| StockFetcher Forums · General Discussion · POLITICS GOES HERE | << 1 ... 57 58 59 60 61 ... 76 >>Post Follow-up |
| Mactheriverrat 3,153 posts msg #104952 - Ignore Mactheriverrat |
2/13/2012 3:26:20 AM We keep re-electing the Infidels because everyone likes their congressmen but hates all others. Term limits would be a start |
| machismo 115 posts msg #104954 - Ignore machismo |
2/13/2012 9:14:47 AM Force none of the above as a voting option, and if it wins those on the ballot cannot run again. Perhaps that might get 40% of the people who don't vote into the mix. |
| TheRumpledOne 6,411 posts msg #104957 - Ignore TheRumpledOne modified |
2/13/2012 2:52:40 PM George Soros doesn’t like the direction in which Europe is heading |
| TheRumpledOne 6,411 posts msg #104958 - Ignore TheRumpledOne |
2/13/2012 2:57:38 PM Mactheriverrat We keep re-electing the Infidels because everyone likes their congressmen but hates all others. Term limits would be a start ..................................................................... IF WE THE PEOPLE quit re-electing the idiots we wouldn't need term limits. But I am for either term limits or no consecutive terms. Serve one term, leave office, and then run again. =================================================================== machismo Force none of the above as a voting option, and if it wins those on the ballot cannot run again. Perhaps that might get 40% of the people who don't vote into the mix. .......................................................... None of the above would be nice but what happens if no one gets elected for years? Would we be stuck with the current batch of idiots? |
| TheRumpledOne 6,411 posts msg #104977 - Ignore TheRumpledOne modified |
2/14/2012 5:54:18 PM IN MY INBOX.... "Facts about Dr.Charles Krauthammer, MD" They forgot to include that he writes for the Chicago Tribune each Monday ..... - Fast Facts About Dr. Charles Krauthammer , MD 1. Born: March 13, 1950 2. Birthplace: New York City, New York 3. Raised in Montreal, Canada 4. Attended Mc Gill University and Harvard Medical School 5. 1972 diving accident left him paralyzed from the neck on down. 6. Directed psychiatric research for the Carter administration 7. Began writing career in 1981 with The New Republic 8. Helped develop the "Reagan Doctrine" in the 80's 9. Appointed to Presidential Council on Bioethics in 2002 Dr. Krauthammer is frequently on the Fox News Channel. He is an M.D., a lawyer and is paralyzed from the neck down. A friend went to hear Charles Krauthammer. He listened with 25 others in a closed room. What he says here is NOT 2nd-hand but 1st. The ramifications are staggering for us, our children and their children. Last Monday was a profound evening. Dr. Charles Krauthammer spoke to the Center for the American Experiment. He is a brilliant intellectual, seasoned & articulate. He is forthright and careful in his analysis and never resorts to emotions or personal insults. He is NOT a fear monger nor an extremist in his comments and views. He is a fiscal conservative and has received a Pulitzer Prize for writing. He is a frequent contributor to Fox News and writes weekly for the Washington Post. The entire room was held spellbound during his talk. I have summarized his comments, as we are living in uncharted waters economically and internationally. Even 2 Dems at my table agreed with everything he said! 1. Mr. Obama is a very intellectual, charming individual. He is not to be underestimated. He is a cool customer who doesn't show his emotions. It's very hard to know what's behind the mask. The taking down of the Clinton dynasty was an amazing accomplishment. The Clintons still do not understand what hit them. Obama was in the perfect place at the perfect time. 2. Obama has political skills comparable to Reagan and Clinton. He has a way of making you think he's on your side, agreeing with your position, while doing the opposite. Pay no attention to what he SAYS; rather, watch what he DOES! 3. Obama has a ruthless quest for power. He did not come to Washington to make something out of himself but rather to change everything, including dismantling capitalism. He can't be straightforward on his ambitions, as the public would not go along. He has a heavy hand and wants to level the playing field with income redistribution and punishment to the achievers of society. He would like to model the USA to Great Britain or Canada . 4. His three main goals are to control ENERGY, PUBLIC EDUCATION and NATIONAL HEALTHCARE by the Federal government. He doesn't care about the auto or financial services industries but got them as an early bonus. The cap and trade will add costs to everything and stifle growth. Paying for FREE college education is his goal. Most scary is his healthcare program because if you make it FREE and add 46,000,000 people to a Medicare-type single-payer system, the costs will go through the roof. The only way to control costs is with massive RATIONING of services, like in Canada .. God forbid! 5. He has surrounded himself with mostly far-left academic types. No one around him has ever even run a candy store. But they are going to try and run the auto, financial, banking and other industries. This obviously can't work in the long run. Obama is not a socialist; rather he's a far-left secular progressive bent on nothing short of revolution. He ran as a moderate but will govern from the hard left. Again, watch what he DOES, not what he says. 6. Obama doesn't really see himself as President of the United States but more as a ruler over the world. He sees himself above it all, trying to orchestrate & coordinate various countries and their agendas. He sees moral equivalency in all cultures. His apology tour in Germany and England was a prime example of how he sees America as an imperialist nation that has been arrogant, rather than a great noble nation that has at times made errors. This is the first President, ever , who has chastised our allies and appeased our enemies! 