Fiting the Right, Again. An AOL News story, "US Default on Debt Could Be Disastrous Choice for Economy", brought out a lot of the Radical Right propagandists who swarm AOL comments areas, tho not the worst of the lot. The issue was apparently a little too technical for some. But there was a lot of drivel posted there anyway, so I spent several hours trying to reach casual readers with the truth. I present below 105 substantive comments (not just those that told people to stop repeating posts, and such), comprising about 5,680 words on a wide range of political and economic topics. I provide links to websites that other Liberals may find useful in bolstering their own argumentation against the Radical Right.

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Put replies to a comment AT that comment. And cut the crap about the rich being our generous benefactors. They are useless PARASITES.
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Stop talking nonsense. Credit is an integral part of all major economies, and always has been. The way to cut debt is to increase revenues, and the way to do that is SOAK THE USELESS, PARASITIC RICH.
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The flat tax is REGRESSIVE and benefits ONLY the rich.
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Kindly cut the anti-Moslem crap. You CANNOT restrict the relgious rights of Moslems -- or Jews, Christians, atheists, etc. -- thanks to the First Amendment. Nor can you restrict the freedom of association, of citizens to form unions. There is an easier solution to the problem of exported jobs: forbid corporations that export jobs from doing business of any kind in the United States.
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Obama wanted to raise taxes on the rich, but Republicans won't permit that. So exactly WHO is putting debt onto your children's and grandchildren's backs?
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People in many of the countries we send a PITTANCE of foreign aid are ACTUALLY starving, and you want them to die. Foreign aid is much less than 1% of our budget. The issue is not that we can't afford to do everything we need, as a civilization, to do. It is that the rich won't let us tax them. Tell the rich they can pay their taxes or face a new American Revolution, with a Rei[g]n of Terror against the rich like France's Revolution.
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Why should there be any cap on income subject to Social Security tax? Most people pay SS on every dollar they make. Everyone should. As for who gets SS and Medicare, only people who need it should get it. The rich don't need SS nor Medicare, but they curiously don't mind getting Government "welfare" they don't need. End the cap and means-test Social Security and Medicare, and SS will finally be able to pay people an amount they can live on without desperate measures.
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Some people are still pushing the old "trickle down" b.s. NO, the rich do NOT provide the jobs. CORPORATIONS provide the bulk of jobs, and small businesses, none of which makes anyone rich. Corporations collect SMALL amounts from many, many people. That is how they fund their operations. They do not collect HUGE amounts from tiny numbers of people. The rich are USELESS, and fully dispensable.
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The Republican Party appeals only to a minority, but midterm elections draw only a minority of voters. Presidential elections bring out the majority. Compulsory voting would bring out almost everybody, and then we'd know what the people really want.
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Kindly stop talking nonsense. NO responsible person -- on Earth -- wants the U.S. to default.
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Alas, yes, the Government does need to borrow money to do some things. It's just like the individual needing to borrow for manjor purchases. Almost NOBODY can afford to buy a house for cash.
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That was in response to a Bush Administration that cut taxes on the rich and ran two wars on credit, doubling the national debt. He was right. And he is right now in believing we must raise taxes on the rich. But the rich refuse to have their taxes paid, and have sold fools a bill of voodoo-economics, "trickle-down" b.s. to 'justify' their obscene wealth and parasitic uselessness.
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The U.S. Government has not in any way benefited from the export of jobs. Obama tried to close the loophole that permitted export of jobs, but Republicans BLOCKED that -- but curiously are not held responsible for the continued export of jobs that they WANT and expedite.
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Make up your mind: do you want to destroy Social Security and Medicare or preserve it? Oil from the ground is a technology of the past that can be done away with, just as we did away with oil from whales. The way to a decent future is by converting to renewable energy, which can power EVERYTHING, and by raising taxes on the useless rich. Any budget has two elements: income and outgo. Cutting spending is NOT necessary is you increase revenues, by raising taxes on the useless rich. We don't have to force the poor and middle class to sacrifice. The rich can pay HUGELY higher taxes without sacrificing at all.
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The President's overall approval rating in the REAL world, not your fevered Radical Right imagination, is 47%. The President does NOT run the country, only the Executive Branch of the Government, which is much, much smaller than the country. Most people who read comments on AOL with any regularity know that there is a coterie of a few dozen Radical Rightists who post HUNDREDS of very short, anti-Obama comments on stories selected by that coterie for propagandistic swarming. But they are still only a few dozen Radical Rightists, and do NOT speak for the Nation.
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You have no better manners than sense. The rich make essentially NO jobs. The middle class create small business, which employs a very large portion of the population, and corporations, which raise small amounts of money from very large numbers of people, create the rest. You know nothing about economics if you think the rich make the jobs. They do not. That is "trickle-down" propaganda.
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No, the answer is not to starve the poor, impoverish the middle class, and ravage the economy thru unwise and unnecessary cuts, but to increase revenues by raising taxes on the rich back to the levels of 1985.
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Individuals and the Federal Government cannot be compared. You cannot, for instance, raise your income any time you want simply by raising taxes on the rich. Nor can you print money.
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Yes, by all means let us sta[r]ve the children of welfare moms to death! Welfare was reformed under Clinton. Deal with it.
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Not funny. Criminals NEVER report their income from illegal activities, so will NEVER pay their fair share. And the Fair Tax is no such thing.
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You're talking irresponsible, antisocial nonsense. NOTHING in Obama's program is Socialist. If you don't understand something, don't talk about it.
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That's easy to say if you have lots of money. But the free traders have impoverished so many Americans that they can't afford U.S.-made goods. They'd have to buy American if we sealed our borders against unfair competition, but the free traders keep pretending that free trade makes us all richer, whereas it actually makes all but the rich poorer.
