The amazing thing isn't really that there are people who believes things like this. The amazing thing is that there are enough voters out there to put these lunatics into positions of power over all of us instead of just cock/cunt punching them into oblivion.
The Republicans are more than slightly better, IMO. At the very least, there are Republicans who consistently vote to decrease the funding of the government (lower taxes, balance the budget)... and most of those are Tea Party leaders. By decreasing funding for the government, you decrease its power. I'm willing to hold my nose with some of the Republicans who just can't help talking about Jesus, since Jesus seems to almost never be a hot topic of legislation -- as long as that Republican will continue to vote to decrease the power of the Federal government. That said, I have no use whatsoever of "socially conservative" Republicans like George W. Bush. What an f'up he was.
I keep waiting for some sane Democrat leaders to emerge who will say no to just one increase in spending and the power grab by the government. I'm cool that Democrats have a different focus on where our money should be spent, but goddammit, you've got to be rational when it comes to spending more money than the government takes in. You've got to be rational about how you regulate the economic environment that we all depend upon to provide jobs and innovations. Certainly there are some Democrat leaders somewhere who believe in the importance of unions but who also believe in balancing the budget without resorting to class warfare and unlimited taxation.
So far, those sane Democrat leaders remain conspicuously out of the spotlight.
Horseshit... Anyone trying to shimmy right up to the Bill of Rights to eek out every bit of State power that they can will get no benefit of the doubt for "good but misguided intentions", sorry.
I'll gladly forgive anyone a knee-jerk reaction if they're on the side of personal freedom, since the inexorable movement of the State is to restrict liberty as it accrues power.
I did read the source material and it displays a profound lack of respect for individual rights while trying to achieve a "no bullying" agenda. Bullying sucks, but to not realize that fundamentally destroying individual free speech to stamp it out is just idiotic.
that if you receive any letters from any lawyers you will answer them truthfully. So if you get accused of illegal downloads, you would truthfully reply that you didn't do it, but your roommate.
We're not talking about a morally upstanding individual here. The torrenting roommate will just attempt to drag the other one down with him.
I would go my separate ways from a roommate that was carelessly putting me in danger of losing all my computer equipment and paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees or worse in fines.
I'm not sure where you get your legal information from, but it doesn't jibe with my own experiences and observations. At a minimum, their computer equipment will disappear and be treated with a great deal of ungentleness. Even if the Internet doesn't get cut off, good luck using it while your computer equipment is in evidence for a year.
This kind of legal action happens all the time in all sorts of similar contexts. It's extraordinarily rare that any sort of harassment countersuit is made to stick from the deep pockets pursuing its "legal interests" a bit overzealously. Even if you can get the legal attack declared groundless or harassment, it involves the expenditure of a great deal of legal defense resources with a great deal of risk that those resources will never be recovered. Certainly, your time is gone forever.
This isn't like a drive-by misuse of the connection, though. The roommate is building up a lot of evidence that illegal filesharing was the norm with that line to the Internet.
When shit goes wrong, don't be surprised when the roommate who never wants to pay for any media brings everyone down with him by claiming that everyone knew about the way the connection was used.
Our insurance companies aren't exactly the problem. It's the companies that the insurance companies pay. They're robbing us all blind.
The problem is that there are several middle men, no transparency in who's paying for what, no ability/expectation for insurance holders to control hidden costs, and complicated layers of laws designed to hold the whole scam together.
If medical insurance were treated like car insurance where it was not connected to your job and you only used it in an emergency -- but paid out of pocket for most routine needs, everything would be different.
And we should all speak Esperanto.
Not true at all. The first bullet point that explains the reasoning for the downgrade in the article is this:
The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.
The debt is the most important issue.
The fact that they don't trust us to be able to solve the debt problem is the part you quoted. There's nothing in the text that would indicate that that's the more important factor. If we didn't have our huge debt, then the bullet point you quoted would be a non-issue.
So your reaction to the destruction of the US's good credit rating and all the devastation that's going to cause to the value of what generations have built in this country is to rail against the one group of people who are trying to get us to spend tax dollars responsibly? The Tea Party?
That makes no sense at all.
When you find yourself trapped at the bottom of a deep hole, stop digging!
Just look at your rhetoric, "Trying to take things away from you". That sense of entitlement is exactly the problem that got us into this mess.
I agree with cutting the military, and I agree with the fact that we shouldn't be the world's policeman.
The main thing that the US government *should* do, is to defend our citizens from foreign and domestic threats.
Social Security has a pretty decent store of financial instruments that they can liquidate to keep making payments for months in the event of a government shutdown.
Besides that, though, servicing of the debt is around $30B per month, and the Treasury takes in revenues of over $170B per month. There's more than enough there to fund servicing of the debt, social security, medicare, paying military personnel, and a slew of other government functions.
Default on August 2nd was never even close to the problem. Our rating was cut because the fear is that our debt will be $25 trillion in ten years and is spiraling out of our control. Unlike Greece, no one will be big enough to bail us out. We will take the entire global economy with us.
We had a chance to show the world markets that we could make real cuts to our budget and deficit. Forces of the State didn't like that and instead chose to pass huge amounts of debt and looming disaster on to our descendants.
There was never a danger of default. The US tax revenue every month is much greater than the debt servicing payments.
The only thing we were in danger of was a government shutdown. The "default" talk was all theater designed to scare voters.
The reason we were downgraded is because the "debt deal" was pretty close to useless. More theater.
The real problem (as the article mentions) is that we have such a huge debt in the first place. The Tea Party folks were vindicated by this slashing of our rating. They knew all along that it was about the debt. They tried to do something about it. The leaders of the Republican and Democrat parties should be tarred and feathered on their way out of office.
Cop Block is a brilliant resource for those wanting information on abusive state practices.
As always, government needs to be on a short leash. Give these folks too much power and they'll abuse it time and time again.
Please raise my taxes to pay for more of this shit.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
