It's crippling to the economy. Government spending is what is keeping the economy from taking an even worse nosedive. In case you haven't noticed, we've been a recession with high unemployment since the banks crashed the economy in 2008. In my state there are 5 people looking for work for every job that's available. Spending equals jobs. Government is one of the biggest spenders. Cut government spending, you kill jobs. These things have a multiplicative effect. You kill jobs, those people who lost their jobs can't spend as much, more people lose their jobs. 2% is a lot of jobs. An analysis put that at 2 million jobs lost.

The problem isn't rising entitlements. Social Security, for one, is not responsible for a single cent of debt, and never has been. The reason SS is in any kind of trouble at all is because the government has been raiding SS funds for other purposes and owes it money. The problem is reduced revenues. That happens in a depression.

To step in to a dangerous metaphor, you weren't living beyond your means when you made 60k/yr, but say you just took a pay cut and now you're making 50k/yr (just like the government when the economy crashed and tax reciepts went down.) Where do you make the cuts? Do you stop buying guns or stop buying your prescriptions? I know which I'd cut, but insanely, we're talking about cutting the prescriptions.

Just like Republicans that refused to identify what they would cut. They wanted this across-the-board cut all along, this was their provision in the last temporary budget compromise.

Ask Boehner. He's the one refusing to allow any Democratic compromise from getting anywhere. There's only one party that's willing to negotiate in good faith. And if you can't see that then you aren't doing your civic duty of at least paying attention.

Republicans. Seriously, are we this short-sighted? When Clinton was president the budget deficit was a big deal too. Then what did Clinton do? He fucking balanced the budget. We could have started paying down the debt then and there. Gore ran on a platform of doing just that. Bush ran on a platform of trillion-dollar tax cuts, increased spending, and wars in the middle east. Guess who people voted for, and guess who ran up the bill? And why was this never an issue when Bush was in office, running up the debt? Because as Cheney said, "Deficits don't matter." At least not when Republicans are running the place and they get to set their own agenda. But if a Democrat gets in office, they will do everything they can to derail their mandate by screaming about deficits, even though it's the least important issue and completely counterproductive.

Don't blame Democrats, this is 100% a Republican-created crisis. Republicans are as fiscally-irresponsible as they come.

He isn't saying it's okay for Obama to do stupid things, he's saying Obama didn't do the stupid things he's being accused of doing. Obama passed a temporary tax cut. That tax cut expired. Failing to permanently extend a temporary tax cut is not the same thing as raising taxes. That's the argument. And fuck the guy who tried to smear Obama with that brush.

GP is casting blame at the people he thinks truly deserve to be blamed, ie Grover Norquist.

And the blame should fall squarely on the GOP's shoulders. This is a crisis of their making, this is their sequester. Obama agreed to it because he's been willing to compromise, as he has endlessly showed us, it's the GOP that has refused to budge. They constantly refused to even write a bill or identify what they wanted to be cut. They didn't even put a bill up for a vote in the GOP-controlled House. This is entirely of the GOP's making, and they like it that way, because they have no interest in bipartisanship, only reducing taxes and forcing the Democrats to take the blame for the inevitably necessary spending cuts.

Courts won't take on such "advisory" cases. You need to prove that your rights have been violated in order to have standing to bring such a case. You can't just bring a case to a court and get a law struck down without such injury. I think it's a pretty terrible principle, especially since courts almost always defer to the government when it comes to the secrecy of evidence, and therefore its inadmissibility, making it impossible to prove any sort of injury in a court.

Exactly! Are we seriously talking about letting a serial rapist go free because we don't want to spend the money it takes to determine which of the two possible men it is? (By we I mean these French authorities.) A million euros is certainly worth the cost to convict a serial rapist. The fact that there's even hand-wringing at this cost is kind of disgusting.

The arguments are pretty weak. Evil is as evil does. Summary execution, collective punishment and decimation, these are evil acts, and hallmarks of tyrannies. Just because supposed good guys like the United States and Israel engage in them now does not make them any less evil, it only makes the people that engage in them evil.

Indeed, what good were satellites or manned space flight in 1956? What good was air flight before 1903? What good is looking at the stars at all? One could go on and on, but the point is that you don't understand how invention and exploration benefits humanity. You can't know until you do it.

So what good is a moon base? We'd have a low-G depot, for one, with no atmospheric drag. It would be far easier and cheaper to base our spacecraft there than on Earth, with 6 times the gravity and a significant atmosphere to deal with. Helium-3 mining, for another, since the moon is supposed to be rich in the stuff and it's supposed to be useful for fusion research, cryogenics, and some medical uses. It can be a useful training ground for astronauts preparing for bigger missions like Mars, and we can build and deploy far more powerful and advanced telescopes there than we could on earth, due to the lack of atmosphere or geologic activity. These are just a few things I pulled off of the Wikipedia page, and these are all things we thought up before we built any kind of moon base. Who knows what other benefits we could discover once we start building them there.

I think you underestimate our apathy. We've been watching them do all kinds of things first for decades, from green energy investment to bullet trains. We just don't care anymore, our national pride is gone. It's been replaced with "Always low prices, always". That is most important to us now. And guess who that ends up helping most?

Beautiful response. I'd mod you up if I could. This hits the point home precisely. This submission is just the latest salvo in the ongoing smear campaign against Assange and Wikileaks for nothing more than engaging in actual journalism, something that many of us have forgotten what it looks like because most so-called journalists these days have become government lapdogs.

And how do we know you are physically incapable of using the double carriage return?

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/17/170227/dod-study-contradicts-charges-against-wikileaks

Yes, because the US doesn't harm anyone by its actions.

Look around you, the reason Wikileaks exists is because governments like the US harm so many! It's blatantly hypocritical for anyone to demand that Wikileaks cease operations because it might harm innocents.