7. He is now handing out goodies. He hopes that the bill (and pain) will not come due until after he is reelected in 2012. He would like to blame all problems on Bush, from the past, and hopefully his successor in the future. He has a huge ego and Dr. Krauthammer believes he is a narcissist. 8. Republicans are in the wilderness for a while but will emerge strong. Republicans are pining for another Reagan but there will never be another like him. Krauthammer believes Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty & Bobby Jindahl (except for his terrible speech in February) are the future of the party. Newt Gingrich is brilliant but has baggage. Sarah Palin is sincere and intelligent but needs to really be seriously boning up on facts and info if she is to be a serious candidate in the future. We need to return to the party of lower taxes, smaller government, personal responsibility, strong national defense and State's Rights. 9. The current level of spending is irresponsible and outrageous. We are spending trillions that we don't have. This could lead to hyperinflation, depression or worse. No country has ever spent themselves into prosperity. The Media is giving Obama, Reid and Pelosi a Pass because they love their agenda. But eventually the bill will come due and people will realize the huge bailouts didn't work, nor will the stimulus package. These were trillion-dollar payoffs to Obama's allies, unions and the Congress to placate the left, so he can get support for #4 above. 10. The election was over in mid-September when Lehman brothers failed, fear and panic swept in, we had an unpopular President, and the war was grinding on indefinitely without a clear outcome. The people are in pain and the mantra of change caused people to act emotionally. Any Dem would have won this election; it was surprising it was as close as it was. 11. In 2012, if the unemployment rate is over 10%, Republicans will be swept back into power. If it's under 8%, the Dems continue to roll. If it's between 8-10%, it will be a dogfight. It will all be about the economy. I hope this gets you really thinking about what's happening in Washington and Congress. There is a left-wing revolution going on, according to Krauthammer, and he encourages us to keep the faith and join the loyal resistance. The work will be hard but we're right on most issues and can reclaim our country before it's far too late. |
| Mactheriverrat 3,153 posts msg #104980 - Ignore Mactheriverrat |
2/14/2012 7:17:14 PM Nothing is going to change ROME is dead |
| Redbird 5 posts msg #104981 - Ignore Redbird |
2/14/2012 8:33:16 PM A New Declaration of Independence: 10 Ideas for Taking America Back from the 1% The weight of the 1 Percent has become intolerable. How can we take our country back? Here's a fresh draft. October 31, 2011 1. Debt relief Total household debt in America is $13.3 trillion — 114 percent of after-tax income. That millions of working Americans owe every penny they make to hugely profitable financial institutions is absurd and grotesque. We demand immediate relief for the 99 Percent, particularly the poor and young students and college graduates. The Debt Jubilee is an ancient idea, and an attractive one in an era of growing economic feudalism, as the poor increasingly devote all their labor to repaying the rich. It is not in the national interest to force the impoverished to become wage slaves to pay off insurmountable debts owned to payday lenders and hugely profitable bankers. Every other rich nation on earth heavily subsidizes higher education. We force mere kids to mortgage their futures, then ensure that the debt follows them the rest of their lives, regardless of their living circumstances. Student loan debt hurts not just the graduate but everyone else in society, too: The cost of healthcare would surely decrease, and the availability of primary care for disadvantaged populations increase, if new doctors were not regularly graduating school $200,000 in the red. And real and widespread relief for homeowners in crisis is urgent. Even millions of homeowners who “did everything right” find themselves underwater, or illegally foreclosed upon by banks running roughshod over the rights of homeowners by robo-signing fraudulent foreclosure documents by the thousands. Banks servicing mortgages are (rightfully) more worried about getting sued by the owners of securities made up of Americans’ debt than they are about getting in any sort of trouble for bullying or illegally seizing the homes of regular people. Everyone should get a shot at a renegotiation of their mortgage, at fair rates, and with support from the government. 2. A substantial jobs program Most American cities are filled with beautiful old buildings and monuments and parks dating back to the recovery programs of the New Deal, as well as increasingly decrepit bridges and roads and structures that have been neglected by the last couple of decades of shrinking infrastructure investment. A real, direct jobs program, done in the WPA style, would rebuild our cities and towns in addition to putting thousands of people back to work. 3. A healthcare public option Medicare is probably the single most popular government program in the country, which is no surprise, because government-subsidized healthcare tends to be the most popular government program in every nation that has implemented it. If a true single-payer system would be too disruptive, we can put the building blocks in place by giving people a public option. Expanding the pool of Medicare recipients to include healthy younger people paying into it would instantly improve the program’s fiscal outlook. Nationalizing the underfunded Medicaid system would instantly reduce the deplorable inequity of our healthcare system, too. If this new Medicare could negotiate drug prices — like the Veterans Administration, our wonderful, totally socialized healthcare program for one group of Americans — it would save even more. (Hey, why not combine the proposal with debt relief for young doctors?) 