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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.