No I don't mean Iraq at all. No one but Bush thought that removing Hussein was a good idea, every other country in the world knew the WMD thing was bullshit. And if Hussein was repressing a couple of nutbar religious groups, well if you haven't noticed, sometimes its a good thing to repress certain groups of fanatical crazies.
You need to brush up on your facts. Pretty much every intelligence agency the US interacts with believed that Iraq was in the process of reconstituting their WMD program. We're talking the UK, France, Germany, the Czech Republic here.
No, I'm talking about Regan's interference in Afghanistan, training and arming the local religious crazies against the Russians, who were trying to repress (wait for it), the people who now form the Taliban! Good gob there!
Again, you need to brush up on your facts and command of history. The Taliban did not come into existence until 1994, well after the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, and they did not start interacting with OBL until 1996...when the Clinton administration conspired with Sudan to kick him out of Sudan instead of taking custody of him (which Sudan offered to us).
The folks that Reagan supported were the same folks that went on to form the Northern Alliance...you know, the guys that are still our current erstwhile allies in Afghanistan.
Anyway, I suppose never let facts get in the way of a good left-wing yarn.
Also I'd much rather my money being spent locally on constructive issues
Like bailing out the already rich bankers? Because that's where the bulk of the tax money is going. Oh yeah, and bailing out the UAW.
than spent trying to blow the crap out of someone half a world away in a situation REPUBLICANS CREATED (Regan era) and we should never have been involved in in the first place!
Presumably you mean Iraq. Reagan didn't put Hussein in power. That happened during Carter's watch. The US did provide some logistical and financial aid to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, but that was because Carter kneecapped the Shah of Iran and allowed Khomenei to seize power and turn Iran from an ally into a very hostile country and the US sought to counter-balance Iran's power. Unfortunately, not everyone you have to do business with is a savory character. By your logic and reasoning, we can credit North Korea's nuclear weapons program with the Clinton administration...after all, pictures of Madeleine Albright dancing with the mad dictator and all.
The US hasn't really practiced "capitalism" since the Great Depression. To a great extent, our economy has been a bureaucratically controlled command economy where success has come in novel industries where government corruption hasn't (or hadn't) yet kneecapped business like aerospace and IT.
Privately held debt is almost completely driven by government monetary policy, btw, since they are the ones that largely determine the available and cost of debt (or more accurately, they set the floor).
What you are seeing isn't the collapse of capitalism, it's the power grabbing phase of a bureaucratic kleptocracy centered around Goldman Sachs alumns who are well entrenched in the halls of power, both in the former Bush administration and now in the Obama administration. A true capitalist system would've allowed the banks and to fail. Obama isn't saving the capitalist system (and Bush didn't either), they are stabbing it in the back in order to save / enrich their bankster buddies and advisers who are the guilty parties in the first place.
"socialism" doesn't mean what the bulk of americans (ie "you") think it means. Most of Europe, Canada and South America are "socialist". We say "socialism" and you hear "communist dictatorship" which is something completely, completely different.
Not really. A communist is just a socialist in a hurry.
European socialism is only "working" insofar as they are able to spend the surplus that their capitalist ancestors accumulated, which is rapidly running out. What you see in Europe now is the bill is getting too large for the natives to pay, so you guys are having to import workers to pay for your 6-8 weeks of vacation, retirement at 50, and "free" healthcare. We'll see how good that works out in the long run. It reminds me though of the Roman Britons inviting in the Saxons to help defend Britain against the Picts.
However, by any measure you care to name--longer lives, lower infant mortality, lower morbidity...--we have considerably better health care outcomes in Canada than Americans have, and we pay less for them.
Not if you control for race. The US has a larger minority population that has a much higher prevalence of a whole host of negative behaviors that affect health (a poor diet being the principal one). Same thing is true for gun crime, btw.
No, what the report did was take extremist groups like the Christian Identity movement or abortion clinic bombers (who aren't really "right wing" in any classical sense of the word) and slyly associate them with legitimate conservative movements.
Think you are paying too much in taxes? You could be a terrorist sympathizer.
Think the Federal government has usurped the legitimate power of the states? You just might be a right wing terrorist.
A war veteran? Your skills are going to be coveted by those "terrorists", so you bear close watching lest you become a political convert to the Republican party.
