Republicans ok with CISPA Pages PREV 1 2 | |
The Republicans seem ruled by Christian Conservatives, who generally don't have any problems with the "security" part of the government being quite large and intrusive, so that order and traditional values can be forcibly upheld. It's all the other parts with the welfare and whatnot that bothers them. ...and who'd ever trust Obama to curtail anything? Guy's been consistently unable to affirm himself. Though somewhat ironically the republican way of preventing him from doing so - surrendering the party to the extremist fringe - will certainly be far more costly in the end. Already they were pretty much forced to elect a boring reactionary billionaire to run against him in the middle of an economic crisis, because everyone else was just too radical. A party with that much internal division - from outright theocrats to staunch libertarians - really can't afford to discard moderation, it'll drive both the moderates and the radicals from all the internal sides it isn't playing up away. | |
Once again we get to discover that most politicians are assholes. Color me surprised... | |
So you admit that the GOP platform is based on taking whatever Obama's stance is and then doing the opposite? I applaud that sort of candor. | |
I've been saying for years that if the Democrats really want to win an election, they need to have Obama declare National Not Setting Yourself On Fire Week to be the last week of October. The jihaddhi Republicans can't vote from the burn ward... | |
Lots of this. Obama is totally not playing his cards right. | |
And 42 Democrats broke with the White House and voted for it. There seems to be a suggestion in this thread that Democrats are not the party of fat cats and big business? EDIT: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503933125159928.html I think the money follows whoever they think is going to win. For 3 years, it was Democratics, now swinging toward Republicans. But they wouldn't be giving money at all if it didn't buy something. | |
They're a party of _different_ fat cats. The GOP are pretty much the loyal catamites of Big Oil, whereas I believe Hollywood favors the Dems, for example.
Well, ka-derp. Some wiseguy economist did the numbers, and figured out that Are you OK with this? | |
I am not, but what do you do about it? The only idea I trust is that we make government small. A small government has less power to abuse.
National Review magazine had a great piece a bit ago, when CISPA was still called SOPA, that existing big businesses will use government to shut down competition (See "Tucker"). To them, what SOPA was really all about was smashing Hollywoods competition. CISPA claims to be about security, but I'm sure it will be used in ways that please established media. | |
In the words of Lewis Black, the Democratic Party is a party of no ideas and the Republican Party is a party of bad ideas. And the only thing worse than a Democrat or a Republican is when they work together. | |
GRIDLOCK NOW!!! I would reverse Mr. Black's assessment though. Republicans at least pay lip service to limited government, while Democrats are the party of government activism. They are actually excited by what they think government can do for society. But I do have friends that actively split their vote in the hopes of creating gridlock. | |
BWAHAHAHAHA. I can't believe you are still reciting this whopper. Refresh my memory - who came up with the USAPATRIOT act and the TSA? Who's been the biggest, most fervent boosters of the War On Some Drugs? Who decided that Repubs may pay lip service to 'small government', but that's ALL they do for it. And if you can't see that, I feel sorry for you. | |
I was just going to say. Also, Gorfias, from your post you seem to be saying that government is incapable of doing anything good for society. | |
The Republicans in charge of the GOP as of late seem to think it's the role of the government to be the enforcers of subjective and "family" values. And while they love to strut around claiming to be staunch supporters of the Constitution, they seem to be blissfully unaware that the first amendment also applies to Christianity. The policies they are putting forth are more accurately represented by the phrase "We want the government out of our lives, unless you're gay or want an abortion." The Republicans may talk about how much they support small government, lip-service as you said, but in practice they only support it when it happens to oppose whatever the Democrats (and especially Obama) want. | |
And their failures have cost them power. I wonder if the Democratic controlled Senate will pass CISPA and will the President, the Drone Warrior and hero of Libya, sign it?
I like interstate highways, patent & copy write laws, a national military, farm subsidies... there are things I expect a Federal government to do and get correct.
Ron Paul is a Republican, as is, hopefully, or next President, Mitt Romney. I've read Mitt's budgets will be smaller than any other Republican candidate short of Ron Paul's and certainly less than Obama has been spending. That's something. | |
Ron Paul's a Republican in name only. The man's a Libertarian if I ever saw one. Mitt's a Corporatist. If that's the Republican stance now, then sure, Mitt's a Republican. Also, considering the past twelve years, let's not compare spending tendencies between parties, shall we? Let's just discuss who can do the better job. | |
I include having a future in mind for the country as part of doing one's job as President. Not this: | |
Really? Because I've read Mitt Romney wants to significantly increase the defense budget. It probably depends on who you ask. Well we'll see, I guess. | |
I'd hope we can keep the troop numbers up, shrink the over-all size (I'd read our aircraft carrier space is 15 times larger than the rest of the world's combined... do we really need that?), scale back our missions and focus on investing in high tech. | |
I could get behind a plan like that. If we're wanting to transition into a peacetime, having a bloated standing army is saying one thing with our mouth and another thing with our hands. While it should be ready for action, as you said just about everything we have is bigger than what everybody else in the world has several times over. There is a lot of scaling back that can happen while still maintaining about the same level of readiness and security. I'm sure a lot of people will moan and groan about military people being put out of work in this tough economy. But if that's really what they're worried about, then all that lowered spending frees up money for education and skilled labor training and employment programs, similar to what was done in the Second New Deal. | |
That, and decommissioning old equipment (including air craft carriers) can save money that can maintain jobs as newer technologies are subsidized to replace them. Save money decommissioning 5 old ships, but build 2 newer, higher tech ones to replace them. Jobs, savings, and higher state of readiness. | |
So make Congress even less effectual than it is now? That's hard to do.
