Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
- Thread starter GasBandit
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From what I read about it, it was correct in terms of law/constitution. The problem is your constitution (an amendment at least, which is the same functionally) making corps "a person" of a sort. So now the legislative correction is starting.
That said, I don't put it much above a snowball's chance in hell of happening, but I HOPE it happens.
T
TheBrew
What leap? Only a moron would think that Obama was some sort of extreme liberal. He has always been at the (American) center and it isn't his fault that people life to project their own fears and hopes onto him.
And fucking idiots. Don't forget them.
Well, of course the fucking idiots! The fucking idiots go without saying! (read in John Cleese voice)
Despite all the evidence turned out because it was obtained by tortue, Federal judge sentences 1998 embassy bomber Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani to life-without-parole. Maybe we'll stop hearing that "military tribunals are the only answer" meme.
T
TheBrew
Jeez, with that sentence they might as well just sent him home with a bomb-making kit. When will people learn that secret, brutish military tribunals are the only way?
GasBandit
Staff member
If you thought the news of the deficit was bad, it's about to get worse ... Social Security is officially broke. The CBO's latest estimates now place the program in permanent deficit.
Rand Paul has a plan. His plan wouldn't just freeze spending, but cut $500 billion from government spending in one year alone. He is the only one, to my knowledge, who has the gonads to even suggest touching the Education Department. His plan would gut the Education Department, fold the Energy Department into the Department of Defense and completely get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Other victims on Paul's chopping block are seven independent agencies including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and national endowments for the arts. Right on.
Republican lawmakers in a dozen states are looking at their next option to fight ObamaCare: nullification.
The Obama administration is using new "environmental standards" to force independent owner-operator truckers into becoming part of the Teamsters union.
Clarence Thomas forgot a few things on his financial disclosure forms. Whoops.
Apparently Planned Parenthood is a little more on the ball than Acorn.
Rand Paul has a plan. His plan wouldn't just freeze spending, but cut $500 billion from government spending in one year alone. He is the only one, to my knowledge, who has the gonads to even suggest touching the Education Department. His plan would gut the Education Department, fold the Energy Department into the Department of Defense and completely get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Other victims on Paul's chopping block are seven independent agencies including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and national endowments for the arts. Right on.
Republican lawmakers in a dozen states are looking at their next option to fight ObamaCare: nullification.
The Obama administration is using new "environmental standards" to force independent owner-operator truckers into becoming part of the Teamsters union.
Clarence Thomas forgot a few things on his financial disclosure forms. Whoops.
Apparently Planned Parenthood is a little more on the ball than Acorn.
I have no words for how stupid this is.
Oh, and there is a whole thread on the Clarence Thomas thing. Oops
In short: Fuck the poor, fuck the arts, education and culture are for the rich an privileged only.
I wonder how long until we start having protests from people who aren't going to be able to enjoy SS, despite having had to pay into it for all of their lives. They're going to have to consider letting people below a certain age opt out of the tax or it might be bloody. Then again, they could just offer a tax break to them or something...
And what a shitty plan it is. Any plan that doesn't start with cutting defense spending substantially is merely an excuse to gut social programs your voter base don't benefit from.
Sarah Palin misunderstands what "Sputnik moment" means to great hilarity.
What a dipshit.
I would like to actually see his calculations on this stuff. A lot of this still seems very arbitrary. And considering the size of both the Defense Budget, the numbers from that end are surprisingly small. And folding the DoE into the DoD entirely is a bad idea. I could see nuclear weapons monitoring being moved into the DoD, for obvious reasons, but the DoE does research and research grants as well.
Also, why are
GasBandit
Staff member
All the NEA ever did was dilute the art world by incentivizing hacks who otherwise might have had to find something they were actually good at to support themselves. Centralizing education to be controlled at the federal level does nothing to help the poor, and in fact, has done loads to hurt every American student since its investiture.
I'd just like to reiterate that when private citizens try to do what social security does, they go to jail for it.
Defense spending is usually the first on the chopping block during peacetime (which this isn't), and even then it hurts us. The Clinton years bankrolled themselves by scuttling half our armed forces, and we've been feeling the burn from that for the last 10 years. Now, not to say that things can't be trimmed there, too, but the real issue is that cutting defense spending is usually a routine and little argued point, once the danger is past - but these other things are bloated bureaucratic sacred cows that people who "feel" instead of "think" are always first to scream bloody murder about whenever they're even obliquely threatened with a cut. Besides, it's not really about helping the poor to these people - it's about making them dependent upon government. When liberals scream about "you just want to fuck the poor," I say "you just want to put them in chains." If leftists actually cared about the poor, they'd give more to charity than do heartless, poorfucking conservatives... but they don't. They give less even though they make more on average.