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As Kevin points out, Social Security is not a bank account against which we draw but an ENTITLEMENT to receive benefits. That's that evil word that Republicans and Tea Partiers want you to be indignant about, as tho being entitled to something is bad.
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That some conspiracies may not be real does not mean that there are NO conspiracies. Free trade is a conspiracy openly conducted in international agreements. A tax code that favors the rich and destroys the middle class is a conspiracy of legislators who have somehow persuaded economically "innocent" (naive, ignorant) people that trickle-down WORKS! It does not. Calling someone names does not in any way validate your arguments.
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Of COURSE it's a revenue problem. Have you no comprehension of the way a budget works? Income vs. outgo. Too little income can be balanced by EITHER cutting outgo or increasing income. The Radical Right wants people to think that we cannot possibly increase income because it is impossible to raise taxes on the rich. No, it's really not.
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The only class warfare and redistribution that has been going on in this country for a generation is warfare AGAINST the middle and lower classes BY the rich, and redistribution of wealth UP from the poor and middle class to the rich. When people in general finally get that thru their heads, there will be hell to pay. Not only will taxes on the rich DOUBLE or TRIPLE, but a lot of rich people will consider themselves very lucky if they are not dealt with as the French Revolution dealt with France's evil rich.
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The United States is NOT a corporation, and the bulk of shares in the economy are owned NOT by the rich but by pension funds, mutual funds, etc. Yes, the rich would LOVE to have thousands of times as many votes for public office as the poor, but we're not going to let your implied policy ever be implemented. Let's try the "fair tax" scheme, except make it a "fair income" approach, in which everybody is paid the same, with no more variation than in lifespan. No one lives thousands of years, so why should they make thousands of times as much as other people? No one is thousands of times smarter than the average person, or thousands of times healthier, taller, etc., etc., etc. ONLY in wealth do we have these insane discrepancies. There is absolutely no way in logic to justify it, esp. since many of the activities that make a few people obscenely rich have NO social utility. Does a stockbroker churning accounts provide any value to society? Does a multimillionaire athlete really provide any value to society? NO! If you play a child's game, shouldn't you make what a child makes? Equal pay for equal people! That is not one whit more bizarre a concept than allowing some people to make tens of thousands of times as much money as others.
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You contradict yourself, as you must when you talk economic nonsense. There are two sides to a budget equation, income and outflow. Alter one beyond the other, and there is an imbalance. The Republicans keep reducing taxes on the rich, so of course we always have ever less money to spend. Now Ryan wants to lower taxes on the rich again, and pretends that that will somehow make it easier to pay for things!
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That is an astoundingly dishonest representation of the debt situation. Regan TRIPLED the national debt, and Bush I added another third, so the Reagan-Bush years QUADRUPLED the national debt. Bush II DOUBLED that. Obama has added at most $3T to what was already a national debt of well over $10T. (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm) So you just LIED, baldfaced, brazenly LIED about the national debt. Do you think that people can't find the Treasury website to SEE that you lied?
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Stop the lies. The poor DO pay taxes, just not income taxes. They pay excise taxes, Federal utility taxes on telephone service, etc. They pay user fees of various sorts, and sales taxes to states and localities, property taxes directly or thru their rent, and on, and on, and on. The Fair Tax is a con of the foolish by the rich, who want to keep ever more of "their" money and push ever more of the costs of Government off on the poor and middle class. And NOBODY needs to read an entire book about that scam. Summaries in places like Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_tax) make plain that it is an intended scam upon the stupid.
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I know it is a common "understanding" of the Radical Right that people in general are conning the system, but that's hogwash. If you think the poor live so well, why don't you just give away your "dolce vita" and live on what the Government provides?
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DRIVEL. It is not things tacked onto the "defense" (war) bills in the Bush years that DOUBLED the national debt, but the wars and other expenses of the Bush budgets that he REFUSED to pay for with taxes on the rich.
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No, Obama wants to RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH, which would fix the budget problem very, very handily, and pay DOWN the national debt. The Republicans want us to think it is IMPOSSIBLE to raise taxes on the rich. And why, exactly, would that be?
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So you'd be fine if the economy collapsed entirely [because we don't raise the debt ceiling], and your job was one of the millions and millions lost, and you retirement account lost 70% of its value, eh?
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Nonsense. Pure, simpleminded, Radical Right nonsense. We don't need Government to do anything. The rich will take care of us! The free market will take care of us all, and build the bridges, repair the roads, pay the soldiers, buy the fighter jets and aircraft carriers, and do everything else the Government does.
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Why do you respond to my point about Republicans by talking about "the far left"? Are you saying that the Republicans are "far right"? Midterm elections do NOT represents majority opinion, because only a minority votes. If you really want to know how people feel, join with me in demanding compulsory voting, so EVERYBODY votes.
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"A plague on both your houses" answers nothing. Pls provide useful suggestions.
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"Blame the messenger" -- very interesting 'thinking'. We can RAISE revenue by RAISING taxes on the rich. We do NOT have to cut necessary spending. We do not have to make the poor and middle class "sacrifice", at all. The rich would sacrifice NOTHING -- except perhaps their 14th house, 20th car, 2d yacht, 40th Armani suit or 1,400th pair of shoes -- if we DOUBLED taxes on them, even TRIPLED their tax.
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Nonsense. You show no understanding of what money does, nor how it works. Of COURSE it's just paper and ink (or round bits of metal). But gold is only pretty yellow metal. IT has no intrinsic value except for what it can be used for (in electronics or jewelry, for instance). And what would take the place of Congress and the President? Stop talking resentment-derived foolishness.
