Jump to content

U.S. Politics, 4


TerraPrime

Recommended Posts

An ever-growing number of people are wanting something different than what either party has served up since 2000.

I feel sorry for them. If their candidates win in November then in a couple years they're just going to be like all the people who thought Obama was going to completely change everything due to his "change" slogan.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ser Scot, I can definitely see a Republican-controlled House trying to impeach Barack Obama. Does the justification really matter? Back in 1998 there wasn't much cause to impeach Clinton, and yet the GOP went ahead even in the face of popular opinion. One thing I have learned about the GOP is that it always, always, always goes there. Attack, attack, attack. This strategy doesn't always work, mind you, but you can always count on the party to try it. So an Obama impeachment is IMO well within the realm of possibility.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Funny, you'd think they'd have found it before now...

Blago will lead them to where the bodies are buried if The Machine doesn't save his ass from prison.

Edit: Republicans would also wait until after the elections so they have control of Congress as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The United States is Bankrupt.

But delve deeper, and you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”

The fiscal gap is the value today (the present value) of the difference between projected spending (including servicing official debt) and projected revenue in all future years.

Double Our Taxes

To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.

...

Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt. This gargantuan discrepancy between our “official” debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities “unofficial” to keep them off the books and far in the future.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"But we can't be bankrupt!" scream the lefties. "Not after we're finally in power and have unfettered access to the national treasure!"

"Tough titties," say the realists.

"No! I won't let us be bankrupt," they whine. "It's our turn! It's no faaaaaaaaair!"

The above is the petulant denial I sense from lefties in their refusal to acknowledge that we just can't afford to pay for all the crap they've had pipe dreams about for decades. You could completely eliminate the military and tax every millionaire and billionaire at 100% and it still wouldn't come close to covering it. It's morbidly entertaining in its own way; it's almost a Greek tragedy, really. I'm reminded of the scene in the movie, The Book of Eli when—

—Gary Oldman's character finally gets his hands on the Bible, only to find it's all in Braille, and thus useless to him.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I bet that the imminent collapse of the US economy is any day now; gotta start stockpiling more guns and ammo.

I'm also glad that the void left by the absence of HammerofGod has been recently filled by the occasional hysterical libertarian rants of Tormund.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

*says stupid stuff*

hmm. The United States is only bankrupt due to the policies of Reagan and Bush Jr. In fact, of the 12 trillion debt, they're responsible for 10 trillion of it. So the republicans drove the country off a cliff and now think its funny that democrats have to deal with their suicidal impulses? Last time, Clinton left the economy in surplus, balanced budget, at peace with the world (despite the attack on the Cole, which if it had happened a few months later would have given Bush what he needed to get us into Iraq a whole two years sooner than we did anyway). We'd certainly be better able to handle this crisis if an idiot republican led country hadn't slashed taxes to unsupportable levels while starting two wars, refusing to pay for the wars by financing them on debt, deciding to purchase for all seniors drugs (but forbidding the government paying for the drugs to demand lower prices) by financing them on debt, and creating a massive and utterly useless new Department of Homeland Security which they refused to pay for and financed on debt. A Republican led country took us immediately into one recession with a nearly catastrophically long exit and after exiting the First Bush Recession almost immediately plunged us into an even greater financial crisis three years later, a recession so massive it nearly became a depression.

so the republicans bankrupted the country and you're gleeful that democrats are upset at the state of affairs.

We could have used some "tough titties" realists when the republicans had unilateral power over the government for six disasterous years. Oh wait, the party with unilateral control of congress that enacted strict realist budget rules that eventually changed a deficit into a surplus was realistic, but it sure wasn't the insane republicans, rather it was the democrats of 1992-94. Somehow I think your realists are not realists but are spoiled children who are too ignorant to understand the relationship between cause and effect.

Comparitively, Obama has had a good not great healthcare bill passed that pays for itself and is not financed by debt, he's passed good but not great financial reform that doesn't have a lot of teeth to it and is pretty unthreatening to the players that caused the financial crisis, he's passed a good but not great stimulus package that prevented the recession from becoming a depression but was not enough to push the economy back into a stable recovery with positive self-reinforcing cycles.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

this article bizarrely connected with another I read just this week on Skousen, who is endorsed by none other than Orson Scott Card as "one of my mentors when I was growing up.

This is a great read about the melt-down on the right, and why it is so foul to those who used to lean that way (like me)

From the Article:

Around this same time, Beck began promoting the work of an arcane Mormon conspiracy-peddler named W. Cleon Skousen, whom he described as his political lodestar. Suddenly, Beck had something more to offer than irritable mental gestures.

