Sticks and stones

[n0mad23]

It's a good "exception to the rule" piece, but not representative of left-wing bias, or the firebreak you keep invoking. There's a contradiction in your argument here, namely "Thus a fairly extreme left-winger in the US would be considered moderate or even right-wing in Europe, for instance."

Is there such a thing as right-wing socialism?

Show me one published piece in the last year that reminds us that Dubya was appointed by the Supreme Court. Or one mainstream media piece talking about the 40 journalists arrested in St. Paul during the RNC.

I've been pondering this one a lot lately, and I think you might be right about the dangers of socialism. But not in the way you're concerned. Welfare or food stamp recipients aren't the real problem - it's corporate welfare.

 

[Bullethead]

How exactly would you say it was a devils bargain? I ask because I sometimes get the feeling that the we on the religious right made a bit of a devil's bargain with the Republican party.

"Religious right" is another twisted political term I'm surprised nobody's gotten into in this thread yet....

The "religious" part of this term is facially misleading because the word itself is general but as used here it's fairly specific. However, the specifics vary depending on who's using the term.

As I gather from hearing the term used, "religious right" means Christianity, not any other religion. There are no Jews or Zoroastrians in the "religious right", for example, no matter how devout and right-wing they might be. Furthermore, usage implies that the "religious right" is a subset of Christianity, often meaning the more fundamentalist Protestant denominations. There doesn't seem to be any Catholics or Episcopalians in the "religious right", IOW. But different people vary on what demoniation or nondenominational sect is or isn't part of the "religious right".

The "right" part of the term isn't too clear, either. Some people use it to mean simply conservative (in the US sense) in outlook, while others use it as a slur the same way conservatives use "liberal".

When you put both words together, you still get different meanings. To some people, the "religious right" is a group of people whose political outlook is shaped by their (whatever type of Christian) religious beliefs, which they keep to themselves. In this sense, the term is only useful to those trying to market political agendae to the group. At the other extreme, the term is frequently used, especially by the left, to refer to people whom they think want to impose an Amish-esque version of an Islamic theocracy on everybody else. Such people are probably imaginary, but they make a convenient bugbear for the left to rail against in its effort to stifle all religious activities and thought.

Does anybody have a clear, precise meaning for "religious right"?

As an aside, I've always wondered how somebody could be both "religious" (as in Christian) and "right" (as in US-style conservative) at the same time. As I gather from reading the Bible, Pauline Christianity as it has come to the US via Europe is a theological version of a leftist, big-government state.

... my point is that the slant on the left is deeper and reaches into a far more dangerous foundation than what seems to animate the ideology on the right. On the right, with the exception of matters of religion in America, there is a firebreak.

This is quite true. The left says the most outrageous things, such as "this (insert Republican agenda item here) will kill babies and make old people eat dogfood", and then it gets indignant when the right feels justifiably insulted. Or how the left can make explosively seditious rants, that cause riots leading to hundreds of deaths and set national interests back, and then dare anybody to question its patriotism. OTOH, it's also true that the right sometimes goes beyond the pale on religious issues, including that whole creationism/ID/evolution mess, which would be comical to watch if it wasn't so tragic to education.

The most sickening thing is how 1-way the left is on all this. For example, as a white male Southerner, I'm a member of the only ethnicity it's still OK to lampoon, stereotype, and satirize. To the left, I'm an ignorant, inbred, slothful, wife-beating, canoeist-raping, racist hick who joins lynch mobs for entertainment if he's not too drunk to get down the rotten steps from his delapidated trailer without breaking his neck. But watch what happens when I complain about this portrayal. Or even worse, try to use some of these same stereotypical features on anybody else.

The lack of the firebreak on the left has always made me wonder how the left continues to attract recruits. How can you take anybody seriously who comes across as the left usually does? Even its "mainstream" spokesmen alternate between egocentric self-righteousness and shrill hysteria, usually portraying everything as a doomsday scenario either way. Limbaugh is the same way, of course, which is why I don't listen to him. But there are far more such people on the left--pretty much all of them, it seems to me, whether they're in politics or the media. Their delivery completely turns me off, so I never even hear what points they're trying to make. I just think, "Jeez, what a jerk", and tune them out.