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No, we should be thinking at least equally of not taking in less than we need to spend, so tax increases on the RICH must be in the mix. We don't need to starve the poor and elderly, or make it impossible for the middle class and poor to send their kids to college. All we have to do is TAX THE RICH.
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So we don't need lawyers to write laws? Quite so, if we hire lawyers we can trust to write the laws to conform to what the legislatures intend. But you say we can't trust lawyers. Doesn't that mean we can't trust laws? Pls spare us anarchist drivel.
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"Nationalization" is a generic term for what has happened in a great many places. Railroads and subways failed? Localities and states took them over, because as a society we decided we needed transportation. There are state-owned bus lines, electric companies, etc., that work just fine.
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Pls provide a URL to a reputable source that states how much other countries owe us, for what reason, so we might evaluate whether pressing them on those debts would make any significant impact on our current budgetary problems.
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Just tax the rich and we'll be rolling in dough.
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Our freedoms are largely intact. It is our economy and socioeconomic justice, such as equitable distribution of wealth, that are in tatters.
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Drivel. How many illegals do you imagine are receiving U.S. Government benefits? I've got news for you: the bulk of illegals HIDE from the Government; they do not stand in line at Government offices waiting to apply for benefits. They don't even call the police when they're robbed. You're talking nonsense when you exaggerate the toll of illegals on Government expenditures. As for starving the children of welfare mothers, do you really want children to die? I don't. Welfare was already reformed under Clinton, so I suspect you absolutely misstate the law as to welfare benefits.
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You grossly overstate the expense of U.S. participation in various wars and police actions. Do you REALLY think that we will be safe if the whole remainder of this planet descends into violence? Isolationism in the Thirties did not stop the rise of Nazism and Japanese militarism. But you don't learn from history. Sensible people do not ignore the dangers that chaos outside our borders can present to US.
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What exactly do you mean by programs that haven't worked? Do you mean social welfare programs that kept millions of people from dying of starvation -- or rising in armed revolution? How about Pell Grants, which Republicans want to cut, so poor and middle class kids will not be able to go to college? You see how things are; you don't see how much worse they would be if we hadn't spent money on the programs you deplore.
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Pls cite a URL to reputable media reports about your assertions about bailouts of union pension funds. How much money do you think our elections cost? The 2008 Presidential and Congressional election cost $5.3 BILLION (http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/10/23/cost-of-2008-election-cycle-53-billion/). $27.4 millionn doesn't seem like very much now, does it?
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Putting things into quotation marks does not make them quotes. You need to CITE to reputable sources for all your assertions -- the great preponderance of which are totally b.s. fabrications by the Radical Right.
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The schools are doing very well, by and large. The mass failure of American education is a Radical Right LIE. Watch "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" and see how well our kids are doing. The problems the U.S. has to overcome that other countries we are compared to do not include a very large number of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, and a system that wants to believe that everyone is college material, so must receive academic education, whereas many other countries shunt the less gift into vocational programs -- which we could perfectly well do, and benefit from.
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U.S. medical and nursing education are top-notch. There just aren't enuf people entering nursing schools here to supply the demand. But yes, we need to END FREE TRADE and only selectively allow in goods and services that actually serve our national interests. We must stop worshipping at the Radical Right's altar to free trade. It is not a religion; it is a political program based on false premises and sold to the people by lies.
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I'm afraid your approach to the world is more than a little simplistic. What have our bases in Europe accomplished? They've kept Europe from engaging in another fratricidal general war for 66 years. Do you really think that is worht nothing? The last two general European wars drew us in, and killed over half a million Americans. As for the current wars, we can certainly withdraw from Iraq, which Obama pledged to do but has refused to live up to. But we must be on the side of democracy in the Arab world.
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Kindly tell us what can be cut without hurting vulnerable people.
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I don't recall any expenditure of billions to secure any countries borders, except to the extent we are trying to keep the Taliban from crossing back into Afghanistan from Pakistan. Do you FAVOR a return of the Taliban to control of Afghanistan, and a return of training camps for Al-Qaeda to Afghanistan? I don't.
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We don't need to fill the Constitution with unnecessary amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment already says that everyone must have equal protection of the laws. And the wording of the amendment you propose is moronic, because it would ban Congress from setting Congressional pay unless it sets everybody's pay!
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The real question to ask is why don't we have Government funding of Congressional elections, as would REMOVE money from the equation and let members of both houses tend to the people's business without having to raise thousands of dollars of campaign contributions every day. As for the two-party system, no, it plainly does not work, but the two parties labor mightily to persuade people that there is no alterantive, and people buy the lie that a vote for a third party is a vote wasted.
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The issue was NOT helping people buy a house. It was in not BANNING the bait-and-switch practice of "adjustable rate mortgages". The people who bought these houses on the original terms for the most part COULD afford their original mortgage. It was only when the con artists in banking CHANGED the terms and raised the payments that the poorer people could not cover the HIGHER costs. Broad home ownership has many societal values, and is something that social policy should encourage.
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You are very confused. YOU try living on food stamps, and the low income needed to qualify for food stamps, you nasty, petty-jealous person. NO, not everybody has to sacrifice. The rich aren't sacrificing at all, and they WOULDN'T sacrifice if we TRIPLED their taxes.
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No, what you propose is not common sense, but nonsense. Foreign aid is much less than 1% of our budget, and ending it would cause some people to DIE of starvation. The world NEEDS police, or it will descend into very widespread violence that might DESTROY us. Illegal immigration should end, of course, but it has already dropped starkly because of the economy. And you propose to cut Government workers' "perks"? Like what? Health insurance? vacation days? sick days? You want Government workers to live miserable lives, and expect them to work hard for you? Are you out of your mind?
