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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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JE,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I certainly appreciate it.
Some of the main points that I got from the Nadar article was that the main stream media advocates for the right while ignoring events that promote the "liberal" agenda. The article quotes Nadar, who gives specifics on several of these events.
On the claim that "The left has nowhere to go," I'll admit, I don't fully agree with that assessment. But, with the second part of the article, the whole media thing, it's interesting to note that Nadar includes the NYT in his MSM rant, a publication that the Right media has largely positioned as being a liberal mouth piece.
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
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John said
McGovern and Goldwater were good men, and able spokesmen for the more "pure" members of their parties, but had almost no support from independents. Ironically, I think partisan Democrats probably think much more highly of Goldwater than of Reagan
Democrats look on fondly to both Goldwater AND Reagan for the simple fact that they appear sane and congenial compared to the current hardliner groupthought that has taken hold of the RNC. Congratz, Modern Republicans: you have made an anti-civil rights candidate look liberal.
John continued
Always delighted when you post. What you say is, in part, what Adam Smith said over 200 years ago. People who believe in capitalism have great mistrust of any alliance between business and government, because the result is usually to undo competitors.
And yet many of the greatest things this country has ever accomplished were all a result of public-private partnerships. Go figure.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Successful capitalism requires effective government to protect property rights and to enforce fair competition.
THIS IS SUCH A KEY POINT.
THIS is the reason, and the logic, for the rich and the corporations to pay the lions share of taxes for the support of government. Because they REQUIRE that same government for them to prosper, keep their wealth, and keep their competitors fighting in the same way.
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Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
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It's going to require that people be put out of work enough, that their lives be interrupted enough, that they see that their children may be put in harms way enough for people to rise up stand up and get rid of all those who claim to be American, and are really about as Un'American as one can get.
If only they could see that their actions could not contribute to the overall betterment of humankind.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Wow, it is embarrassing that this woman went to the same school that I did. What the hell did she learn there? Certainly nothing about ethics, truth, or science.
I wonder if I ever encountered her <shaking head>
[quote]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_MacDonald#Events_leading_to_resignation[/quote]
If scientists made one recommendation, MacDonald would alter ther recommendation or ignore it if it “threatened industry or landowners in any way.” One Fish and Wildlife officer said that MacDonald’s influence was so prevalent that “it became a verb for us — getting MacDonalded.”
During investigations of her actions, MacDonald was revealed to have disseminated internal DOI documents “to two people with e-mail addresses at Chevron; and to the father of an online role-playing game partner, who had no legitimate reason for access to internal Interior Department records.” Asked about why she sent internal DOI documents to a friend from an online RPG, MacDonald simply responded that she wanted another set of eyes on them, negative comments included.
Upon leaving DOI, MacDonald received a $9,628 bonus from Lynn Scarlett, was just under the $10,000 amount that would have triggered a review by the Office of Personnel Management.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Boner cries like a little girl
Weak mind, like all reality denying pubs
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Those Goddamn posturing repubs, who are about to start this crap about reading the Constitution.....I'd pay money to watch them read the 16th Amendment:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Those who had hoped to see a glimpse of the much-advertised Republican plan to revive the economy and put Americans back to work will have to wait at least until party leaders finish their Beltway insider ritual of self-glorification.
NY Times Editorial
Pomp, and Little Circumstance
A theatrical production of unusual pomposity will open on Wednesday when Republicans assume control of the House for the 112th Congress. A rule will be passed requiring that every bill cite its basis in the Constitution. A bill will be introduced to repeal the health care law. On Thursday, the Constitution will be read aloud in the House chamber. And in one particularly self-important flourish, the new speaker, John Boehner, arranged to have his office staff “sworn in” on Tuesday by the chief justice of the United States.
Those who had hoped to see a glimpse of the much-advertised Republican plan to revive the economy and put Americans back to work will have to wait at least until party leaders finish their Beltway insider ritual of self-glorification. Then, they may find time for governing.