 

[dougkeenan]

canoeist-raping

LOL

 

[Bullethead]

Is there such a thing as right-wing socialism?

There must be. The left continually accuses the right of being "Nazis" :rofl:. But of course, everybody on both sides there is focusing only the racial issues, not the underlying political/economic part of Naziism.....

Show me one published piece in the last year that reminds us that Dubya was appointed by the Supreme Court.

Now, now, that's a pretty left-biased attitude to come out with there, my friend Besides, you're making me fall off the wagon by putting my lawyer hat on again. I've been clean for a couple years, dammit :lol:

It's been a while, but IIRC the Supremes did nothing at all in this case, let alone "appoint" Bush. The issues before the court were whether a) Florida state law for handling federal elections met all the federally required standards, and b) that Florida had followed its own federally OK'd election laws. Remember, this was an appeal, not a trial.

The Supreme Court was NOT trying to determine who won the election, nor deciding who should be president, and in fact COULD NOT rule on those issues, because it lacks that sort of jurisdiction. Granted, the Ginsburg side of the bench didn't care about that and raised holy Hell about not getting to play kingmaker. However, you should be glad that infernal got overruled. Otherwise, we'd never have a real election in this country again. The SC then really COULD be appointing presidents, regardless of the vote. It was to save us from that the Rhinquist side of the bench eschewed unconstitutional judicial activism. You should thank the old guy's shade.

So anyway, the Supremes looked at the above questions and decided Florida's federal election laws were OK, and that Florida had followed those laws. So the APPEAL failed, which meant the original ruling stood, which meant that Bush won in Florida just like Florida had been saying all along.

I could be wrong about the above, but it really doesn't matter because of the following:

It later turned out that Florida was right, and Bush HAD really won. You might recall that all sorts of leftwing crybabies and media people spent months digging through and hand-counting the Florida ballots afterwards. And they finally had to admit that Bush really did win Florida. Of course, by then the left had already established the myth that the SC "appointed" Bush as a core belief in its dogma, so the left-dominated media made as little mention of this as possible and leftwing politicians and journalists have pretended otherwise ever since.

But to answer your question, I seem to remember seeing a commercial for some sort of mini-series about this whole thing just a couple months ago. It was put on by HBO, MSNBC, or CNN or somebody like that. I didn't see it, but I know it existed.

Or one mainstream media piece talking about the 40 journalists arrested in St. Paul during the RNC.

I really know nothing of the details of this. But if they were behaving like Hunter S. Thompson, they should have been arrested :rofl:

BTW, I really miss HST. I'd have loved to have hung out with him. I still drink to his shade and read his books regularly

I've been pondering this one a lot lately, and I think you might be right about the dangers of socialism. But not in the way you're concerned. Welfare or food stamp recipients aren't the real problem - it's corporate welfare.

Hmmm, "corporate welfare"... That's another ambiguous political term. What do you mean by it? And why do you think it's a problem?

My own understanding is that when people say "corporate welfare", they mean that the government gives business things like tax breaks and also buys stuff it really doesn't need, sometimes at above-market value, just to keep the corporations in business (really only applies to defense contractors who might be a matter of life or death in the future). Is that what you mean?

How is any of this bad?

It's a common misconception that corporations are evil. This view is usually held by either ivory tower types who've never had to earn an honest living or union members who've been brainwashed by Marxist propoganda at their locals. In reality, corporations are just businesses. They are also the bedrock of any large economy. There's no other way to conduct business on the necessary scale to support any country as large as this one. And without that size of economy, the whole standard of living which we currently enjoy would go down the tubes.

Corporations get tax breaks for 1 main reason: as an incentive to build a facility in a given area. Why is that? Because the new plant will give many of the politician's constituents jobs, so they'll be happy and keep voting for him. It will also attract more people to the area, so the overall tax base goes up and the whole local economy booms. And the corporation will still have to pay taxes, which even at a reduced rate is more than the locality was taking in before. So it's a win-win. The local government gets increased tax revinues and all the local businesses do more business, and local unemployment rates go down. How is that bad? Oh yeah, maybe because with the people happy, they keep re-electing the guy who made this happen, who is, like most politicians, probably utterly detestable in all other respects .