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You know nothing about economics, and everything you say rises from a resentment of other people. Sales taxes are REGRESSIVE. They invariably hurt the poor and middle class more than the rich. The "mundane chores" of congressional staffers include helping people get the veterans benefits, solve immigration problems, get Pell grants and apply for other Federal programs, read those 1,000-page bills, read email and letters from constituents, answer fone calls from constituents (700,000 per Congressional district, MILLIONS per Senator in big states). As for helping with disasters, you show again your evil selfishness. I hope someday soon YOU are the victim of a disaster, and NOBODY helps you in any way. If you are trapped under a fallen tree, get out by yourself; if you are swept away in a flood, drown!
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You're talking trivial drivel (drivia?). Do you REALLY think it would be in our interest to have another Korean War, which killed 37,000 Americans? As for the illegal alien problem, it is grotesquely overstated, and the violence is easily solved by punishing U.S. drug USERS, up to and including by DEATH if they refuse to stop using the drugs that are ravaging Mexico. 28,000 Mexicans have died because of U.S. drug users, so which country should be resenting which?
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$181 billion of the "bailout" has already been repaid. Yes, the TARP was redirected away from what it was supposed to have done, and perhaps Paulson and Bush need to be brought up on charges, but a lot of economists think it nonetheless achieved most of what it was designed to do.
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Stop exaggerating the trivial, nearly infinitesimal amount we give in foreign aid, or that a tiny fraction of illegal aliens defraud the system of. There is absolutely no need to be meanspirited toward Americans in need. Just tax the rich at pre-1986 rates and we will have enuf money to do everything we should be doing AND pay OFF the national debt.
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Why do you not acknowledge that this is an ARTIFICIAL crisis due only to our refusal to tax the RICH at rates they could easily afford?
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Please do not attempt to condescend to me. I am assuredly your VAST superior, intellectually and in every other significant way, for purposes of discussions of public policy. Nationalize: "to put (an industry, resources, etc) under state control or ownership" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nationalize). State: "the body politic as organized for civil rule and government" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/state). Socialism: "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/socialism). Many states and localities own various things, as I said, like bus lines and subway systems. They took them over NONdogmatically, as a matter of PRACTICALITY, not some grand scheme to change the fundamental nature of society. When you know nothing, say nothing. And do not call your superiors names.
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Trivia, meanspirited and worthless. So the President should lose hours and hours trying to get to the places he needs to go on the people's business, eh? Shut up. I want the President working, not waiting in airline terminals for delayed commercial flites. Stop begrudging members of Congress a decent salary. YOU couldn't do their job, and they work for hundreds of thousands of people. They deserve to be paid well.
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Bankruptcy is a GOVERNMENT BENEFIT. The bankruptcy of an individual or corporation does not destroy the world financial system, nor throw millions of people out of work. The taxpayers who can get us out of this mess are the RICH. Just raise taxes on the rich and the problem will be solved.
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Exactly how large a portion of our budget do you think goes to foreign aid? 20%, 40%? Try less than 1%. Now try making some sense.
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warren, the United States is not a military empire. We have a number of alliances of which we are a crucial member. We have NO colonies except tiny insular territories all of which should be brought into the Union as states or parts of existing states. We are involved in two wars and one police action at present. One war can be exited safely right now: Iraq. The Libyan police action, shared by our ALLIES in NATO, is temporary.
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I guess you never heard of a little thing called the BP oil spill. We did NOT spend billions on Brazil; a Government-directed bank that places PRIVATE moneys LENT money to Petrobras, which it will have to pay back WITH INTEREST. Green energy is the way to go. Stop looking backward. Look to the future.
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You couldn't do Obama's job for three days without collapsing in exhaustion.
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If you don't know how to quote, don't EVER quote. As for your unsupported and absolutely wrong assertions of "unequaled economic growth and revenues" Bush DOUBLED the national debt, and the "unequaled economic growth" was ALL in "bubbles" -- that burst.
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So there should be no central bank, eh? Should there be no banks at all? That makes about as much sense as getting rid of the Fed.
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The Federal Reserve did NOT require a Constitutional amendment, and there were exactly two Constitutional amendments proposed during Wilson's tenure: the 18th (Prohibition) and 19th (women's suffrage). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution)
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Nonsense [outlaw political parties], and unconstitutional infringement of the right of free association. We have nonpartisan local elections, and have absolutely no idea what anybody stands for in most elections.
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Your history is very selective. Remember a little place called EUROPE, which used to have general wars at least once a generation? Now Europe hasn't had a general war in 66 years. Remember Latin America, which used to have almost nothing but dictatorships? Now it has almost nothing but democracies. And U.S. intervention is what brought about those changes.
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You can't have a small government when you have a huge population, huge territory, and huge corporations.
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Let me explain something you need to know: NOBODY can see into the future. And NO President would let gas prices get that high. To the extent that gas prices do rise to oppressive levels, people start thinking SERIOUSLY about alternative fuels, and migrate to use of alternative fuels, which brings DOWN the cost of gas by forces of price competition.
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I have a better idea [than instituting the "Fair Tax"]: make advocating the REGRESSIVE "Fair Tax" punishable by death.
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You're talking complete nonsense. Of COURSE there's an easy solution: tax the rich at pre-1986 rates, and EXECUTE tax evaders.
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Did it ever occur to you that the people are disgusted with the way the Republicans are preventing the Nation from doing anything to solve its problems?