At least most places that get 115F are dry enough to use a swamp cooler.
Not in the American south. The most densely populated parts of Texas (DFW, Houston) routinely have summers where temperature is in excess of 100 degrees and humidity is in excess of 60% for weeks at a time. This would be true of places like New Orleans, Hotlanta, Birmingham, and any Florida city as well. Air conditioning is what made these areas habitable for large populations, and one of the reasons why the South was underpopulated relative to the Northeast and old Northwest prior to the 1950s.
Depending on how you actually count unemployment (U5 or U6, for example), we're over 15% real unemployment if you throw in discouraged or underemployed workers. Example, if you were an IT professional making $100k a year, got laid off, and are now making $12 an hour working at Radio Shack, guess what, you don't count as unemployed.
The fundamental problem is we had a series of liquidity bubbles triggered by cheap government credit ("stimulus") which provoked a lot of over investment and malinvestment in the private sector. At the same time, the cheap credit caused consumers to go into a consuming frenzy financed by debt, which capacity naturally expanded to meet. The auto industry is the textbook case of this...people were buying cars every 2 years resulting in close to 20 million new units being sold every month. Now it's down to 10 million units a month. Some inventory is backed up over a year at present demand.
Until that excess capacity is destroyed, or demand rises to meet the capacity, we will be in an effective depression (recession = excess of inventory, depression = excess of capacity).
The bigger problem is, the current administration (and to be fair, the last administration, and the McCain campaign as well) want to re-inflate the bubble, not actually fix what is ailing the economy. Which is too much debt in the system.
To put things in perspective, we've already dropped enough money or committed enough money to the banks to give every single taxpayer a tax holiday for a couple of years.
He is working on getting the economy stimulated by spending money and trying to regulate the financial sector. More power to him.
Do you believe this? Honestly? Minus the "stimulus bill", which by the way was pretty weak in the way of actual Keynesian stimulus, Obama's administration has simply continued the misguided last year "bailout" policies of George Bush's administration by bailing out the kleptocrats with taxpayer money.
So to get back on track, Barack's been in office for three months and he's trying to fix the economy. I'm still waiting for the republican counter-plan.
Simple. Let the free market work and let failing companies fail. Remove the "too big to fail" classification. Bring back the firewall between commercial, retail, and investment banks. Regulate and reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Abolish the Community Reinvestment Act. Ruthlessly prosecute the rampant fraud being perpetrated by the Goldman Sachs alumn and being abetted by powerful people in Washington (including members of the Obama administration).
The economy is too complex for Obama to "fix", although the man's hubris might know no bounds, his actual ability is quite limited. It would be best for him and all of us if he realized that.
My position is that you have no right to tell a person where he can be simply because of the misfortune of his place of birth! It's no different than racism, sexism, or any other of those things.
Bullshit. Collectively, my fellow countrymen and I have every right to determine who can and who cannot come here, and under what stipulations people are allowed in. Every other country in the world does it. Including Mexico.
It's Jim Crow on a grand scale.
Bullshit. It's no different than deciding who gets to come into my house, except on a national scale. Maybe one of these days you'll graduate from whatever utopian fantasy world you live and come join us in the real world.
Well then, time for single payer insurance. It's long over due anyway.
Single payer insurance doesn't do anything to reduce the cost of paying for the health care for illegal aliens, it just hides it better.
The rest of your crap is nothing but FOX talking points that know nothing of nature and how it works.
A couple of points. One, I don't watch FOX news. Two, your comment is a non sequitur, it isn't even an argument or factual.
Over 1/3 of California inmates are in for violations against prohibition. Deal with that before complaining about where they come from.
The drug war (which I am against) and illegal immigration are two different subjects. Notice, you originally responded to my comment about illegal immigration. You're doing a really good job about talking about everything EXCEPT what I was talking about. Way to argue ineffectively for whatever your position is.
Some of us want to have social services, jobs, roads, infrastructure, etc... And don't find spending for these to be wasteful. Some of us don't find these important at all.
Some economists thing that Obamas budget will equalize, and turn into a gain after the original spending. Some don't.
A responsible budget is one that you can afford. Period. Spending more than you can afford is irresponsible and is the road to financial ruin and serfdom.
We have been spending more than we could afford since the 1960s. Every single damn year, and Obama is increasing the deficit exponentially.