Nevertheless, due to the Marxist dogma inherent in leftwing thinking, this is all portrayed as bad. Why? Because as the "workers and peasants" increase in affluence due to the economic engines of corporations, they begin to realize that capitalism is a good thing. They become bourgeois and conservative, and thus no longer fund and vote for leftists. So to the left, it's a matter of pure survival to paint corporations as evil, to brainwash the "workers and peasants" into rejecting the road to prosperity. Otherwise, the left would evaporate.

Note, though, that this is coming from the very people who claim to care most about the "little guy". That's BS. All the left leadership cares about is itself. It would rather keep down the very people it alleges to protect than relinquish its own power and admit the bankruptcy of its ideology.

So now you get to why everything is being dumbed down under the left-dominated education system. Anbody with 1/2 a brain should realize all the above, and also all the other fallacies of leftist dogma that fly in the face of objective reality. Therefore, the left is trying to make sure everybody has less than 1/2 a brain. That would be funny if it wasn't true... And you should know, given what you told me about the quality of the last batch of term papers you graded

So that's the government side of "corporate welfare". On the corporate side, you've got lobbyists contributing to campaigns. Note, however, that corporations contribute equally to both sides, so they won't be targets of reprisals by the side they didn't back.

Why do corporations lobby at all? If they pay both sides, why not pay neither side? It's neutral either way, right? Simple answer to that. If you do nothing for me, I'll do nothing for you. The fact is, the leftists have succeeded in dumbing down enough people that they can now base entire election campaigns on demonizing one industry or another. And usually being just as ignorant of the workings of the economy (they're Marxist-influenced, after all) as they are of any other realworld issue (they're politicians, after all), leftwing politicians have no trouble at all following through on campaign promises to kill the golden goose. That is, unless said golden goose has feathered their own personal nest beforehand.

Bear in mind, too, that corporations are to some extent government-proof. Raise the taxes on a corporation and the corporation will just pass them on to its customers and employees. Higher prices and lower wages for all the "little people" that the left alleges it's looking out for. But of course the left then blames this on the "evil" of the corporations, which it claims are just trying to screw everybody.

Now, I will admit that there are forms of "corporate welfare" that are VERY bad. Farm subsidies are the obvious example, where small farmers who can no longer make it in the large-scale economy get paid to stay afloat, even for NOT growing stuff.

But the thing that's really got me mad at present is the ethanol incentive. The government's recently made it so enticing to grow corn that it's overpowered the actual demand for it and everything else. As a result, there's all this corn going to waste, while there are shortages of and higher prices on everything else that otherwise would be growning in the new cornfields. And all this despite the demonstrable stupidity of using corn-based ethanol as a solution to the various energy and environmental concerns currently in vogue. If you think the price of a loaf of bread is going up too fast, thank the ethanol pushers.

Not to mention that it's getting damn hard to find barley to make beer out of, and that it's a mortal sin to burn corn whiskey instead of drink it

 

[cjp]

I'm not sure I have time today to do justice to your very good post, and for what it's worth, I intentionally used rhetoric in my post intended to elicit a good reply from you -- and it worked (an old Jeddi trial lawyer mind trick ). A few quick thoughts:

[then follows a long piece of actually quite clear reasoning]

Greg,
Let me first say that, while you think you are an atheist right-winger and I think I am a Christian left-winger, I can still appreciate your posts. I even agree on some of your statements, even when my attitude on the subject as a whole is very different. Usually I read your texts like this:

1. yes
2. yes
3. yes
4. no, I can't follow with this or that assumption or opinion
5. no, but I understand it follows from 1..4
6. no
7. etc.

I don't mind you quoting yourself. In fact, I even have plans for myself to make a website and fill it with my own detailed opinions. Should at least help me get rid of all the inconsistencies in my mind . OTOH, it gives a lot of (potentially off-topic) reading, so you should make sure all the key elements of the reasoning are put together in a small text.