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Where do people get these insanely naive ideas? Commodities markets, and esp. futures markets, are necessary, but need to be much better regulated. What we CAN outlaw is the sale of futures contracts. If you decide you don't want to take delivery of a commodity, cancel the contract and let the provider of the commodity draw up a contract with another buyer. No one should make money just for holding a contract. There is NO public benefit to that. As to the Fed, we need a central bank. That is not dispensable.
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Pls provide an alternative to active U.S. engagement to prevent criminality and violence from consuming the world.
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You just MADE THAT UP! [Illegal aliens receive $338.3 billion a year.] There is NO such toll of illegal aliens, and you cannot provide a URL to ANY reputable news organization to back up that FABRICATED statistic.
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Fair-minded readers can see the insane $338.3B claim EXPLODED at http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/cost-of-illegal-immigrants/.
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The Government is so irresponsible because Republicans won't let us tax the rich. It's like your bank refusing to let you get a better-paying job.
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No, Republicans are unrealistic and must be stopped. You can't keep cutting taxes and expecting revenues to RISE. It doesn't work that way. You cut taxes, you cut revenues.
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[Re shutting the government down:] Who cares if we have 27% unemployment and hordes of desperate people in the streets ready for blood?
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Reagan INSTITUTED the tax code we have today, with the "Tax Reform Act of 1986"! What are you talking about? The only fair tax is a steeply progressive income tax that not only raises revenue but also reduces the disparities in wealth between rich and poor. That's not what you mean tho, is it? You HATE fairness, and want the rich to live a thousand times better than the poor. Why? I'll bet you're not yourself rich, so why do you spew their propaganda?
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No, the solution is to RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH. Government is NOT hugely too big. The only cuts to government programs should be welfare for the RICH, including rich corporations that pay no tax, and interference in education, a state responsibility.
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What decent people want is for taxes to be an equal BURDEN on the rich as on the rest of us. The poor and middle class are told they must sacrifice, but the rich are NEVER t sacrifice. If you don't understand that, you need to stop pretending yourself rich and realize that you could be RUINED in a single day, by an accident, a fire, a crime, but the rich could not.
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And so, if Communist China goes to war against us, and we cannot fite that war because we don't have the money, you would just be in favor of Communist China taking over the United States and leaving your life to the tender mercies of the Butchers of Beijing, eh? No debt limit can be hard and fast, without reference to inflation or national emergency.
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Studies show that lotteries are an effective tax on the poor. Let us instead tax the RICH what they used to pay without suffering, pre-1986.
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No on both counts. There were only two Constitutional amendments initiated during Wilson's Presidency, and he had nothing to do with them: Prohibition and women's suffrage. The creation of the Federal Reserve was by ordinary legislation.
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North America is not a political entity, and not a customs union, nor monetary union. We could of course bring Canada and Mexico into the Union as a number of states, but that would require no change in the name of the national currency.
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Your plan to make life miserable for Federal employees would save perhaps 1% of the budget, and I don't want Federal employees ANGRY at us, do you? You have no solutions, just resentments.
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What interesting fiction you write. No, not that interesting after all. We can imagine why a Communist Chinese general would want to attack the United States (and the Pentagon has known about their animus for many years, and has contingency plans for war against China), but the politicians in China's government do NOT want the U.S. to collapse, in large part because they have a lot invested here. We can get out of debt just by raising taxes on the rich. When he thought of running for President years back, Donald Trump said the rich are now SO rich that a ONE-YEAR surcharge that they could easily afford could pay OFF the national debt at the time. Now it might take two or three years, but we could do it easily, without any real "sacrifice" by the rich.
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We don't have to continue on that track, tho. We need merely raise taxes on the RICH. It CAN be done. Only delusional thinking says we can't.
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http://able2know.org/topic/162060-1 gives some information. It's very hard to find out what, if anything, then happened to that attempt to end tax provisions that encouraged the export of jobs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce OPPOSED closing those loopholes. Nice bunch of traitors, eh?
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Congressional pay and perks are TRIVIA. Maybe YOU don't think the people who work for you need to be of high quality, and well compensated, but I do.
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You plainly do not understand how taxation works. Income taxes are deducted EVERY PAY PERIOD for people on a payroll, and paid QUARTERLY by self-employed individuals, and perhaps by corporations as well. So there would be an IMMEDIATE boost to revenues at the effective date of the legislation.
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NO, small business owners are NOT rich. Almost NO small business gives its owner $250,000 or more in profit. You have bought the lie. "In 2008, the average nonfarm sole proprietorship had revenues of only $58,256 and net income of only $11,696." (http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/11/how-much-money-do-small-business-owners-make.html) That's why they are called "small" businesses. Larger 'small businesses' incorporate, and pay taxes at corporate rates, not personal rates.
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And what exactly do you think the Government spends FOR? For the people, for the Nation, not for the people in charge. They aren't getting $3.7 trillion a year. Grow up.
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So you favor ending U.S. aid to Israel? Good. But what about pro-democracy movements in Arab countries? Should we just let them be crushed by brutal dictators? France didn't let the British do that to us, so we shouldn't let Qaddafi, Assad, and others do that to their own people either.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,450 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:05 PM

 
Don't Trust Them. I get annoying offers of 'pre-approved' credit cards and personal loans (which of course are not really pre-approved at all, in most cases; you have to meet qualifications in an application to be submitted later), and there is advice as to how to get your address removed from their lists. As one offer I got from Citifinancial puts it:

You can choose to stop receiving "prescreened" offers of credit from this and other companies by calling toll-free (888) 567-8688. See PRESCREEN & OPT-OUT NOTICE on other side. * * * [which reads]

This "prescreened" offer of credit is based on information in your credit report indicating that you meet certain criteria. This offer is not guaranteed if you do not meet our criteria. If you do not want to receive prescreen offers of credit from this and other companies, you can call 1-888-567-8688 or write to the following consumer reporting agencies: Experian Inc., P.O. Box 919, Allen, TX 75013, TransUnion, TransUnion Name Removal Option, P.O. Box 505, Woodlyn, PA 19094, Equifax, P.O. Box 740123, Atlanta, GA 30374-0123.