You are right that I probably don't put a premium value on socialized or nationalized health care. But the reality is, we can't afford current government commitments. We can't afford the commitments the government had in 2000, much less the damage heaped on to us by 8 years of Bush and 4 months of Obama (who is on pace to outstrip Bush's 8 years in 1 Obama year).
Funny how Obama can spend or appropriate several trillion dollars overnight.
He can push through a massive budget increase almost over night.
But actually having a responsible budget? That takes time.
Close down Gitmo? Well, that takes time too you know. All those business as usual politics. Didn't you rubes know that hope and change was just a marketing slogan?
Card check and seizing control of the GM, Chrysler, AIG, and the big banks is much more important (but, actually prosecuting the people who are defrauding the US taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars...much less important).
Check your sarcasm meter. None of the terrorist actors we are fighting are "freedom fighters", but the left sure likes to think they are because they share the same Rage Against The Machine (TM).
A person has at least the same rights to roam freely about as a moose. If they can't bring the food home, then they must be able to go where the food is.
No they don't, not if the food is in my refrigerator. Your "rights" end where my property begins.
Wow, B.O. is sooooooo much better than Bush. Woooooo Hooooooo!!!!!
I think you meant to say something else. Given the consistent and overwhelming public opposition to "comprehensive immigration reform", aka amnesty, I think Bush, McCain, and Obama are all equally repugnant here.
Slashdot Mirror
No I don't mean Iraq at all. No one but Bush thought that removing Hussein was a good idea, every other country in the world knew the WMD thing was bullshit. And if Hussein was repressing a couple of nutbar religious groups, well if you haven't noticed, sometimes its a good thing to repress certain groups of fanatical crazies.
You need to brush up on your facts. Pretty much every intelligence agency the US interacts with believed that Iraq was in the process of reconstituting their WMD program. We're talking the UK, France, Germany, the Czech Republic here.
No, I'm talking about Regan's interference in Afghanistan, training and arming the local religious crazies against the Russians, who were trying to repress (wait for it), the people who now form the Taliban! Good gob there!
Again, you need to brush up on your facts and command of history. The Taliban did not come into existence until 1994, well after the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, and they did not start interacting with OBL until 1996...when the Clinton administration conspired with Sudan to kick him out of Sudan instead of taking custody of him (which Sudan offered to us).
The folks that Reagan supported were the same folks that went on to form the Northern Alliance...you know, the guys that are still our current erstwhile allies in Afghanistan.
Anyway, I suppose never let facts get in the way of a good left-wing yarn.
Also I'd much rather my money being spent locally on constructive issues
Like bailing out the already rich bankers? Because that's where the bulk of the tax money is going. Oh yeah, and bailing out the UAW.
than spent trying to blow the crap out of someone half a world away in a situation REPUBLICANS CREATED (Regan era) and we should never have been involved in in the first place!
Presumably you mean Iraq. Reagan didn't put Hussein in power. That happened during Carter's watch. The US did provide some logistical and financial aid to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, but that was because Carter kneecapped the Shah of Iran and allowed Khomenei to seize power and turn Iran from an ally into a very hostile country and the US sought to counter-balance Iran's power. Unfortunately, not everyone you have to do business with is a savory character. By your logic and reasoning, we can credit North Korea's nuclear weapons program with the Clinton administration...after all, pictures of Madeleine Albright dancing with the mad dictator and all.
The US hasn't really practiced "capitalism" since the Great Depression. To a great extent, our economy has been a bureaucratically controlled command economy where success has come in novel industries where government corruption hasn't (or hadn't) yet kneecapped business like aerospace and IT.
Privately held debt is almost completely driven by government monetary policy, btw, since they are the ones that largely determine the available and cost of debt (or more accurately, they set the floor).
What you are seeing isn't the collapse of capitalism, it's the power grabbing phase of a bureaucratic kleptocracy centered around Goldman Sachs alumns who are well entrenched in the halls of power, both in the former Bush administration and now in the Obama administration. A true capitalist system would've allowed the banks and to fail. Obama isn't saving the capitalist system (and Bush didn't either), they are stabbing it in the back in order to save / enrich their bankster buddies and advisers who are the guilty parties in the first place.
"socialism" doesn't mean what the bulk of americans (ie "you") think it means. Most of Europe, Canada and South America are "socialist". We say "socialism" and you hear "communist dictatorship" which is something completely, completely different.
