So what? I don't expect everything to last forever. Read something else and move on. If the WSJ lost a bunch of readership, then it wouldn't matter that it has slid so much.

Well, that and their ability to regenerate crime sprees on the fly. I've seen a number of such stations which don't go beyond reading the local crime blotter and cute pet stories.

Which is a remarkably underwhelming number.

But that is a considerable part of the reason we don't normally consider gold to be a pollutant. Dose makes the poison and there just isn't a lot of dose here.

Here's an idea: how about you tell us which things the administration said about the US deaths in Libya were actually true. Because that will take less time.

Let's just keep it simple: the entire story about a spontaneous demonstration and a mob angry about some video on YouTube was completely fabricated. They knew it wasn't true, and that's been obvious since the day it happened. Today's email dump makes it even more clear. Purposeful, deliberate lying about the death of an ambassador and other Americans, all in the name of tamping down some prospectively unpleasant buzz that wouldn't resonate with the "Al Qeda is on the run!" narrative. Of course you, just like everyone else, already know this. Have fun being a part of theatrics, but just remember that pretending it's not so doesn't make you come across as any more credible. It's kind of embarrassing, actually.

LOL. That's a lot of unintentional comedy right there, 7300 plates worth. I guess the California government is good for something.

Well, I've been READing and UNDERSTANDing you and I have yet to see an actual fact backing your assertion that the tax is regressive. If we actually look at the proposed mechanics of the tax, it's a a flat tax on everything past a certain base amount. That right there makes it slightly progressive. And that's pretty much it.

It doesn't help that so many of Rand Paul's opposition are twirling their well-oiled mustaches like a Ayn Rand cartoonish villain.If you're a plug in replacement for a "looter" in Atlas Shrugged, then Ayn Rand's stilted writing and logic is the least of your troubles.

Except for people who care that Obama and his administration blatantly lied about what happened in the period right before an election. And we see that Hillary Clinton knew very well that what was being said by both State and White House spokesdroids (and by her, and the president himself) was pure fabricated BS meant to placate prospective voters. They deliberately lied about what happened so that those events wouldn't contradict the narrative that Obama was trying to sell in his re-election bid. The people who actually know this, and who claim they don't care, are desperately hoping that Clinton's complicity in spreading that lie won't remain on people's minds during this upcoming election.

Except by taking their stuff or putting people in jail, of course. The thing missing in your argument is the vast power differential between even a "weak, decentralized" government and a corporation.

Sure, it does. A business's power is far easier to break. Just destroy or take their capital or stop buying their stuff, then they stop making a profit. That jackboot goes away when the business can no longer pay for it. For better or worse a small group of people can considerably harm even a large business, if they target it with effective sabotage or high profile bad publicity.

Sure, they do. But over the lifespan of the US the "moderation" usually favors the wealthy and connected. It's only when the public gets particularly outraged that the moderation has anything to do with creating a better society.

The obvious rebuttal is twofold. First, one would expect in a democracy for those who don't desire government action in their lives to require a larger bribe than those who do. It's standard supply and demand in a democracy.

Second, where is the money going? Just because, say, West Virginia gets money for a high tech emergency command center or money to back bonds for an interstate (hypothetical examples) doesn't mean that the money goes to West Virginia networking equipment manufacturers or the fees for managing the sale of said bonds go to West Virginia brokers. There's a lot of blue state participation in red state spending.

I call your bluff here. By all means, cut funding to those disrespectful, slothful red states. Of course, your "moderation of society" will be cut in retaliation. That's win-win for me.

I think the previous poster was thinking of stuff like the "nuclear option", the blocking of filibustering (like what Paul did just now) on a variety of US Senate activities. That wasn't done by the "right wing" though admittedly they were blamed for it.

Except for the obvious bit about not actually being regressive. The actual regressive tax problem I see with a flat tax is that they can't permanently eliminate tax loophole creation. That's what creates localized regressive tax situations today.

Not at all. It summarizes a causal relationship. The disingenuous GP is the one that says, "Having little money is a case of having little money." He doesn't address the why, whereas I'm pointing out that it's the lack of specific action that causes the lack of desired results.

Funny, how people are more concerned about hypocrisy, real and imagined, than about genuine evil. Perhaps you ought to look into what it takes to be an elected politician. The key thing for purposes of considering your empty accusations of hypocrisy is that his job is to represent the interests of his constituents, which aren't mostly not libertarian in viewpoint, not merely advocate a particular ideology with pure consistency.

I notice that no one bothers to point out the hypocrisy of the vast majority of US politicians here. Somehow Rand's hypocrisy is far more significant than the hypocrisy of a Reid or Shelby, to name a couple which I've noticed. I think it's a terrible idea to leave politics to the completely venal, but this sort of attitude remains strangely commonplace.

One would have to be a fool to eschew a strong libertarian (or whatever philosophical traits one deems desirable) candidate on the basis that he isn't ideologically pure while ignoring that he has a job that demands a lot of things over ideological purity. Especially when his supposed hypocrisy is not notable compared to background noise of the group he is part of.