Funny that you use those titles as pejoratives. Fifty bucks says if Mitt Romney did any of those things, you'd be singing his virtues from the rooftops.
Just not any kind of social policy? Here's the million dollar question: Do you support social welfare over corporate welfare?
Two things. First of all, Ron Paul has no real leadership power within the GOP. He is and always has been an outlier whose popularity mostly comes from the fact that he's the only Republican who loudly and frequently takes the piss out of his own party. Otherwise, the Republicans are obsessed with creating the appearance of an ideologically unified front to the point where the Tea Party suggested mandating a purity test to run for office as a Republican. Ironically, their favoritest person other than Jesus, Saint Ronny Reagan, would have failed spectacularly on the proposed test. Second, Mitt Romney proposed slashing taxes and raising the defense budget by $98 billion. He's going to increase government spending and decrease federal revenue. He's going to reduce income and increase spending. Where the fuck is that money supposed to come from?! Romney is trying to run on an economic platform of his accomplishments in the private sector. But do you know how a private equity firm actually works? | |
I do not. | |
You want to do this? Fine. Have a look here. Special attention to everything past 2000. You want to blame someone for a debt crisis, blame the guy who got us involved in two decade long, unfunded wars. You want to bitch about a deficit? Complain to the congress that they considered making Obama a one-term president a higher priority than the deficit and economy, even to the point of refusing tax increases and refusing to end oil subsidies in an attempt to stop Obama's so-called "Liberal agenda." ...and you want to support these people? | |
No they haven't. I mean, YOU'RE going to vote for them, right? | |
I wouldn't be rioting because I'd be too busy recovering from the shock of him doing something effective.
Okay. So why are you voting for Republicans who prioritize corporate welfare?
Here's how it works. Rather than investing any of their own money, a private equity firm gathers money from outside investors. This is important to remember. At no point does the firm or the partners in it ever take a risk with their own money. They invest other people's money. Once they have the investment capital, they buy a company and try to squeeze as much money out of it as possible by cutting costs. For most companies, their highest costs are going to be their workers. The solution to this is firing workers, sometimes en masse, and/or slashing wages, benefits, and pensions. Sometimes all of the above. Furthermore, they use the company as collateral with banks to take out loans. The payments on loan debt are deductible from company profits, so the company shows even bigger profits. Once this is done, they get the company to issue a dividend to repay the original investors. Everything else, the partnership gets to keep, which they do. Once they've wrung as much profit as they can out of the company, they sell it for much more than they bought it for and pocket 20% of the gains from the sale. Those profits are listed as capital gains and only taxed 15%. But that's not really fair because capital gains taxes are lower under the assumption that the recipient of those gains was risking their own money on a venture. But like I said before, the firm never invested or risked any of their own money and the actual investors have already been paid back. The cherry on top is that this all goes onto the backs of people like you and me. All those workers that the firm fires? You can I are paying the taxes on the unemployment benefits these people need to keep their heads above water until new work can be found. And a lot of the companies that these private equity firms sell off eventually go bankrupt under the weight of all the debt the firm protected them from and the federal government has to reimburse the pensions of the workers, which results in people like you and me seeing more of our tax money going into that when it should have been going into the commons. So that's why Mitt Romney running on his business experience is completely clownshit. He's not a businessman at all. He's a financial predator. He never took the kind of risk that someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Sam Walden did. He just squeezed companies for extra profit using other people's money, pocketed massive profits, and then threw the companies into the gutter when he was done with them. Leaving aside the fact that any decent capitalist will tell you that you can't run government like a business and vice versa because they're completely different entities, why on earth would experience as a private equity manager qualify someone for executive office? Mitt Romney claims to know how to maximize profits, but the problem is that he does it in an irresponsible way and just shifts the burden onto other people. | |
Bush DID use predator drones, quite often. Do you think Obama fucking invented them or something? I have a feeling "Drone Warrior" is the new, up-and-coming right-wing meme. It's ALWAYS projection. | |
Do some webbing around: the consensus seems to be that Obama has normalized this use and made it a standard practice in a way Bush, who had been accused of running an assassination ring, did not. | |
OK. So what? Allow me to start by saying that no, I'm not a big fan of these drones, because I'm not a big fan of war. I hate it, and I don't think we should be dicking around in Afghanistan; however, I am not stupid and understand that sometimes war is an inevitability. That said -- what's the problem? Fewer American soldiers get killed, there's little evidence that there's more collateral damage than with conventional strikes, and objectives are achieved. And if you think Mitt Romney is going to not use this technology should he become President, you're kidding yourself. Again, the GOP is attempting to claim both that Obama is killing too few and too many people, simultaneously. | |
Like government, much of what you describe is like a marbled steak. The protein needs to stay but the fat has to go. Much of what Bain and firms like it do is important work and legit, creative destruction. I'm glad I don't have to subsidize VHS rental stores to keep them afloat. I'm glad Staples shed some manpower (even though it was me), shook loose some cash and diverted this manpower and money to theoretically better use. (Though, now that better use is to outsource the work to other countries and bank accounts in the Caymans). But as you write, there are costs and exploitation that go on, along with tax payer bailouts. Another important point you make is that running a business and running a government are very different and success in the business world does not automatically translate into being able to govern. I do like the idea of a business man going into politics in that, I think he is likely to have an idea of how to take care of geese that lay the eggs so to speak. I've read that leftist George McGovern, after a career in politics opened a Hotel and was staggered by the impediments government places in the way to opening a wealth producing business. In the end, I'll vote for whoever I think will spend less. Spending is power. The more power government has, in the hands of either party, the easier it is to abuse that power. Right now, it is only the Republicans giving lip service to smaller government.