The empty gestures are officially intended to set a new tone in Washington, to demonstrate — presumably to the Republicans’ Tea Party supporters — that things are about to be done very differently. But it is far from clear what message is being sent by, for instance, reading aloud the nation’s foundational document. Is this group of Republicans really trying to suggest that they care more deeply about the Constitution than anyone else and will follow it more closely?
In any case, it is a presumptuous and self-righteous act, suggesting that they alone understand the true meaning of a text that the founders wisely left open to generations of reinterpretation. Certainly the Republican leadership is not trying to suggest that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person.
There is a similar air of vacuous fundamentalism in requiring that every bill cite the Constitutional power given to Congress to enact it. The new House leadership says this is necessary because the health care law and other measures that Republicans do not like have veered from the Constitution. But it is the judiciary that ultimately decides when a law is unconstitutional, not the transitory occupant of the speaker’s chair.
All of this, though, is simply eyewash — the equivalent of a flag-draped background to a speech — compared with the actual legislation the Republicans plan to pass. And though much of that has no possibility of being enacted, it does suggest the depth of the struggle to come. The bill tauntingly titled the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” has nothing to do with increasing employment and will never reach the Senate floor, but shows that the leadership is willing to threaten the hard-fought access to health care for millions of the uninsured, just to make a political point.
On budgetary issues, the House Republicans’ new rules bypass the chamber and even their own Budget Committee to give all power to set spending levels to the committee’s new chairman, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. It is hard to imagine how long such an aggrandizement of power will last in a contentious body like the House. The plans by Mr. Ryan and his colleagues to simply cut all spending back to 2008 levels also have no chance of being enacted.
The one good thing about these meaningless rules and bills is that they finally seem to be prodding House Democrats into standing up for their own programs as they enter the minority. Democrats have begun to remind Americans of what is at stake in repealing health care: popular provisions like the elimination of lifetime coverage limits, insurance under parents’ policies up to age 26, and coverage for pre-existing conditions.
The Republicans’ antics are a ghastly waste of time at a moment when the nation is expecting real leadership from Congress, and suggest that the new House leadership is still unable to make tough choices. Voters, no less than drama critics, prefer substance to overblown theatrics.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Alright! Here we go! Fatty, the one of whom we speak, has one he favors, Cantor. For the first time, Cantor is taking the lead. He has chosen his path. The next ten days will probably demonstrate whether he is going to be the leader that Repubs want to follow, or not.
If he is wrong, his run for President will be over before February.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2011/01/eric_cantor_discusses_his_heal.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
Eric Cantor knows best? The GOP moves on health care.
By Stephen Stromberg
The trouble with politicians who win elections is that they start sounding like incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday. In a fleeting moment of modesty, he assured reporters that the election "wasn't necessarily an election about us." Then, recovering, he went on to describe how the election was thorough, affirmative endorsement of the Republicans' platform, particularly on health care.
"I think it is fair to say, when it comes to Leader Reid, to Leader Pelosi... they clearly don't understand what Americans want as far as health care is concerned."
That's possible. So who does understand? Eric Cantor, of course.
"We just need to repeal [the health-care law], as the American people have spoken out and said."
"Most Americans want to see this health care bill gone."
The health-care law "is something that is rejected by the majority of the people. This has been litigated in this last election."
One problem: Neither the bulk of election-day exit polling nor current telephone polling really suggests that the election was about repealing the health-care law -- it wasn't -- or that a majority of Americans favor doing so, particularly with nothing on deck to replace it.
Reporters Tuesday kept pushing: Even if the polls fully evidenced Cantor's claims, what would be the point of attempting to repeal the health-care law if both the Senate and the White House would reject the measure? And if this isn't just symbolic, wouldn't repeal possibly increase the sort of uncertainty that businesses hate? Cantor responded:
"The imperative right now is to make sure that we send a repeal bill across the floor, reflecting our willingness to listen to the American people.... the Senate can serve as a cul de sac if that's what it wants to be."
