fiasco stuck in their mind where people who were supposed to be treated equally, were not.
There is nothing stopping homosexuals from marrying someone of the opposite sex. Therefore, they are not treated unequally.
What's to stop you from getting a group of your concerned friends and associates together, pooling funds, and doing the same thing?
Oh yeah...Campaign Finance Reform laws.
Aka the incumbent protection racket.
McCain-Feingold isn't about removing the money out of politics, it's about removing the extraneous players. Like the citizen.
Money is a part of politics it is impossible to remove it, but it's not impossible to remove YOUR access.