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The American Jobs Act OR Stimulus 2: The Stimulating
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Rigorous Scholarship
People are bad at decision-making, therefore Jim Crow?
Rigorous Scholarship
The main "ideological question" at stake is creating jobs via stimulus vs. creating jobs via tax cuts on the wealthy.
The progressive "ideological solution" is more in line with recommendation by actual economists, and actually did work when it was tried, though the scale was too small.
The conservative "ideological solution" requires belief that money given to the wealthy will translate into jobs, despite recent historical examples to the contrary.
The conservative political rhetoric ("the government can't create jobs!") is untrue on its face and doesn't accurately reflect the belief of most actual conservatives ("the government can create jobs, but not as efficiently as private investment"). So, it constitutes something even worse than ideology. I'm sure there's a fancy word for it. Fancier than "bullshit", at least.
republican: cut out the uneducated voters to have a better election
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
In context the response is a stupid sentiment though. MM is correct: if the GOP is too "out there" for American voters (and there is reasonable turn out) then it should be broadly indicated in the 2012 election.
On some level, if they are too out there then the "keep them out" turn out should be high.
This tangent is stupid, though I do oppose on principle efforts to disenfranchise voters (and many other facets of the US election system thank god we have compulsory voting here).
No more than the idea of executing them. The solution to people being dumb is to make them less dumb. In the meantime, American democracy means two sheep and a wolf voting on what's for dinner, and one of the sheep doesn't know what "mutton" means.
Goddamn, somebody send that to the president. :lol:
Fox would just say he's "elitist" for actually knowing what a Stradivarius is.
But each side is at fault for different reasons. Ignoring one side's faults and not yelling at them to improve while demonizing the other side is exactly how we got in this shit show in the first place.
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Not really, no. The only Democratic fuckup was Clinton moving towards the middle and supporting banking deregulation. But even that was a primarily Republican bill (thanks Phil Gramm!). The rest of the problems were Republican tax policy, foreign policy, regulatory policy, and Republican fed chairs. Thomas Friedman is a moron, partisans are sometimes right. "Both sides do it" is usually just lazy, lazy thinking.
Clinton also championed the just-recently ended Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Which is largely irrelevant to the economy/jobs picture which is the subject of this here thread.
As a replacement for the previous, even worse policy.
Yeah I honestly don't blame Clinton for that. The intent was noble, but they underestimated the resistance they would face, so did what they could.
Maybe the Swedish electorate would conclude that the GOP is too radical to be given power. But their opinion is irrelevant in this debate.
Rigorous Scholarship
Rigorous Scholarship
The GOP are masters of distracting the electorate from how unreasonable and reactionary they are by painting the Democrats as even more unreasonable than they are, whether it's true or not on any given issue. A voter doesn't necessarily have to find the GOP reasonable to vote for them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/pelosi-democrats-will-not-support-any-disaster-relief-offset/2011/09/22/gIQA4bWOoK_blog.html
So, republicans were playing games with the debt ceiling and now it looks like round 2: You only get disaster relief if you cut jobs.
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
I just really can't believe Cantor's going to push for this. You know I have to ask, it seems like increasingly we're getting a Republican party that is isolated from the national electorate yet still able to wield a disproportionate amount of power. If we assume trends continue and they as a party continue to believe their failures are all for being not conservative enough, and that Democrats are inherently illegitimate rulers, how long until the vitriol reached the levels where politicians start encouraging violence George Wallace style?
I mean as we can see with the Jobs act, they are against everything that would stimulate the economy and help them economically. That's just going to make them poorer, and more angry, and then lead them to do things that make them poorer and angrier and vote in angrier and angrier conservatives. At what point does it boil over into violence in the streets or where else would it go? I mean I'm sure we've got a lot of real Republican statesmen but there are some congressman I wouldn't put it past to try and become some kind of mob-like figurehead if they thought they and their party were going to lose all effective power long term. (Like Bachmann, possibly Allen West and probably a lot of Tea Party freshman.)
But Paladin, such a program would have a liberal bias, because it will hold Republicans accountable for the things they've said and done!
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That's the point. It feels like we're in a dangerous cycle because while as a percentage the hardcore conservative types like the Tea Party make up a small percentage of our total population, in sheer numbers they're still a sizable chunk of people. What happens if that chunk one day as a whole wakes up and says "America has failed us! Those dirty illegals and gays are out there turnin' my children into commie-fags and I can't do anything about it?! Time for a second amendment solution!"
Because if these people are being bred and raised to be cut off from objective sources of information, to tune out debate, to tune out rational arguments and instead listen to charged (possibly religiously inspired) rhetoric which compels their loyalty to a cause that claims to have their best interests at heart while actively seeking to undermine them and instead of blaming the people actually responsible they blame their political opposition.
Because of social and political history these people define their entire world around a set of harsh social norms and any attempt to change those they see as a direct assault on their ability to be happy as people. (Look at how gays are blamed for natural disasters and other things, it's like they can't accept that these people are not the cause for all of their problems.) So as they see what little power they had left to enforce these horrible policies erode away and their numbers dwindle I feel like that's just going to drive a wedge so hard it will push these people off of a cliff. All you need is the right opportunistic demagogue and I could see these people forming some kind of violent opposition. That worries me.
And then the Democrats are like, "I don't know... What if we compromised and only sucked out half the lifeblood of our society?" And even that makes the Space Parasites angrily question the Democrats' commitment to Sparkle Motion. And then the public looks at both parties and then votes for whichever candidate has the sleekest proboscis.
Now I understand how conservatives must of felt in the 60s when they saw all the hippies. The Tea Party are the Hippies of our time, but at least they had an excuse: LSD is one hell of a drug. These people are just fucking loony tunes.
The analogy breaks down when you consider the military.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!