Thanks to Beck's designation of Skousen's pseudohistorical tract The 5000 Year Leap as "required reading" on the Web site of his 9-12 Project, and his promotion of the book on his show, the previously obscure Skousen became the Hidden Imam of the Tea Party movement. By the summer of 2009, Skousen's Leap was among the top 10 books on Amazon.com and a fixture on literature tables at Tea Party gatherings. It went from selling a puny couple of thousand copies in 2007 to selling over 200,000 copies in 2009. Just why the book generated such an instant appeal is difficult to understand. It is little more than a slapdash of quotes from the Founding Fathers, often taken out of context and deliberately oversimplified, to explain why America is the greatest nation in history. In the process, Skousen claims that church and state separation is un-American, that "coercive taxation" is communist, and that marriage is the underpinning of a free society. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote at length on the merits of "amours" with "old women," and who famously solicited prostitutes and fathered a son of out of wedlock, was the ultimate authority Skousen quoted on the importance of marriage.

Though Skousen claims the Founders as the world's foremost source of eternal wisdom, he buttressed his points with fringe sources like the conspiracist Norman Dodd's screeds about the Illuminati. According to Skousen, Dodd claimed that "powerful influences congregating in the United States" like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds had forced the United States into World War I. Skousen published Dodd's manifestoes in his obscure journal Freemen's Digest, which he founded for the express purpose of propagating conspiracies.

Skousen's paranoid politics were an outgrowth of his participation in extreme anti-communist groups during the 1950s. He boasted of a close friendship with then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and said he provided him with research on communist plots, claims disputed by FBI historians. (During a recent interview, Skousen's son, Paul, told me that contrary to rumors of Hoover's cross-dressing and homosexual dalliances, he would set the top cop up on blind dates with live women.) Skousen was fired from his job as Salt Lake City's police chief for, in the words of the city's conservative Mormon mayor, "conduct[ing] his office as chief of police in exactly the same manner in which the communists operate their government." From there, Skousen sailed off to the far shores of the Right-peddling conspiracy tracts like The Naked Communist, and earning condemnation from his beloved FBI, which accused him in an internal memo of "promoting [his] own anti-communism for obvious financial purposes."

Skousen's vocal support for the far-right John Birch Society's claim that communists controlled President Dwight Eisenhower cost him the support of the corporate backers who had paid for his Red-bashing lecture tours. He went off the radar for several years, returning during the late 1960s to accuse the Jewish Rothschild family of secretly bankrolling everyone from Ho Chi Minh to the civil rights movement. By the late 1970s, even the Church of Latter Day Saints distanced itself from Skousen and his conspiracy theories. His work fell through the margins and might have disappeared entirely had Beck not revived it, turning The 5000 Year Leap into the bible of the Tea Party movement. Journalist Alexander Zaitchik observed in his authoritative profile of Skousen on Salon.com that Skousen's renewed influence through Beck and the Tea Party "suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place."

Orson Scott Card's articlethis week (and this is the first time I've ever seen him reference Skousen ever):

So it can be attractive for us to wish to go back to first principles, wake up our sleeping Constitution, and wave it in the faces of dictator judges and power-grabbing politicians, who seem to regard the Constitution as whatever will advance their own agenda – instead of what it originally was, an actual contract between the people, the states and the government.

But what does the Constitution mean?

W. Cleon Skousen was a mentor of mine when I was growing up – except on politics. However, politics was where he made his name and put his heart (he wrote The Naked Communist, which was like the Common Sense of the right wing in the 1960s). When Glenn Beck called attention to it, Skousen's later book, The Five Thousand Year Leap: 28 Great Ideas that Changed the World, started flying off the shelves. Not bad for a book that was first published in 1981, and whose author died in 2006.

What Skousen intended with Five Thousand Year Leap was a close examination of the values and principles that lie behind the Constitution, or were supported by those who created it. And for that purpose, I highly recommend the book.

Unfortunately, I also have to say that if every idea of Skousen's had prevailed through American history, this country would not be a very good place to live.

The original intent of the founders is worth examining, but we also have to recognize that the world has changed. For instance, Skousen embraces Washington's (and others') idea that for us to intervene in European wars would do nothing but waste America's treasure and the lives of our people.

*snip*

My point is simply this: Skousen's analysis ranges from brilliant to weird to dangerously wrong (in my opinion).

If you read his book with the idea in mind that you will think about the issues that he raises and reach your own conclusions after consulting other sources, you'll be fine. Skeptical inquiry is always rewarded, as long as you don't become a disciple.

Time after time in reading Skousen's Five Thousand Year Leap, I wanted to say to him, "Cleon, would you really want to live in the country you're describing?" If I ever knew the man, I think his answer would often be, "No. But we should have amended the Constitution in order to do this." Of course, just as often the answer would be, "Yes," to which I would say, "Well, I don't want to live in that country. I think it would be a terrible, destructive mistake."

But time after time in reading his book I also wanted to shake his hand. That needed to be said! That idea needs to be part of our public discussion!

It makes OSC's crazy a little more understandable if he was mentored by one of the modern kings of mormon crazy.