4. Reregulate Wall Street Taking the “unsophisticated” broad view, it seems painfully obvious that Wall Street deregulation undid the stabilizing effects of 1930s-era Wall Street regulation. We’re on a boom-and-bust cycle, and a shrinking number of growing megabanks now regularly threaten the entire world economy. It’s hard to imagine that we wouldn’t be better off with a worldwide network of small, independent credit unions than massive financial institutions daily innovating new and more arcane methods of shifting vast sums of imaginary capital around, but in lieu of smashing the banks with brickbats why not just reinstate the rules that effectively limited their behavior for 40 years or so? Bring back Glass-Steagall. Pass the Volcker rule, too. Ban banks from trading derivatives. Limit their behavior and tax their earnings. 5. End the Global War on Terror and rein in the defense budget Brown University estimates that our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have cost 236,000 lives and $4 trillion. Millions more people are displaced refugees. If 10 years of war have weakened al-Qaida, we should draw down. If it hasn’t, we should seriously rethink our tactics. Regardless, there’s no way the world’s sole remaining superpower can justify spending more than every other country on Earth combined on its military. There’s no coherent reason why the Pentagon’s budget should be rising inexorably every year, while the rest of the country grows shabbier and poorer. Spending more on defense now than we did at the height of the Cold War is insane. The billions spent yearly to rain death on faceless strangers thousands of miles away should be the first program on the chopping block if we’re serious about tackling the deficit. That money could better be put to use both here at home and abroad. USAID and the State Department could surely do more to defeat those Who Hate Us For Our Freedom with that money than the Defense Department has so far managed to. 6. Repeal the Patriot Act Speaking of expensive wastes of resources that are also in direct violation of the nation’s founding principles, let’s dismantle the expansive domestic surveillance state, hurriedly established at a panicky period of national crisis and then enshrined as permanent without a word of serious debate. The extra-constitutional “delayed-notice search warrants” given to law enforcement by the Patriot Act have been used far more for fighting the war on drugs than the war on terror, which is to be expected from a law that was essentially a massive laundry list of tools and privileges that prosecutors and FBI agents had wanted for years that had thus far been denied to them by pesky constitutional checks on their powers. The government even has its own secret legal readings of the act, allowing it to do secret things we can know nothing about. The government now has vast powers to track and spy on us for whatever reasons it chooses, and both parties are mostly fine with that. When the NSA was found to be engaging in illegal domestic wiretapping and data mining, Congress responded by granting them more domestic wiretapping and data mining powers. As we’ve moved further from those panicky days that birthed the Patriot Act, the law and its associated unaccountable domestic surveillance state have, perversely, become more normalized. Those in favor of limited government should be the most alarmed at this. 7. Tackle climate change We may be rapidly approaching the catastrophic point of no return when it comes to preventing major, devastating climate change. To keep warming below “dangerous levels,” one recent study says, we’d need to “reverse the rise in emissions immediately and follow through with steep reductions through the century.” Immediately — like now. Frustratingly, even half-measures have found no support in Congress, where the industries doing the polluting have far more clout than mere scientists or human beings who’ll be alive in a future period of mass extinctions, hunger, flooding and drought. At the very least — and this is literally the very least the government should be doing right now to combat climate change — a price should be put on carbon emissions, either in the form of a direct tax or as part of a cap-and-trade scheme. This is a policy so self-evidently beneficial to the vast majority of mankind — it taxes a bad thing, so that corporations do less of the bad thing, while also giving the government revenue to spend on good things — that cap-and-trade’s defeat in Congress says just about all there is to say about the corrupting power of industry money on the government process. 8. Stop locking everyone up for everything and end the drug war The American incarceration rate dwarfs that of our closest competitor, Russia, at 743 per 100,000 residents. A full quarter of the world’s prison inmates are American prison inmates. One in 100 American adults arebehind bars. These staggering numbers have been repeated over and over again for years by activists, reporters, academics and even the very rarecourageous politician, but the prison system just keeps growing, and growing, and growing. The problem is that there is no political will to do anything about it. In fact, locking people up tends to be a popular campaign platform. In some locales, felons are both denied voting rights and also counted as residents of their prisons for the purposes of congressional apportionment, causing a perverse incentive to lock up more inmates. Tens of thousands of inmates are in long-term solitary confinement, which is essentially torture by another name. As violent crime rates have fallen, the