Now some "random comments":
You recommended reading some of the classics (like those of Marx) (instead of reading about them), to understand the radical origin of modern socialist influences in society (am I right about that?). Now, while that would be terribly interesting, it would take lots of time to read all relevant classics, and, as the Bible says , "As to more than these, my son, beware. Of the making of many books there is no end, and in much study there is weariness for the flesh." (Ecclesiastes 12:12; at least one book I can quote). But there is another excuse I have for not having read all those books: I don't think it really matters in the end.

Why not: basically, I think only the contents of ideas matter, and not their origin. The origin only matters as a historical argument, to show that certain ideas can be related to each other. This could help as a warning, and puts pressure on (in this case) mild left-wingers to distantiate themselves from extreme and dangerous ideas. However, this only works if those mild left-wingers agree in morally rejecting the extremist ideas. Then, they'd have the choice between either drawing a sharp line between both sides, or leave their left-wing opinions.

Also, I think you should not attack the left side on being influential in society. Of course, incorrect ideas(*) are more dangerous when influential, but the danger depends in an essential way on whether these ideas are actually bad. In other words: on the contents. I think you should attack it there. If your attacks are powerful, people might be influenced, so you may be able to reduce the influence of these "dangerous ideas". But maybe I misunderstood: maybe you were just defending instead of attacking...

Finally, considering the subject of this thread, think about the irony: Chomsky, the influential linguist, being an evil left-wing extremist.

(*) Who will be the judge on that one?

 

[Bullethead]

LOL

You got a purdy mouth, boy. Squeal lak a pig :wub:

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

 

[n0mad23]

BH,

Agribusiness subsidies was one of the things I was thinking about when I invoked corporate welfare. The small farms have been dying out for decades now, but this also is the same with small business. Who's taxed these days?

It's a critique that goes back to the 1970's and one that's got me sneered at before, but I think there's a lot of truth to it. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. See, for example, "Society" circa 1972 for "privatizing profits and socializing losses." Arguably, the current sub-prime fiasco shows another example of this.

The oil industry is another great example. But before just dismissing this, have a gander at an excerpt from Stephen Slivinski's article:
The Corporate Welfare State: How the Federal Government Subsidizes U.S. Businesses


The federal government spent $92 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to businesses and private- sector corporate entities — expenditures commonly referred to as "corporate welfare" — in fiscal year 2006. The definition of business subsidies used in this report is broader than that used by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis, which recently put the costs of direct business subsidies at $57 billion in 2005. For the purposes of this study, "corporate welfare" is defined as any federal spending program that provides payments or unique benefits and advantages to specific companies or industries.
Supporters of corporate welfare programs often justify them as remedying some sort of market failure. Often the market failures on which the programs are predicated are either overblown or don't exist. Yet the federal government continues to subsidize some of the biggest companies in America. Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and others have received millions in taxpayer-funded benefits through programs like the Advanced Technology Program and the Export-Import Bank. In addition, the federal crop subsidy programs continue to fund the wealthiest farmers.



Because the corporate welfare state transcends any specific agency — and therefore any specific congressional committee — one way to reform or terminate those programs would be through a corporate welfare reform commission (CWRC). That commission could function like the successful military base closure commission. The CWRC would compose a list of corporate welfare programs to eliminate and then present that list to Congress, which would be required to hold an up-or-down vote on the commission's proposal.

This is from the CATO institute, which is not a leftist institution under any definition. For the full article, download the .pdf here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa592.pdf

 

[GregBurch]

So much meaty content here ... so little time to reply between checking the storm track, fiddling with preparations for the Old testament Sh*t bearing down on us, and generally wishing I'd gone ahead and gotten a generator this summer.

But, in the midst of all that, I can quickly second that "corporate welfare" is BAD. We're seeing a great example of it in the bail-out of the evil twins, Freddie and Fannie. Note that this is connected with something I was writing about on another thread here, about how I loathe "tax policy" as a fetid mask for corruption. (All of the constitutions of entities like Celestium and Heinlein have provisions forbidding the substitution of tax forgiveness and tax credits for actual expenditure, thanks to the wisdom of their Founders.)