I finally got around, tonite, to calling that number.
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The first part of the fully automated, voice-recognition process is unobjectionable, entering your name and address, in reverse order starting with zip code, then proceeding backward to street address, last name, and first name. But then they demand your Social Security number, which I will NOT give them. After demanding that info several times, when I stayed mute, the program skipped to the next objectionable item, my date of birth. I am not giving them that information either. How does that have anything to do with removal from a mailing list? I am not going to give the banking industry my Social Security number or date of birth just to have my address removed from junk-mail lists, and you shouldn't either. Surely a mass-mailer needs only name and address, NOTHING more. I guess I need to write to the President, my Senators, Congressman, or Federal Trade Commission or banking authorities — or SOMEBODY in Government — to ask them to force the credit industry to stop demanding this information that they have no right to.
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Homemade Urinal, Cheap but Effective. It is a staple of standup and sitcom humor that men miss the toilet, pee on the toilet seat, etc., causing friction with the female members of their household. I realized only this past week that the conflicts over men's wet messiness are absolutely necessary.
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If you do a Google search on "home urinal", you will see, high in the results, a page from uncrate.com that starts:

We're men... we're made to pee standing up. Install a home urinal and never again lift a toilet seat (or remember to put it back down, if you have a woman). We did some digging and found several Kohler fixtures, including the Freshman ($240), Dexter ($130), Darfield ($125) and, our favorite, the Bardon Touchless ($890) with motion sensor.

That's great if you have (a) money to burn and (b) a place to put such a porcelain fixture that would not offend any women in your household. Most people have neither. Every gay man, of course, should delite in installing a porcelain urinal in a bathroom or half-bathroom.
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But there's another solution that I only recently realized.
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I have had three knee surgeries due to failure of the patella tendon of both legs, in separate incidents, the second failure of which undid the first surgery. While in the hospital, I encountered the little plastic version of the urinal, a one-liter receptacle shaped to enable a man to pee into it lying down (as in a hospital bed) or standing up. I took three of them home from my hospitalizations (and wonder what happens to those that people do not take home; are they thrown away in the insane, anti-environmentalist profligacy that the medical industry engages in?), and use them at nite, because I cannot risk trying to walk to the bathroom when I wake up, needing to pee, in the wee hours, lest, while groggy, I fail fully to straighten the leg that doesn't work quite right — thanks to the vile healthcare system of the United States, which prevented me from getting surgery after my first accident until more than a year had passed, during which time some tissues had atrophied, and muscles shortened. I might fall, and cause serious new damage to one or both knees. So I use a urinal overnite, and dump it the next day.
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This is a modern-day version of the chamberpot, which was used for many centuries in 'loo' of indoor plumbing.
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What I hadn't put together until this past week, however (tho I've been using a plastic urinal at home for about 7 years), is that men can use a plastic urinal in the bathroom to pee neatly, without spatters, and then empty the urine into the toilet neatly, in a two-stage minor exercise that could eliminate a lot of interpersonal irritation and cleanup. A third step is rinsing the urinal and closing the cap to eliminate all possibility of offensive odors. Storing the urinal between pees in an unobtrusive spot in the bathroom would make its use essentially invisible to others.
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One doesn't even need a fancy, industrial-design "urinal" as such (which could cost about $5 each from a medical-supply store, per bathroom). An empty (washed-out) one-quart mayonnaise jar, glass or (much better) litewate plastic (as would not shatter if dropped onto a hard bathroom floor), with screw-on lid to guard against odors between uses, would serve brilliantly. Essentially every household in the Western world has, or could readily retain, an empty one-quart mayo or other suitable covered jar that could serve as a makeshift urinal, and eliminate hours and hours of conflict between the male and female members of a mixed household.
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Why haven't I heard this suggested by the Heloises of the world?
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I actually did a search on "Heloise urinal" and found one item that included both terms:

She is also a role model and advocate for women. At speeches where her audience is primarily female, she asks management to convert the men’s restrooms to women’s. "The best hotel ever was the Westin downtown [in San Antonio], which filled the urinals with ice and placed potted plants in there — it looked wonderful," Heloise says.

P.S. There are urinals designed for use by bedridden women too (different in the shape of the top), but that use is aside from the point of keeping a bathroom neat and tidy, and thus saving a lot of heterosexual couples a lot of arguing. Using a handheld urinal between oneself and a low toilet could save even gay men or single straight men from having to clean up after accidents when things go awry (in ways we need not specify). Why worry about aim and things sticking together that cause a stream to shoot wide of the target if you can just pee into a jar or formal urinal, then dump and rinse?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,447 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Fawning Over Fake Royals. There are things about the United States today that disgust me, and fawning over British "royals" is one of the most noxious. One of my ancestors was a private in the Continental Army that threw the British royal family — then real — out of this part of the world, in a Revolution that abolished monarchy for what became the United States. But somehow a lot of Americans seem to think they're British, and that the United States is a monarchy. They talk about "the Queen" as tho the "Queen of England" were our queen. We don't have a queen. Nor does England. Governmentally, we don't even pretend to have a queen. Britain does.