Skousen would clearly see a conspiracy here, he, OSC and Beck are all MORMONS! worse than the Iluminati, coming to getz u! They will take ur cheezburger!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Believe it or not, I am not a Republican, never have been, never will be ;) Indeed, as a green card holder I can't even vote, so I just sit on the sidelines and weep somewhat. I did indeed read the whole of it. I think my objection is a general one, and one that has been repeated on this board before - that of painting the 'Tea Party' with a broad brush. There are certainly crazies, and they are the noisy ones, but I think that many normal people are tarnished by association in these sorts of rants. And I still do not think that the whole of the 'Tea Party' is the artificial construct that the author of this piece asserts. It is far too fragmented for that, notwithstanding the bankrolling by guys like Dick Armey. People still have to show up to protests, and they aren't going to do it because some shady advocacy group chucked in some money to whoever.

Yes they will. They will show up because an advocacy group worked with the "news" station they watch or just direct mailers or what have you to convince them that X is terrible and is going to destroy America and they must do something about it! Or something of that sort.

As for the Tea Party and these broad brushes you speak of, there's been quite a few studies linked on it over the many politics threads and they show a fairly consistent view that differs from the average.

The Tea Party is a creation of the GOP to get people riled up and angry about ... something. Anything really. That great nebulous fear that other people may be different and these people may have won an election! It's payed for by GOPers, it's organized by GOPers and it's promoted by GOPers. Well, and their cronies at Fox News and the like.

Anyway, maybe I am just a little naive about this whole political process in the US. It is so full of anger and hatred on both sides, and it really puts me off. And I really cannot get onside with the portrayal of one side (the right, in this case) or the other in such monolithic terms. This is what I find biased. And maybe that is an over-reaction. But every time I read pieces like this, that is how it reads to me.

Sometimes the truth is not half way between both sides of an argument.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmm... I suppose this *is* the logical next step.

Bryan Fischer, the "Director of Issues Analysis" for the American Family Association, wrote a blog post yesterday on the AFA's site arguing that the United States should have "no more mosques, period."

"This is for one simple reason," he writes. "Each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government."

Fischer, who is scheduled to speak at the Value Voters Summit in September alongside Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, and a host of other Republican politicians, writes that every mosque "is a potential jihadist recruitment and training center, and determined to implement the 'Grand Jihad.'" He adds that "because of this subversive ideology, Muslims cannot claim religious freedom protections under the First Amendment. They are currently using First Amendment freedoms to make plans to destroy the First Amendment altogether."

If a mosque was willing to publicly renounce the Koran and its 109 verses that call for the death of infidels, renounce Allah and his messenger Mohammed, publicly condemn Osama bin Laden, Hamas, and Abdelbaset al Megrahi (the Lockerbie bomber), maybe then they could be allowed to build their buildings. But then they wouldn't be Muslims at that point, now would they?

"Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero," Fischer says.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/top_social_conservative_no_more_mosques_period.php?ref=fpa
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Actually Tormund, you linked to an op-ed piece by Laurence Kotlikoff from Bloomberg.

But at least this time, it's not some libertarian rag piece defending some shady attorney who somehow amassed over 400k in cash and is being prosecuted for money laundering like last time. ;)

Good times.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Blago will lead them to where the bodies are buried if The Machine doesn't save his ass from prison.

Edit: Republicans would also wait until after the elections so they have control of Congress as well.

Again, your proof of this is... what?

No denying that Chicago politics are a pretty hard-boiled place, but I yet to see any single iota or shred of evidence that Obama engaged in corruption. In this hyper-partisan media environment, I'm certain something of that nature would have come out before, you know, he was elected president.

Instead... all they were able to come up with is going to Jeremiah Wright's church and a dinner at Billy Ayers. :rolleyes:

All articles I've read show that Obama was very competitive when he was a Chicago politician (he got a potential opponent disqualified from an election because they hadn't properly registered) but nothing on corruption. (aside from the mutterings of a few Republican coppers who talk about "the things they've heard"... but you know what? Whenever I've asked them what they've heard, they've come up blank)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Believe it or not, I am not a Republican, never have been, never will be ;) Indeed, as a green card holder I can't even vote, so I just sit on the sidelines and weep somewhat. I did indeed read the whole of it. I think my objection is a general one, and one that has been repeated on this board before - that of painting the 'Tea Party' with a broad brush. There are certainly crazies, and they are the noisy ones, but I think that many normal people are tarnished by association in these sorts of rants. And I still do not think that the whole of the 'Tea Party' is the artificial construct that the author of this piece asserts. It is far too fragmented for that, notwithstanding the bankrolling by guys like Dick Armey. People still have to show up to protests, and they aren't going to do it because some shady advocacy group chucked in some money to whoever.

Anyway, maybe I am just a little naive about this whole political process in the US. It is so full of anger and hatred on both sides, and it really puts me off. And I really cannot get onside with the portrayal of one side (the right, in this case) or the other in such monolithic terms. This is what I find biased. And maybe that is an over-reaction. But every time I read pieces like this, that is how it reads to me.

Adamsputnik,

I think that we have ample evidences of the filth being vomited by the leaders of the teabagger movement, but have you have a chance to observe any teabagger gathering to talk to an average teabagger? I encourage you to if an opportunity present itself. Utilize keywords such as "Muslim, illegals, birth certificate, or death panel" and then enjoy the show.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...