Not really. A communist is just a socialist in a hurry.
European socialism is only "working" insofar as they are able to spend the surplus that their capitalist ancestors accumulated, which is rapidly running out. What you see in Europe now is the bill is getting too large for the natives to pay, so you guys are having to import workers to pay for your 6-8 weeks of vacation, retirement at 50, and "free" healthcare. We'll see how good that works out in the long run. It reminds me though of the Roman Britons inviting in the Saxons to help defend Britain against the Picts.
However, by any measure you care to name--longer lives, lower infant mortality, lower morbidity...--we have considerably better health care outcomes in Canada than Americans have, and we pay less for them.
Not if you control for race. The US has a larger minority population that has a much higher prevalence of a whole host of negative behaviors that affect health (a poor diet being the principal one). Same thing is true for gun crime, btw.
I view this as what the Bush regime gave us. Trillion dollar increases in the national debt that our grandkids will be lucky to see gone.
Well good thing you helped elect someone that is spending money at twice the rate Bush did. Way to usher in an era of fiscal responsibility.
No, what the report did was take extremist groups like the Christian Identity movement or abortion clinic bombers (who aren't really "right wing" in any classical sense of the word) and slyly associate them with legitimate conservative movements.
Think you are paying too much in taxes? You could be a terrorist sympathizer.
Think the Federal government has usurped the legitimate power of the states? You just might be a right wing terrorist.
A war veteran? Your skills are going to be coveted by those "terrorists", so you bear close watching lest you become a political convert to the Republican party.
At least most places that get 115F are dry enough to use a swamp cooler.
Not in the American south. The most densely populated parts of Texas (DFW, Houston) routinely have summers where temperature is in excess of 100 degrees and humidity is in excess of 60% for weeks at a time. This would be true of places like New Orleans, Hotlanta, Birmingham, and any Florida city as well. Air conditioning is what made these areas habitable for large populations, and one of the reasons why the South was underpopulated relative to the Northeast and old Northwest prior to the 1950s.
get a window fan
Great. You know what a window fan does when it's a 115 degrees? It acts as a convection oven.
and a attic ventilator
Helps a litte bit. A little bit.
plant some shade trees.
Yeah, and in 20 years when the trees reach maturity, that might be useful.
Depending on how you actually count unemployment (U5 or U6, for example), we're over 15% real unemployment if you throw in discouraged or underemployed workers. Example, if you were an IT professional making $100k a year, got laid off, and are now making $12 an hour working at Radio Shack, guess what, you don't count as unemployed.
The fundamental problem is we had a series of liquidity bubbles triggered by cheap government credit ("stimulus") which provoked a lot of over investment and malinvestment in the private sector. At the same time, the cheap credit caused consumers to go into a consuming frenzy financed by debt, which capacity naturally expanded to meet. The auto industry is the textbook case of this...people were buying cars every 2 years resulting in close to 20 million new units being sold every month. Now it's down to 10 million units a month. Some inventory is backed up over a year at present demand.
Until that excess capacity is destroyed, or demand rises to meet the capacity, we will be in an effective depression (recession = excess of inventory, depression = excess of capacity).
The bigger problem is, the current administration (and to be fair, the last administration, and the McCain campaign as well) want to re-inflate the bubble, not actually fix what is ailing the economy. Which is too much debt in the system.
To put things in perspective, we've already dropped enough money or committed enough money to the banks to give every single taxpayer a tax holiday for a couple of years.
He is working on getting the economy stimulated by spending money and trying to regulate the financial sector. More power to him.
Do you believe this? Honestly? Minus the "stimulus bill", which by the way was pretty weak in the way of actual Keynesian stimulus, Obama's administration has simply continued the misguided last year "bailout" policies of George Bush's administration by bailing out the kleptocrats with taxpayer money.
So to get back on track, Barack's been in office for three months and he's trying to fix the economy. I'm still waiting for the republican counter-plan.
Simple. Let the free market work and let failing companies fail. Remove the "too big to fail" classification. Bring back the firewall between commercial, retail, and investment banks. Regulate and reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Abolish the Community Reinvestment Act. Ruthlessly prosecute the rampant fraud being perpetrated by the Goldman Sachs alumn and being abetted by powerful people in Washington (including members of the Obama administration).