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Only 13% of Americans are of British ancestry, about the same percentage as black Americans. So why are people of German, Italian, Czech, Dutch, Russian, perhaps even Chinese, Arab, Peruvian, and other ancestries — including Irish, a nationality hideously abused by Britain — fawning over British "royals"?
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Let's be clear. A monarch is someone who could have your head cut off. Britain had such a monarch soon after the European discovery of America, Henry VIII (12th great-uncle of Liz2). George III, the monster who tried to keep the American colonies in thrall by force rather than by meeting their legitimate demands, was the last monarch of Britain who deserved the term, and by the end of his life, he had been stripped of his powers because he had gone mad.
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Ever since the rise of "Queen" Victoria, Britain has been playing a stupid game of pretend-monarchy, and the world indulges that stupidity. Miss America, a beauty "queen", is fully as much a queen as Elizabeth II.
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It's time to end the sham and declare an end to even the pretense that Britain's "Royal Family" is a political force — i.e., real royals. Britain and all its emotional colonies should forthrightly and forcefully renounce monarchy, and cashier out the parasites of the "Royal Family", which would save that country a fortune, a veritable king's ransom.
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Why on Earth would ABC or any other American broadcaster give further publicity to imitation-royal idiocy? I hate what has happened to this country, in so many ways. Americans have been alienated, literally, from their heritage, and are now a bunch of fawning imitation-Brits. Dozens, if not even hundreds of national commercials now affect British accents, often lower-class accents that ignorant Americans think classy. Oh, they're classy, alrite: lower-class-y.
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Americans have been better educated and richer than Brits almost from the beginning of this Republic. Many parts of the Nation had universal education when most Britons couldn't read or write. We had democracy long before Britain got rid of its "rotten boros" and villagers started ignoring the orders of the local lord as to how to vote.
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Britain is an imperial has-been, a FORMER great power that now can't even get NATO to stop standing idly by while Qaddafi slauters his people in trying to retake eastern Libya. So why this adoration of all things British?
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My great-great-...grandfather would be horrified at what has happened to the Nation that he and the other patriots of the Revolution established with such difficulty and sacrifice. Thomas Paine started to write The Crisis in my city, Newark, NJ. (That's the work that begins, "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.") Newark is, in fact, mentioned by name in The Crisis. We also have major streets Downtown named for early patriots, from Washington Street to Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and so on. A lot of American cities have streets named for early patriots, but their residents seem to have forgotten what those men stood for.
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Thomas Paine and the great man whose camp he stayed in here in Newark, George Washington, would be disgusted with the traitors who are literally or figuratively bowing and scraping to the make-believe "royals" of a country that long ago should not just have admitted that the colonials were right, but also joined the United States, reuniting the English-speaking peoples in an egalitarian federal union.
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The Republican Party and the grotesquely misnamed Tea Party are now engaged, sadly, in destroying American egalitarianism and creating a nobility of wealth, and royalty of both wealth and power in the service of obscene wealth, that embraces inequality and lauds it as the highest good. The adoration of British royalty is not harmless, but part and parcel of the destruction of American socioeconomic democracy.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,447 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:54 PM

 
Voicing Liberal Views, Explaining Liberal Ideas. A Liberal's work is never done. Again today I spent some time answering the idiotic propaganda of the Radical Right in the comments area of a story on AOL News, "White House: Obama to Lay Out New Spending Plan to Cut Deficit". The following 149 comments, comprising about 8,000 words, speak to a number of different issues that a lot of people clearly do not understand. I don't for an instant think that the Radical Right propagandists will concede they are just plain wrong, but I hope that open-minded people who see RadRite bull side-by-side with Liberal ideas will see how much better we will be as a society if we see to the triumph of Liberalism. I did a fair amount of Internet research and provide links to further information in several comments, which may be useful to other Liberals fiting in other forums.

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And such insulting cuts [to the salary of Members of Congress and making Mrs. Obama singlehandedly clean the Executive Mansion!] will save what? $3 a year? Get serious and stop telling people in Government they have no right to live well while doing the people's business.
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You do NOT know how the real world works, but are a mindless propagandist for people who HATE you. It is NOT the rich who employ most people. Small business employs a larger percentage of working people, and corporations of varying size employ many others, while government employs still others. Corporations take small amounts of money from a great many people, including pension funds, to create and run their businesses, hire people, crate products, and provide services. We thus do not need ANY rich people whatsoever, and only the TINIEST FRACTION of all jobs are due to the rich.
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What appallingly stupid advice [boycott General Motors]. We saved GM, and now you want to destroy it? What is WRONG with you?
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[Re a remark by a notorious Rightwinger:] You cannot ever tell the truth about anything, so no one should heed anything you say. When the poor and middle class are going deeper into debt every year, and the rich are getting ever more obscenely rich, what is happening is NOT fair.
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Stop lying. The CBO never said any such thing [that hundreds of thousands of people will quit their jobs once "Obamacare" is in place]. Kindly cite to the URL of a specifi[c] webpage that shows the CBO saying anything LIKE what you say.
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You have one vote for a Representative, and maybe one vote for Senator, if one of your Senators is running next year. I'm sure your Congressman and Senator are terrified of your one vote. If you think they don't deserve to be paid well, then you think YOU don't deserve quality people in office. I would tend to agree that YOU don't.
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[To someone who suggests we close all our military bases outside the U.S.:] And if the world spins out of control and violence rises everywhere, we can retreat behind Fortress America and be safe, eh? Too bad the history of the world in no way justifies such a naive stance.
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Less than 1% of the Federal Budget goes to foreign aid. Stop resenting the pittance we give to people in STARVING countries. And cut the anarchist crap. The Government is NOT dispensable.