He could do his audience a favor by making his non-answer answers a little less blatant.
Don't worry, though. Cantor insisted -- apparently unaware of the irony as he continued to combine logically incompatible talking points -- that "what this Republican Majority is going to be about is striving for results."
Just because Republicans won the election doesn't mean that everything they want to do commands majority support. Cantor could simply argue that repealing the health-care law is good for the country. Instead, he is overreading the GOP's mandate. Legislating with this sort of logic is just what Republicans warned Democrats about after 2008, with the line about America being a "center-right country." If they were right then, Republicans might want to keep the "center" of "center-right" in mind now.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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The newly elected tea baggers , who have shunned bussiness as usual , go running to the tit of corporate campaign financing....Article in LA Times today...Nothing will change , we will just have a new set of pompous hypocrites representing the republicans and corporate special interest...rj
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Nanny State union member
State paycheck
Big government healthcare till death
Big government pension
Can't make it in the private sector like a real man?
Then suck off bog government NANNY STATE EMPLOYEE
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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$5000
Real men aren't afraid to put their money where their mouth is.
I'm not.
Why are you such a pussy, Fatty?
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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January 5, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Mascot Politics
“Marginalized groups” are tokens, not beneficiaries, of elite self-regard.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson’s quietly chilling article, “Two Californias,” ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere — and is a slow poison that is largely being ignored.
Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California’s predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today — and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.
In Hanson’s own words: “Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards.”
This is a Third World culture, transplanted from Mexico, and living largely outside the scope of American law, state or federal.
Ironically, this is happening in a state notorious for its pervasive and intrusive regulation of the minute details of people’s lives, homes, and businesses. But not out in the Third World enclaves in the Central Valley, where garbage is strewn with impunity and unlicensed swarms of peddlers come and go, selling for cash and charging no sales tax.
While waiting in line at two supermarkets, Victor Davis Hanson realized in both places that he was the only one who was not paying with the plastic cards issued by welfare authorities to replace the old food stamps. He noted that these people living on the taxpayers were driving late-model cars and had iPhones, BlackBerries, and other parts of what he calls “the technological veneer of the middle class.”
Sadly — and, in the long run, tragically — this is not unique to California, or to illegal immigrants from Mexico, or even to the United States. It is a pattern to which the Western world has been slowly but steadily succumbing.
In France, for example, there are enclaves of Third World Muslims, living by their own rules and festering with resentments against the society that is content to let them vegetate on handouts from the welfare state.
The black ghettos of America, and especially their housing projects, are other enclaves of people largely abandoned to their own lawless and violent lives, their children warehoused in schools where they are allowed to run wild, with education being more or less optional.
What is going on? These and other groups, here and abroad, are treated as mascots of the self-congratulatory elites.
These elites are able to indulge themselves in non-judgmental permissiveness toward those selected as mascots, while cracking down with heavy-handed, nanny-state control on others.
The effect of all this on the mascots themselves is not a big concern for the elites. Mascots symbolize something for others. The actual fate of the mascots themselves seldom matters much to their supposed benefactors.
So long as the elites have control of the public purse, they can subsidize self-destructive behavior on the part of the mascots. And so long as the elites can send their own children to private schools, they needn’t worry about what happens to the children of the mascots in the public schools.
Other people who cannot afford to send their children to private schools can simply be called “racists” for objecting to what the indulgence of the mascots is doing to the public schools or what the violence of the mascots is doing to other children trapped in the same schools with them.
A hundred years ago, groups that are now indulged as mascots were scapegoated by Progressive-era elites, treated like dirt, and targeted for eradication in the name of “eugenics.”
There are no permanent mascots. As fashions change, the mascots of today can become the scapegoats and targets of tomorrow. But who thinks ahead any more?
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. ©2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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It's true, Dick Cheney has no pulse!
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