Unfortunately, the insidious tendrils of this practice reach into the farthest nooks and crannies of our government. One hopeful sign is the "porkbusters" movement, and its modest success in drawing attention to the almost comically common practice of Congressional earmarks. Abolishing this practice in every form would be perhaps the single most effective first step we could take against the creeping, occult seizure of state power by interest groups of all kinds, from corporations to unions to NGOs.

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with "lobbying" per se -- it's just the practice of hiring an effective spokesman. It's what I do in the courtroom and, contrary to popular opinion, there's nothing wrong with asking someone to speak for you or, Newton forbid, even paying him to do it for you. But the potential for abuse IS real and great. unfortunately, policing that potential is a tricky business, and requires that the police be as clever as the crooks -- a difficult problem when the police earn a fraction of what the crooks do, and the crooks look so respectable.


-----Posted Added-----


AND ON A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, BUT RELATED NOTE ...

I recommend this essay:

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html

for lots of reasons. First, if you don't know about edge.org, you should. It's one of the premier "thought clubs" on the net. Second, this essay, by a social psychologist is thought provoking but also, to me, vastly entertaining. Usually, the essays on Edge really open up my mind, addressing subjects I've either never thought about before, or adding some important new information or insight to a field I've dabbled in, but can always use more input on from someone with more knowledge and insight than I have.

In this case, I find this fellow's work laughably primitive compared to the road I've been traveling intellectually for the last 40 years. For once, I feel like I could sit one of the authors at Edge down and teach him a thing or two.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning:

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.[/FONT]

The tone of this is really charming -- and very revealing. As he explains later on in the essay, this fellow had to have his mind blown open by spending some time in a rural Indian village before he could even begin to comprehend the mental processes of average Americans outside "the Bubble." And then, he works through a painfully systematic (and, I would argue, somewhat "scientistic") process to get to the point that he can sort of squint and see how these strange creatures shopping at Wal Mart manage to maintain the values they have without engaging in a daily lynching or session of wife-beating.

What's really entertaining is that he can only get there by a pathway of multiculturalism. He still can't grok the possibility that he's got the values of the Enlightenment wrong.

 

[Bullethead]

The federal government spent $92 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to businesses and private- sector corporate entities — expenditures commonly referred to as "corporate welfare" — in fiscal year 2006. ... For the purposes of this study, "corporate welfare" is defined as any federal spending program that provides payments or unique benefits and advantages to specific companies or industries.
Supporters of corporate welfare programs often justify them as remedying some sort of market failure. Often the market failures on which the programs are predicated are either overblown or don't exist. Yet the federal government continues to subsidize some of the biggest companies in America. Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and others have received millions in taxpayer-funded benefits through programs like the Advanced Technology Program and the Export-Import Bank. In addition, the federal crop subsidy programs continue to fund the wealthiest farmers.

Without knowing what specifically these payments were fore, it's impossible to comment on whether any or all of them were deserved or not.

I will say this, however. The above (red) definition of "corporate welfare" is ridiculously broad. Haven't you ever heard of paying people who do your work?

The Advanced Technology Program is an example. That's not (usually) "free money", it's (usually) payment for work done. I say "usually" because I've only been associated with a few such projects, for which my corporation worked its butt off, but I can't swear this is universally true.

Anyway, with ATP stuff, the usual thing there is that the government is thinking way in the future, beyond current market trends. It wants to develop some new paradigm-shifting capability that not only doesn't yet exist, but for which market forces and trends don't even yet exist. As a result, nobody in the private sector is going to spend a dime on them, because there's no prospect of return on investment in a reasonable period of time, and the investment is going to be huge because the tech is so new and different.

The government has research labs and factories, but they're not big enough to handle something like this. The only people with the capability to actually do the work are the established (and thus usually large) private industrial firms, who ain't just going to do it on their own due to the economics being very bad. Thus, the government gives them money to perform the R&D that they wouldn't otherwise do. But the bottom line is, the corporation is doing contracted work and being paid for it. This ain't welfare. Period.

