turbodan wrote:
I'll believe it when I see it. The mental gymnastics to rationalize these decisions is always nothing short of amazing. And if all else fails, at least you're getting to vote against those stupid, bigoted, corrupt repulicans right?
You can be damn sure I won't vote for Newt.
You talk about Congress and Wall St. like these are strictly republican controlled entities.
Actually, I did not. You READ it that way. If you go back to the last paragraph of my longer post, you'll see a very brief list of issues with democrats, most of which are reflected in both parties. You probably skipped that because it doesn't fit your preconceived notion of my thinking. The lens through which you look is heavily smeared, but that doesn't mean I have to sit here and let you put words in my mouth.
I don't think I need to explain that to you, but in case you've missed it, Obama was elected in 2009 along with a supermajority in both houses of Congress. Although the Dems took a historic whipping in the 2010 midterms, surely attributable to sucessful fearmongering and racism on the part of Republicans, the Democrats retained the Senate and a fair number of seats in the House. Rupublicans only control one of the three branches of the government. Harry Reid still runs the Senate. If you're upset with Congress and anything they've done (or haven't done) in the last three years, Obama and the Democrats own it 100%.
As of 2010, this is patently untrue. We don't need to rehash it, but the stonewalling by the republican-controlled house made everything much worse. Obamacare was gutted out as the left attempted to include the right. The debt ceiling debacle created huge economic instability, and the cuts that got passed were SMALLER than what was offered by the left. There is no compromise in the approach from one side. Sound familiar?
If anybody had any bright fucking ideas to improve the country, the first two years of Obama's term were an ideal time to implement them. The only debate was between the left and the far left, and they still only managed to squeak through one of the biggest legistlative turds in history. Of course I'm referring the the massive expansion of government and encroachment on civil liberties and constitutional rights known as Obamacare. Thats the best he could do. How do you feel about that bill? I'd love to hear your assessment.
I've already given a partial assessment. If you think that bill is the big turd, though, you obviously aren't aware of the PATRIOT act, FISA wiretapping bill, and the latest defense budget that allows military detainment of citizens without due process. THOSE are real threats to civil liberties.
Obamacare sucks in its final form, but one basic premise of it makes perfect, logical sense: there was a huge popular demand for a provision that would prevent insurers from refusing to cover pre-existing conditions. If such a provision is to exist, everyone must have insurance. There is no economic way around that. Otherwise, you have people signing up for insurance while they're in the ambulance. You can decide that you don't want that provision, or you can decide to enforce participation. That's up to you as a voter, but it has to be all-or-nothing or else the numbers don't work.
As far as taxes go, neither party will give us the sorts of sweeping reforms that we need. But Obama did the right thing by not letting the Bush cuts expire in the middle of a recession. Republicans are doing the wrong thing by not letting them expire now. Harp on the stimulus spending all you want, but unemployment has been on a steady decline and while slow, the recovery is moving along steadily. The reason it is slow has absolutely nothing to do with Obama's policies; it has to do with the credit crunch in China and the instability in the Eurozone. By the way, the Eurozone should be a sign that rapid, large-scale spending cuts in a bad economy make things worse, not better.
Stupid people, though, can't see our economy as part of a larger global system and can't process that any changes take time to work. Obama failed, in their eyes, because unemployment didn't magically disappear the day he took office. Given the economic situation when he came in, he actually did pretty well. We haven't double-dipped, and if we do it will be due to major spending cuts (read up on 1937 to see how that works). Manufacturing has increased. Home prices are still very low and worker mobility is still low, but a huge part of that is that the banks are refusing to approve short sales, so people who are upside down are literally trapped and cannot move to where a job might be (the upper midwest is booming right now--lots of jobs in ND, Iowa, etc.).
But here we are, talking fiscal policy and rational approaches to problems like insurance and taxation. The point of the thread was that for the religiously-motivated voters, these things don't matter. They are told that gays want to get married and force everyone to be gay, and they vote for people who will keep them in the poorhouse. How's this for hypocrisy; Gingrich said he's "not running for President to represent Goldman Sachs," while one of his platform points is cutting the capital gains tax rate to zero. Hmm, I'll bet an investment bank won't be aided at all by that, but Average Joe Racist in North Carolina will certainly take home a lot more money from his investments. Oh, wait, Average Joe Racist has no investments. He's broke. But he'll vote for Gingrich anyway, because Gingrich called Obama the "Food Stamp President" and that resonated with his Average Racist Ass.
In case you're wondering, 1 in 7 Americans is on food stamps right now. 60% of food stamp recipients are children or elderly. Most recipients of food stamps DO have jobs. A higher percentage of whites are on food stamps than blacks. But that's all inconvenient when you're trying to paint the poor as those darker-skinned, lazy people who won't help themselves.
-tammer
