I'll never understand how criticism of Obama is somehow countered with criticism of George W.
That's politics, I guess, where which team you're on is always more important than the soundness of your logic or the value of your core principles.
Yeah, I found a browser add-on that makes reading Slashdot a lot more palatable. It works in Chrome and Firefox. I haven't tried it in IE.
This is the prime reason why I vote for smaller government. People are stupid. Our leaders are at best mediocre. Why should they have so much power to tell us what light bulbs to use, how many gallons we can flush, how we spend our healthcare dollars, etc. Most importantly, why should they be able to take such a large percentage of my labor through taxes to impose tyranny upon me?
The Constitution had more than enough power for these weasels that the dumb-ass masses keep electing.
In other words, your lower tax rates result in an increase in wealth and power for the organizations that sell you goods.
Your entire thesis is undone by a cursory googling of "historical federal spending vs GDP".
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2016USp_XXs1li111mcn_H0f_US_Federal_Debt
The State has dramatically increased its spending for decades, gobbling up the advances in the private sector... and for what? Most of it has gone to waste feeding the political power structure, buying votes with destructive social welfare programs, crony capitalism corporate subsidies, and making war.
You obviously misunderstand the relationship between tax policy, economic growth, and tax revenues. You've bought the line that increased tax percentage means higher tax receivables. You don't understand that high taxes destroy economic growth, drive businesses overseas and end up lowering tax revenues.
You're confused is what you are. Establishment Republicans can be easily as bad as Democrats. You voted for Bush even once? And now you're lecturing to us about how Obama is "smart and honest"? Jeez, dude. Maybe you should sit politics out until you learn to think for yourself.
Maybe you should back up and try to find core principles worth supporting and concentrate on how to find support for those principles in politicians.
Step One: The "1%" rhetoric is jealous bullshit, especially in the context of the people spouting it. Stop using it.
Step Two: Learn about liberty. Learn about freedom and how it's being taken from you -- not by run-of-the-mill corporations and rich people, but by crony capitalism... by your government that you're trying to empower to solve all of your problems.
Go read Eric Raymond's post. He's exactly right.
Please stop voting. You helped to give George W. It sounds like you helped to give us Obama. Nice work.
Look at Obama. He's honest, smart, and completely helpless.
How can anyone think that the guys is particularly smart or honest after the last few years? He has more verbal flubs than Dan Quayle (they don't get the air play that Quayle got, but ah well), and he demagogues every issue with class warfare rhetoric that's so horribly dishonest.
Helpless? If only he were a bit more helpless. The guy has been a one man wrecking ball on the economy.
The worst thing about the guy is that he's fundamentally misguided on economics and what's good for a society with his Marxist class-warfare, blame the producers, anti-freedom, anti-American, self-entitled abject stupidity.
An uneducated person doesn't understand that the U.S. Constitution is outdated and needs to be replaced.
If by "replaced", you mean "followed much more closely than in recent decades because we've gone completely away from it for quite some time", then we agree completely.
Or that socialism isn't a dirty word
Socialism has only a couple of ends. North Korea is at one end of the spectrum. Greece/Italy/Europe is at the other. Which are you more in favor of, gradual ratcheting down the rights and benefits of everyone in the society as mediocrity becomes the norm? Or over-promise and overspend until your debt becomes completely unmanageable?
How about we go back to the raw rights and liberties of the Constitution so that the USA can return to being a beacon of hope and freedom for the world, rather than just another big failed experiment in socialism like Europe?
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.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