I am curious about your opinion. If you had to state a preference, what would it be: | |
Gorfias, you're wrong on almost every count. As usual. First off, this idea that republicans "at least pay lip service" is hilariously backwards. Lip-service is nice, but even if we assume that a tiny, impotent government is a good idea (it isn't), the republicans have been paying it lip service, then turning around and doing exactly the opposite. Hell, Obama has been better on private sector jobs than Bush has! Calling republicans "the party of fiscal responsibility" has gone from "misled" to "fucking lying" territory over the last 12 years, and claiming that they stand up for limited government is simply wrong on every conceivable level. Furthermore, Mitt endorses the Ryan Plan. Do I need to remind you that the Ryan plan cuts 5 Trillion in spending, then gives back 10 Trillion in tax cuts (primarily to the super-rich), and expects to make up the difference through the closing of loopholes, and then fails to specify which loopholes it's going to close? The Ryan Plan that is predicted to raise the deficit even further while slashing programs that the poor desperately need? Then you claim that the republicans have lost power. No, that's not true, they've only gotten stronger, and their plan, regardless of how much stupid bullshit they pull, will work as long as they can get people like you to buy into this rhetoric of "we are the party of small government". You know why? Because the more stupid shit they pull, the more they make the government out to be a failure (regardless of how much of it is their own damn fault), the more people think, "You know what? If the government was smaller, we'd be better off. Maybe we should vote for the party who is giving us our money back!" And the right wing propaganda machines will support that all the way, while no mainstream news organization will dare to say, "hey, wait a minute, that's a load of horseshit" for fear of being called biased. The republican policy right now amounts to "Break it, then blame others for not being able to come up for solutions", and the saddest part is, it's working, because nobody has the balls to come out and say, "Hang on, what just said there is bullshit" to the people peddling this crap! Modern "journalism" amounts to saying "X said Y, but Z said something else". Not "X said Y, but Z said something else; here are the figures to back up that Y is/is not true", just a fucking game of he-said-she-said. It's not only fucking embarrassing, it's the entire reason the republican party still exists. Also, I notice that one of the things you brought up that the fed does well is Patent and Copyright Law. That's funny. You know why? Because Patent and Copyright Law is hilariously broken as it currently stands. Lastly, I'd like to point something out. You know how broken politics seems in the USA? Funny thing about that... We don't have these kinds of problems in Europe. Maybe the issue isn't "government" and is "the people in the government in the USA". Maybe you might want to look into, I dunno, say, the people who belong to a party that seriously profits from the perpetration of the idea that politics as a whole is broken? 99% of the problems with politics in the USA come from the perpetration of faux "neoconservative" policies which have about as much to do with actual conservatism as the voting process in the DDR had to do with democracy. | |
I think I just got a stomach ache from that analogy.
No it isn't. Creative destruction is when a business goes tits up because a better one replaced it. Cars replacing horse-drawn carriages was creative destruction. What Mitt Romney did was just being a greedy motherfucker who made obscene amounts of money as the financial equivalent of a sexual predator.
So it wasn't actually better use at all.
So you admit that private equity forms are exploitative... and you're defending them anyway?
I was thinking more along the lines of, "George Bush ran on the fact that he had an MBA, and when he left office we have the biggest deficit in our country's history." So no, I don't trust any candidate that claims their business experience (and in Romney's case he's not even a real businessman because he never risked his own money) qualifies them for public office because it fucking doesn't.
And that's not going to be Romney.
Yeah, then they turn around and increase the size of the government. So the joke's on you. | |
So this is what Stockholm Syndrome looks like. Got a new job yet? ISTR your fellow Republicans saying some mighty uncharitable things about unemployed people. | |
The joke's on all of us. This is why I keep being dubious about democracy - everyone gets the government 50.1% of the voters deserve. :-P | |
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Good luck convincing people to host anything anywhere near US soil if this continues the way it has been