prison population has continued to grow, because of longer terms and mandatory sentencing and denial of parole. The U.S. holds its prisoners longer than any other nation in the world, and because rehabilitation comes a distant second to punishment in our prisons, recidivism is common. (It doesn’t help that, across the nation, ex-felons can’t qualify for welfare or subsidized housing or find work.) We’re actively creating a massive, mostly black and Hispanic underclass of permanent prisoners and future prisoners. America desperately needs more juvenile diversion programs and well-funded rehabilitation and education programs for those currently in the system. A major contributor to our mass incarceration state is the “War on Drugs,” which after years of waging we’ve yet to win. Full legalization of marijuana would lead to many fewer people being jailed for victimless crimes and immediately destroy a critical income stream for gangs and increasingly violent drug cartels. Legalizing marijuana would also give states and cities a desperately needed infusion of tax revenue. (Legalization or decriminalization of other drugs would be similarly beneficial, but a good deal more controversial.) Those who commit nonviolent drug offenses should never be sent to prisons for years. Those currently in prison for nonviolent drug offenses should be freed and rehabilitated into society. 9. Full equality for the queer community Gay marriage is a no-brainer — rights granted to a majority are being denied to a minority based on arguments founded solely on bigotry — and should be recognized nationwide. Let’s not forget, too, that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans are denied other rights, including, in most states, protection from workplace discrimination and housing discrimination. I suspect lots of Americans don’t even know the LGBT community lacks those basic protections, and that is itself an outrage. 10. Fix the tax system There are a million ways the tax code could be made fairer, simpler and more progressive, and most of those ways are opposed by powerful entrenched interests. But it is an inescapable fact that for most of the 20th century, federal income tax rates were very high on the wealthy — very, very high, in fact — and most of that period also happened to be a time of widespread prosperity for rich and middle-class Americans alike. The experiment in slashing taxes on the rich seems to have failed everyone but the rich. The system as it currently stands forces states to fund essential services with the most regressive taxes possible, mainly sales taxes, in order not to scare businesses elsewhere. The current system allows hugely profitable transnational corporations to get away without paying anything, to make killings “overseas” while operating at imaginary losses domestically. Warren Buffett, as we all know, is paying less than his secretary. So let’s create a millionaire’s tax bracket, and a financial transactions tax. Let’s close the carried interest tax loophole and raise the estate tax and taxes on capital gains. Let’s get the highest marginal tax rate back up to, at the least, Reagan-era levels. Let’s stop all being held hostage, as a nation, to the fanatical anti-tax doctrine of the 1 Percent. |
| Redbird 5 posts msg #104982 - Ignore Redbird |
2/15/2012 12:16:20 AM Republicanism in the United States Republicanism is the political values system that has been a major part of American civic thought since the American Revolution. It stresses liberty and inalienable rights as central values, makes the people as a whole sovereign, supports activist government to promote the common good, rejects inherited political power, expects citizens to be independent in their performance of civic duties, and vilifies corruption. American republicanism was founded and first practiced by the Founding Fathers in the 18th century. This system was based on early Roman, Renaissance and English models and ideas. It formed the basis for the American Revolution and the consequential Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787), as well as the Gettysburg Address. Republicanism is not the same as democracy, for republicanism asserts that people have unalienable rights that cannot be voted away by a majority of voters. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about the "tyranny of the majority" in a democracy, and advocates of the rights of minorities have warned that the courts needed to protect those rights by reversing efforts by voters to terminate the rights of an unpopular minority. The term "Republicanism" is derived from the term "republic", but the two words have different meanings, and people sometimes confuse them. A "republic" is a form of government (one without a hereditary ruling class) while "republicanism" is a political ideology that can appear in republics or monarchies. Two major parties were explicitly named after the idea—the Republican party of Thomas Jefferson (founded in 1793, and often called the "Democratic-Republican Party" by political scientists), and the current Republican party (founded in 1854). |
| Mactheriverrat 3,153 posts msg #104984 - Ignore Mactheriverrat |
2/15/2012 7:15:05 AM |
| kahern1014 13 posts msg #104985 - Ignore kahern1014 |
2/15/2012 8:55:01 AM The first two full fiscal years of the Obama presidency have seen unprecedented decreases in deficits: more in two years, after adjusting for inflation, than in Truman's eight years, and twice as much as in Clinton's eight years. The first seven years of the G.W. Bush presidency increased the deficit by almost twice as much as the 32 years from JFK through G.H.W.Bush combined, and somewhat more than the 24 years from Harding through FDR combined (in inflation-adjusted dollars). http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html#2009 |
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