The economy is too complex for Obama to "fix", although the man's hubris might know no bounds, his actual ability is quite limited. It would be best for him and all of us if he realized that.
My position is that you have no right to tell a person where he can be simply because of the misfortune of his place of birth! It's no different than racism, sexism, or any other of those things.
Bullshit. Collectively, my fellow countrymen and I have every right to determine who can and who cannot come here, and under what stipulations people are allowed in. Every other country in the world does it. Including Mexico.
It's Jim Crow on a grand scale.
Bullshit. It's no different than deciding who gets to come into my house, except on a national scale. Maybe one of these days you'll graduate from whatever utopian fantasy world you live and come join us in the real world.
Well then, time for single payer insurance. It's long over due anyway.
Single payer insurance doesn't do anything to reduce the cost of paying for the health care for illegal aliens, it just hides it better.
The rest of your crap is nothing but FOX talking points that know nothing of nature and how it works.
A couple of points. One, I don't watch FOX news. Two, your comment is a non sequitur, it isn't even an argument or factual.
Over 1/3 of California inmates are in for violations against prohibition. Deal with that before complaining about where they come from.
The drug war (which I am against) and illegal immigration are two different subjects. Notice, you originally responded to my comment about illegal immigration. You're doing a really good job about talking about everything EXCEPT what I was talking about. Way to argue ineffectively for whatever your position is.
Metaphor go over your head?
When an illegal alien drives drunk and seriously injures themselves, who do you think pays for their medical care and incarceration afterwards?
When an illegal alien has an anchor baby, who pays for the delivery?
When an minor illegal alien attends school, who pays for their education?
1/3 of all inmates in the California correctional system are illegal aliens. The cost to California taxpayers is literally, billions of dollars.
Some of us want to have social services, jobs, roads, infrastructure, etc... And don't find spending for these to be wasteful. Some of us don't find these important at all.
Some economists thing that Obamas budget will equalize, and turn into a gain after the original spending. Some don't.
A responsible budget is one that you can afford. Period. Spending more than you can afford is irresponsible and is the road to financial ruin and serfdom.
We have been spending more than we could afford since the 1960s. Every single damn year, and Obama is increasing the deficit exponentially.
You are right that I probably don't put a premium value on socialized or nationalized health care. But the reality is, we can't afford current government commitments. We can't afford the commitments the government had in 2000, much less the damage heaped on to us by 8 years of Bush and 4 months of Obama (who is on pace to outstrip Bush's 8 years in 1 Obama year).
Funny how Obama can spend or appropriate several trillion dollars overnight.
He can push through a massive budget increase almost over night.
But actually having a responsible budget? That takes time.
Close down Gitmo? Well, that takes time too you know. All those business as usual politics. Didn't you rubes know that hope and change was just a marketing slogan?
Card check and seizing control of the GM, Chrysler, AIG, and the big banks is much more important (but, actually prosecuting the people who are defrauding the US taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars...much less important).
Check your sarcasm meter. None of the terrorist actors we are fighting are "freedom fighters", but the left sure likes to think they are because they share the same Rage Against The Machine (TM).
A person has at least the same rights to roam freely about as a moose. If they can't bring the food home, then they must be able to go where the food is.
No they don't, not if the food is in my refrigerator. Your "rights" end where my property begins.
By this I take you think that the idea that a nation ought to enforce it's laws and protect it's borders is fanatical then.
Gee, that's exactly what W tried to do.
Yep, and it's also what McCain wanted to do.
Wow, B.O. is sooooooo much better than Bush. Woooooo Hooooooo!!!!!
I think you meant to say something else. Given the consistent and overwhelming public opposition to "comprehensive immigration reform", aka amnesty, I think Bush, McCain, and Obama are all equally repugnant here.
They are just misunderstood. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. They are blowing up markets for freedom.
Like I said before the election, you might end up getting what you asked for, but it sure won't be what you wanted.
Obama is going to fix that with amnesty and citizenship for the 20 million or so illegals in the country.
Don't like the current voters, get new ones who are more agreeable.
Yeah, and it's working out so well for the folks that thought we'd have a return to civil liberties, a responsible budget, and an end to the Iraq war.
4 legs good, 2 legs better.
The new boss isn't the same as the old boss, he's worse.