Rug Burn Junky on 4/8/2011 at 14:36

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Give a hoot. Don't pollute.

Rug Burn Junky on 4/8/2011 at 23:50

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Like CCCToad's attempts to troll by painting me as a die-hard Obama supporter who is unable to see his flaws and just irrationally hates Bush, the right's attempts to paint Obama as a die-hard socialist, bent on an authoritarian government state are pretty much divorced from reality (the cognitive dissonance between "He increases government!" and "He wants to cut Social Security!" should be duly noted.) It's part of a narrative to push an agenda (e.g. (http://www.gop.com/index.php/briefing/comments/reach_out_and_touch_medicare) here, sent down from on high in the GOP, to be parroted by ignorant shitheads like Toad., but in the end, it's gibberish. It would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic.

Just to clarify for those playing along at home, so you can see exactly what he’s trying to do, here's the analogy.

Suppose you and your wife go out for dinner. She really wants pizza, you, well, you're not so hot for it, but you go along. She's really excited about getting some mushroom & onions (ie. "date-repellent"), which you can't stand. You're more of a pepperoni guy. So you split the pie: half mushrooms & onions, half pepperoni. Your wife gets up to go to the bathroom, and while she's gone, some homeless looking guy in a tri-point hat comes over to your table and starts screaming at you: "GIVE ME SIX SLICES OF PIZZA! GIVE ME SIX SLICES OF PIZZA!"

Now, knowing that you and your wife only eat three slices each, you calmly say to the gentleman: "How about this, I'll give you one slice each of pepperoni and mushrooms & onion, if you pay me for a quarter of the pie."

And he refuses, he just stands there, slack-jawed, screaming: "STOP TRYING TO STEAL MY MONEY! GIVE ME SIX SLICES OF PIZZA!"

And you say "How about three? One m&o, 2 pepperoni, and I won't even charge you"

You know what's coming next, right? "GIVE ME SIX SLICES OF PIZZA!"

Meanwhile, some guy at the next table with a really fake orange spray tan is watching this and saying: “Why are you being so unreasonable, can’t you just give him your pizza to make him go away?”

So you give up. Still calm, unnaturally so given the circumstances, you give him all of your pepperoni, and two slices of your wife's mushroom. (Please feel free to share any stories you yourself have about giving some guy all of your pepperoni in a pizza joint. If it also involves swapping your wife’s mushroom, all the better. But I digress.)

When your wife comes back from the bathroom, and sees two of her slices gone, knowing she would have eaten at least one of them herself, she quite understandably wants an explanation. So you tell her about the crazy jack-ass who wouldn't stop screaming.

But then at the next table, you have the guy at the next table butting in, telling her: "Your husband just gave that guy two slices of your pizza." Which, yeah, is factually correct, but kinda misses the larger point. He presses on, "No, the guy didn't even ask for mushrooms & onions, it was your husband that offered him two mushroom and onions slices. Your hubby didn’t want to come here and now he’s trying to give away all of your pizza. Somethingsomethingsocialistfascist."

You all see that, right?

You have a number of factions right now in the Republican party, including the cynical careerists, and the nutjob ideologues (who the cynics view as useful idiots). The careerists are the guy at the next table, who thinks he has a shot at banging your wife if he can get her pissed off at you. You already know who the idiots in the tri-point hat are.

The plan all along was to push for the cuts that Movement Conservatives actually wanted AND blame Obama for doing so - they were going to run on "He cut Social security" the same way they warped the Affordable Care Act into “Obama's-government-takeover-of-your-medicare.” That's exactly what this is, part of the long game: "See, HE put social security on the table!" is an attempt to cut Obama's support from seniors, so that John Boehner and Mitt Romney can bang your grandma. Yeah, technically, he did, but that's a far cry from what really happened. The Tea Party demands were so ridiculous that you couldn't even come partway to meet them without considering it:

SS is roughly a quarter of federal spending, give or take. When you have the Tea Party wanting to reduce spending by something like 40% as their opening bargaining position, simple math says that they put SS, Medicare and Defense in their demands, even if they didn't explicitly say so - it's a logical necessity to get to their position - you can't cut 40% if you only cut the 25% considered discretionary spending (which you couldn’t get to 0 in any regard). Just like the pizza analogy: If there are only 4 slices of pepperoni, six slices means you’re going to have to give up some mushroom. Of course, that means you’re going to have to buy more pizza, because you haven’t even had one slice of your pepperoni and you still need to eat, at which point our favorite patriot is going to be right back at the table.

Oh yeah, and can we all agree that the tri-point hat guy was way out of line in the first place and this is an issue that shouldn’t have had to be dealt with at all? Thanks, I knew we could. (Just to complete the analogy, after Tri-pointer gets the pizza, he throws it on the floor in disgust, yelling “That’s not the pizza I asked for, you selfish prick!” and cynical-careerist guy makes a dive for it, eating it from the floor as everyone else looks on, horrified. Finally, he offers your wife a slice and says “See that, baby, I can give you the mushrooms & onions you wanted all along.”)