Now, once you've gone and developed the new tech, suddenly the market forces spring into life. Now suddenly that "pie in the sky", sci-fi-esque project is worth way more than you paid for it. All sorts of gizmos we now use on a daily basis came to us via ATP, and they moved the economy along with them. You'd DEFINITELY miss it if ATP suddenly stopped. It's not just for the corporations who did the R&D, but all the end-users world-wide who get the benefit.

This is from the CATO institute, which is not a leftist institution under any definition.

The left doesn't have a monopoly on ignorance, unfortunately . Not saying CATO is totally ignorant, but classifying ATP as "corporate welfare" is pretty ignorant, at least in my experience.

But, in the midst of all that, I can quickly second that "corporate welfare" is BAD. We're seeing a great example of it in the bail-out of the evil twins, Freddie and Fannie.

How long do you think federal control is going to last? I figure if McCain wins, maybe a year. If the Obination, then forever.

Now, as to the root causes of the bail-out, I'm not up on it. But my understanding is that the real estate market went the way of the Dutch tulip market back in the day, being way artficially inflated. Suddenly people woke up and the market crashed, leaving hundreds of thousands of homeowners holding the bag. So, are you going to throw all those people out of house and home? Would it be cheaper to pay each of them off individually than it is to keep their mortages afloat?

Very regrettable all around, but I'm not sure that the bail-out wasn't the lesser evil, given the hole that real estate had gotten itself into the past few years.

In any case, the issue still remains. We can't agree on the meaning of "corporate welfare", and nobody's yet given me an example of it (other than farm subsidies) that I can unabiguously agree with .

 

[Andy44]

Greg, how can you stand to spend your time reading that stuff? I can barely spare the time to read intelligent things, let alone stuff that makes my blood boil! And that is exactly what I was saying before, about how left-liberals think all conversatives and right-libertarians are stupid. That clown goes so far as to imply conservatism is a mental disease. BTW, radio-show host Michael Savage has repeatedly stated that liberalism is a mental illness, but he also openly advocates nuking Arabs...

How long do you think federal control is going to last? I figure if McCain wins, maybe a year. If the Obination, then forever.

This sort of statement, despite all the historical evidence, is why I have rejected the Republicans. Obviously Democrats will never relinquish control of such institutions once they are in the government's hands, but the republicans won't either. Remember Reagan and the Department of Education? Still there. Remember the "Contract with America"? Nonsense. Republicans, especially the Bush administration, have done NOTHING to shrink the size, scope and power of the federal government; indeed, while controlling both the legislature and the executive they have grown it out of control, assaulted constitutional protections, and forgotten all the common sense foreign policies of Ike, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush the elder. There is no longer any such thing as a small-government, pro-freedom Republican.

 

[Bullethead]

This sort of statement, despite all the historical evidence, is why I have rejected the Republicans. Obviously Democrats will never relinquish control of such institutions once they are in the government's hands, but the republicans won't either.

Granted, present trends don't leave room for much hope. OTOH, there's still SOME hope, which is a LOT more than if the Obination wins.

 

[Chipstone306]

After spending an entire afternoon reading these posts and reading the links.....Thank god I am in Canada. American politics are way too confusing for us guys up in the great white north. Although it is very pleasant to see people take such a great interest in the politics of their country and not take a backseat to what goes on and have the sheep mentality.

cheers all

 

[Ghostrider]

You got a purdy mouth, boy. Squeal lak a pig :wub:

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

I think downstream would be a good idea.

 

[Andy44]

After spending an entire afternoon reading these posts and reading the links.....Thank god I am in Canada. American politics are way too confusing for us guys up in the great white north.

Nah, it's simple. There is one Statist Party, with two wings, the Republican and the Democrat wings. They fight with each other over who gets to use the state for what, and all people who don't fall into one of the two wings are called "third party wackos" and are ruthlessly marginalized. If you want to vote for one of the Statist candidates, you go to the polling booth, flip a coin, and pick from Democrat or Republican. If you want to vote for someone else, stay home and fly Orbiter; it's a better use of your time.

 

[Chipstone306]

:rofl:
Try making a decision with 6 parties. We have a federal election coming up October14th. the parties have been in-fighting for the past 3 years trying to get a majority.