Our federal government is broke. Insolvent. We'll spend another 1.5 trillion this year we don't have. Our public debt will be 70% by the end of the year. Spending has to be cut. Even on feel-good liberal nanny programs. Especially on them.
Added at: 13:00
Which is part of why it's such a good plan.
Er, no, it's the reason it's such a bad plan. It's incredibly short sighted and would cause the collapse of our economy. Which I'm sure is ok for people protected in their ivory towers.
How dare the poor get their own towers!
I'm mainly talking about R&D and vehicle/ship creation. We don't need next gen fighter jets right now, when our neighbors don't have anything that can beat anything from the past two generations (and even if they did, we still have a shitload more of them then they do). We don't need more ships when our navy is several times bigger than the rest of the world's naval forces combined and more advanced than all of them. I'd keep up the small arms R&D (mainly because the M4 is showing it's age and because of how much we've sunk into making a replacement) but we certainly don't need the military power armor program right now.
There is a lot of non-vital pork in the defense budget right that could be better spent. Or not spent at all for that matter.
The collapse of the economy is on its way. Certainly if people want to keep up the pretense of spending money we don't have.
GasBandit
Staff member
What is going to cause the collapse of the economy is not learning the lessons of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. What is going to cause the collapse of the economy is umpteen trillion dollars in acknowledged debt, and more undeclared. What is going to cause the collapse of the economy is the demotivation of American potential by infinitely extending safety nets until they become permanent hammocks while refusing to address universally acknowledged educational problems by any method other than pushing EVEN MORE money into the same leaky, corrupt bureaucracy - and ignoring the fact that we don't have the money to pay for it because it is a warm fuzzy thing.
That's pretty all I got out of that.
Reducing debt is a great idea (and we were on our way until Bush Junior dumb fucked it up). What you're proposing isn't fixing the problem, it's causing a catastrophe, making the nation unable to compete with the rest of the world for generations, and hoping that the nation is somehow able to rebuild itself after the fire dies down all in the name of an impossibly ideological society. All the while damn anyone who gets trampled along the way. It's irresponsible and dangerous to think it would work for the entire nation.
I'm all for you getting your dream utopia where you are. Go for it. The United States should chop up a hunk of Texas and let you go nuts with it and try out your grand plan. I won't even laugh when you come crying for help.
I'm all for you getting your dream utopia where you are. Go for it. The United States should chop up a hunk of Texas and let you go nuts with it and try out your grand plan. I won't even laugh when you come crying for help.
Forty percent of the world's defense spending is done by the U.S. All the other countries in the world account for the other sixty. Divvied up among the other 190+ countries of the world. I'd find it hard to believe that every last penny of that is vital to our security.
Not to mention a lot of that money is being spent to protect countries that don't have the means to protect themselves completely. South Korea and Japan being the primary culprits, and that's without going into what we spend on NATO and UN operations. One of the biggest reasons we're in this trouble (and one of the reasons no one has really tried to cash in their chips before now) is because we spend A LOT of money putting out fires that other countries aren't able or willing to handle themselves.
The only Chinese technology we really need to keep an eye on is their submarine fleet. Just about everything else they have isn't even close to what we have.
GasBandit
Staff member
We can balance our budget within a decade if we simply capped spending at its current rate - by freezing the budget. Daniel Mitchell has run the numbers and he says, "If they freeze the budget, we almost balance the budget by 2017. If federal spending is capped so it grows 1 percent each year, the budget is balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington can limit spending growth to about 2 percent each year, red ink almost disappears in just 10 years."
Over the next ten years, Social Security will post nearly $600 billion in deficits.
A look back at some of the great gems of Olbermann, now that his show has kicked the bucket.
President Obama has triggered a new fight with Republicans by re-nominating two controversial officials to key administration posts.
Health insurers in 34 states have stopped selling child-only insurance policies as a result of ObamaCare.
Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating
Colorado State University has received an $8 million grant from the Department of Defense to grow plants to detect explosives in shopping malls or airports.
Mexico is becoming such a violent place, that cruise lines are canceling their stops in some Mexican ports.
Egypt tries to kill all communications, internet, sms, etc.
Over the next ten years, Social Security will post nearly $600 billion in deficits.
A look back at some of the great gems of Olbermann, now that his show has kicked the bucket.
President Obama has triggered a new fight with Republicans by re-nominating two controversial officials to key administration posts.
Health insurers in 34 states have stopped selling child-only insurance policies as a result of ObamaCare.
Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating
Colorado State University has received an $8 million grant from the Department of Defense to grow plants to detect explosives in shopping malls or airports.
Mexico is becoming such a violent place, that cruise lines are canceling their stops in some Mexican ports.
Egypt tries to kill all communications, internet, sms, etc.
