Medical issues aside, being fat tends to be about consuming more energy than you burn.
In a remarkably similar manner, being in debt is about spending more than you earn.
It's cute that you people can take relatively simple problems with overarching patterns and obfuscate them with condescension on loan from Rachel Maddow.

I'm hoping that http://conventionofstates.com/ provides a serious review of all these matters.

Did you really just say that?
I mean, as the Enlightened Being here, I should think it hardly necessary to explain that the theological understanding that "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" is orthogonal to the legal notion of innocence until guilt is proven.
I hasten to add that the notion that people are imperfect, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Acton) is BY NO MEANS an argument that the U.S. Constitution is in a divinely "inspired" document. The document is simply informed by common sense, yo.

You're such an idiot. Bugs Bunny is God, and Earth is shaped like a carrot. Obviously you require a closer study of the Illuminatus Trilogy.

You trolled, and I called you on it. Like the time you accused me of plagiarism, on a piece that had no by-line. You just have zero (0) credibility with me. Sorry if that hurts your pride.

What's to know about Communism? Marx preached "the Kingdom of God, hold the God", and Soviet Communism was essentially Naziism without such an overt anti-Semitic streak. Any centralized, planned economy is a policy of failure.
And no, I'm not going to read every brain-dead reference you proffer, lest I join you. Go read Jonah Goldberg.

Great troll, and I'll buy off on the GOP, but the Tea Party is more accurately attacked for naiveté than anything else.

Indeed, one detects a certain contempt for the lumpenproletariat in the Left's actions.

http://www.headblade.com/

Visa/MC and the banks have security measures in place, merchants who follow the process aren't liable for loss from fraudulent cards. Asking for ID provides no additional protection to merchants and to the extent they rely on it instead of established Visa/MC processes it can lessen security.

The info on the ID is the security measures Visa/MC have in place. They allow a merchant to enter info like address or phone number, and their computers will tell the merchant whether or not it matches the address/phone they have on file for that card. When you pay for gas with a credit card and the pump asks you to punch in your zip code, it's not collecting marketing information. It's using the zip code as a (rather flimsy) security measure to protect against someone buying gas with a lost/stolen credit card. Yeah you can ask the customer to recite their address, but any burglar who stole the card from a house or mugger who got their victim's entire wallet would know the address. A photo ID with that info, while fairly easy to fake, requires a bit more effort on the part of the thief.

Credit card security is in the dismal state it's currently in because Visa/MC/Amex have successfully transferred all the damage from fraudulent transactions onto the merchants. Since they lose practically no money to fraud, they have very little incentive to improve security. (The exorbitant interest rates are to cover the cost of credit card holders who default on their debt.) For market forces to work correctly, financial penalties for risks which fail must be linked to financial profits when those same risks succeed. What Visa et al have done is decouple the penalties from the profits (profits go to them, penalties to the merchant), leading to a situation where they are not penalized when the risks they take (poor security) fail. Consequently there is no motivation for them to improve credit card security beyond the laughable state it's currently in.

Even your punctuation is condescending.

Oh, maybe in the abstract. Dare you involve actual people, and everything goes pear-shaped. This is why the genius of the U.S. Constitution is to assert outright that people are evil, and set up checks and balances to minimize the effects. Which #OccupyResoluteDesk is systematically ignoring, while Congress and the Courts, as a whole, are abetting.
Your assertion of the orthogonality of socialism and fascism is akin to saying that your C++ source code is crash-free--of course it is: until you compile it, execute it, and blame the ensuing stack trace on conservatives.

It is certainly true that I have long since discarded the idea of taking you seriously. That happened sometime last year, I think, around the time you tried to accuse me of calling for assassination.

Your assertions that (a) you hold knowledge, (b) I lack such, and (c) I'm not even trying to learn, are really kind of insulting, don't you think?

Fart too white and nerdy.

Ran across a phrase via Instapundit that seems to capture the Left very 'clearly': nostalgie de la boue .
Putting it theologically, so much of the Left is an appeal to the flesh.