I’m under no illusions that Obama is a diehard defender of all aspects of the social safety net– he even advocates trimming it at the margins. But just like the husband and the mushroom & onions slices, while maybe he's not that sympathetic to SS and he really is willing to trade it off to get things done since keeping it is not his priority, that's a far cry from making it his mission to get rid of it, and that's where the crucial distinction lies. Yeah, I'd rather he stood up to them and said "No effin' way" but given everything we know about him (a center-right moderate, who values compromise and collaborative action in an attempt to defuse partisanship even to the exclusion of advancing a progressive agenda), it's not surprising in the slightest.

The alternatives? John McCain would have been pressing for even more drastic cuts in Social security, and bragging while doing so. Ditto for Romney, Bachmann, Ron Paul, Palin, Perry, you name it. George Bush ACTUALLY DID TRY TO DISMANTLE Social Security entirely. So Obama's not perfect, but holy fuck he's better than the alternative from the other side of the aisle (and yes, “other side of the aisle.” Trying to throw Clinton in there is completely unhinged and a rather disingenuous attempt at sophistry. That much is obvious, right?).

Of course, fucktards like Toad see everything in black&white, stark contrast, so there’s no understanding of these differences. Since in their lens anyone who doesn’t fit in perfect congruence to their worldview is evil, they can’t separate a “deviance from optimal” on the one hand from “outright diametrically opposed” on the other, and they assume that the rest of us view things the same way. Obama tinkering with SS at all should be just as bad as Bush privatizing it altogether in their eyes, and Obama offering some cuts and tax increases to solve an illusory debt problem is just as bad as those fucktards who are making up that debt problem, and demanding that one of the potential solutions is unacceptable. That’s what he’s trying to fart out in his posts now. The rest of us understand the circumstances and know better.

So yeah, you’d have to be pretty fucking delusional to paint that as “denial.”

nbohr1more on 5/8/2011 at 02:42

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All the involved parties are missing the big picture.

1) Capitol growth comes from supply-demand imbalances
2) These imbalances must necessarily be between your nation and others so that your nation can get needed resources from elsewhere. You either need a raw resource or product that the others don't have.
3) The most valuable product you can have is a new Technology
4) Technologies are an outgrowth from investment in research and education
5) Technologies are copied and supplanted rapidly
6) When you out-source your production of this new Technology you make it easier for outside nations to copy or supplant your product
7) Now you are competing against low-cost workers in companies with no burdens from your host country
8) You are now also competing against companies that did not require the initial development investment to create the original product
9) Worst of all, this scenario is common for Chinese goods manufacturers who can appeal to their communist government to supply unlimited resources to out-compete the world markets.

Yes, many other terrible trends got us into to this mess but this trend is the one true pitfall. We owe China so much because we gave away our own manufacturing sector for the chance to gamble and compete in world markets with new concepts alone.

Tocky on 5/8/2011 at 03:53

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I knew it. We should get up from the table and smash our chairs into the teeth of tri-corner hat guy then kick the fat bastards ass at the other table.

I've heard what CCC said regurgitated on The Limbaugh show and I think it's meant to dissuade independents in a divide and conquer way because quite a few independents just like the term and think they are all rebel without understanding any of the issues. Really there is only one issue. Tax the rich at a level that works as it was done under Bill. Give the rich loads of breaks and they invest... OVERSEAS. Hillary might indeed do okay but that's just a non- issue and meant like the magicians "watch this hand carefully" while repubs choke education, healthcare, old folks, children, and any and everything except the ever greedy wealthy until it turns blue. The very fact the tea baggers will consider absolutely no increase in taxes for the wealthy while demanding cuts to the programs which help the poor tells anyone with a brain exactly what they are.

CCCToad on 5/8/2011 at 06:08

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So he's great at things that....don''t really fucking matter that much, right.

How about the facts that Obama:

- (http://www.thenation.com/article/161936/cias-secret-sites-somalia) Has continued the CIA's "black site" program (and (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/07/12/cia.somalia/) here

-Continued Bushs's Neocon policies by US bombings of (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/world/africa/02somalia.html) Somalia and (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/cias-drones-join-shadow-war-over-yemen/) expanded ones in Yemen and dramatically escalated the conflicts in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

- On a similar note, he's also surpassed Bush by claiming that no review is needed before targeting a US citizen for assassination.

-Deceitfully (http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/14/libya_broken_promises) escalated involvement in Libya, while exceeding even Bush's disregard for process by failing to request authorization and then repeatedly claiming that he wasn't obligated to justify military involvement to Congress

-Also, the claim that Obama was against social security cuts is (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sW4bosivvL4/ThWjeyeHvkI/AAAAAAAAAEY/lRC_zVuM-64/s1600/post.png) "demonstrably wrong"(http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-debt-talks-obama-offers-social-security-cuts/2011/07/06/gIQA2sFO1H_story.html) also here

- Completely failed to , as this article puts it, (http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/obama-economy/presidents-failure/) "demand a reckoning from moneyed interests" I suspect this is why RBJ likes him so much. You might want to save that one for later, its a long read.

-Pushed for an extension of the Patriot Act (with no reforms to bush-era policies) with no reforms to bush-era policies and resisted any attempts by the public to discover how its surveillance powers are used domestically.

-Repeatedly failed to make any real push for tax cuts on the rich.



-Legally prosecuted more whisteblowers than all other presidents combined.

-worked to shield investigation into Bush-era torture abuses and continued said abuses(although this was "debunked" in the media, not everything you read is true"




Thats enough for now, I've got to get back to work.