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[Re a comment contemptuous of Donald Trumps financial savvy:] Yes, how does anyone run a casino into the ground?
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Perhaps YOU can afford to pay more for Medicare. I CANNOT. Medicare should be MEANS-TESTED. The rich don't need it, so shouldn't get it.
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What craziness. So Government can let all industries self-regulate, eh? The banking industry did a great job regulating itself, didn't it? And that oil well in the Gulf didn't really explode and pour out millions of barrels of oil, because the oil industry polices itself perfectly. And we don't need to worry about lead paint on children's toys, because nobody would paint a toy with lead paint, right? On and on, the things Government do are unnecessary, eh? Yeah, we don't need to build or repair highways or bridges. They last forever without maintenance. GROW UP. Government has MANY jobs, not just two.
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Yes, of course, all those scores of millions of white people voted for him because he was black. That has always been the case. White people vote for black people, black people vote for white people. On what planet do you live? I suppose on your planet gravity pushes rather than pulls.
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Why do you people keep speculating about the future. Do you believe that somehow the mere utterance of a predication makes it come true? I've got news for you: NO, it really doesn't.
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First off, we haven't heard WHICH seniors will have benefit[s] cut. If RICH seniors will be cut from Medicare -- that is, if welfare for the RICH is ended -- in order that poor and middle-class seniors continue to get benefits, or even greater benefits, that would be fine.
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I suppose you think that illegal aliens get rich benefits, and turn up at Government offices to apply. It never occurs to you that illegals HIDE from the Government.
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What? You think it's fine for oil companies to get welfare?
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You're talking trivia when you attack government salaries. Many government workers make less than their private-sector peers; some make a little more; very, very few make a lot more. As for Congressional staffers, they have to serve CONSTITUENTS -- 700,000 per Congressional district, and MILLIONS per Senator in large states. How many staffers do you think it takes to help 700,000 or 10 MILLION constituents solve problems with government benefits such as veterans' healthcare?
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I guess you never heard of ARM -- Adjustable Rate Mortgages, which should be known as BAS: "bait and switch", a con game. Lure people into something they can afford, then switch them to something they canNOT afford, and blame the victim! Very cute. Yes, we'd be much better off as a society if we had millions of people living on the streets, right? Perhaps you should do some research on the value to society of owner-occupied housing.
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You are talking nonsense and trivia. Very few illegal aliens DARE to get any kind of public healhcare unless they are at risk of dying, lest they be DEPORTED. But I guess you and your ilk WANT them to die. It's not enuf for you that they get deported. You want them to DIE.
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You [who accused another commenter of being a poor person] do NOT know Laurie's personal circumstances, do you? You're just projecting your vicious view of the world onto her. If you know nothing, say nothing. There would be a lot fewer comments on these boards if the Radical Right heeded that advice.
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The Radical Right pretends that Reagan was a fiscal conservative, whereas he TRIPLED that national debt, and at the end of 12 years of Reagan-Bush, the national debt had QUADRUPLED. Bush the younger then DOUBLED that, but the Radical Right blames Democrats.
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Cut the "miniscule mind" -- SPELLED WRONG! -- crap. The present intervention hasn't cost the hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars that Bush's wars have. Still, Obama said he was going to withdraw from Iraq, but he hasn't done so.
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You know nothing about anything. All the things you mention don't amount to a hill of beans, and Amtrak was created because private railroads FAILED. As for defunding the IMF, you obviously do not understand how interconnected the world's economies are. A collapse anywhere endangers other economies, and still others, and then us.
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Nonsense. Universal healthcare will kill people. What an astonishing bit of insanity.
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Once again Obama is betraying his base. Some genuine Democrat needs to oust him during the primaries.
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You apparently do not realize that free trade is a religion, and everyone in both parties worships at the altar of free trade. They are all TRAITORS.
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What is "warbamacare" supposed to mean? You apparently think you're clever. You're not.
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The Radical Right does not for an instant believe the people being ruined will ever fite back.
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Why not just advocate that the U.S. Government sell heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, and every other now-illegal drug [not just marijuana], and establish brothels and offer CIA assassins for hire, and otherwise become the Mafia? Your moral blindness is appalling.
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When the poor VOTE, they will no longer be abused. Note that no one is talking about compulsory voting, so that the poor WILL vote.
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Obama did not give any money to Brazil. (a) An independent agency provided the money you are talking about, and (b) it was a LOAN, to be PAID BACK, WITH INTEREST.
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Oh, and the money did NOT come from Government sources but from PRIVATE funds coordinated by a Government agency.
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Stop talking about Congress and the President as tho they are the enemy, or should be slaves. If you want quality people, you have to pay them well.
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Do you really not know why there is Federal tax on gasoline? Have you never heard of Federal highways and the Interstate Highway system? Do you think they built and maintain themselves?
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So you want our Government to be run by amateurs when "things are about to get very ugly". Oh, that's smart. And if we need to go to war, say, against Communist China, but can't do so because we don't have enuf money, then we should just consent to be taken over by Communist China, right? Stop talking nonsense. The Federal Government is not a state government. It has to deal with a hugely dangerous world, and we can't afford to have new people on the job every few years. We need people who know what they're talking about because they have been in the system and holding hearings and getting intelligence reports.
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Oh, how much do you really know about Iraq and Afghanistan? Do you know, for instance, that the greatest empire of the Middle Ages was the Caliphate, basedin Baghdad, Iraq, which touched both the Atlantic Ocean and China? Do you know that when the West was lost in the Dark Ages, the Caliphate preserved the wisdom of the Roman and Greek worlds' best thinkers, and added things like the concept of zero from India, and gave us algebra and the astrolabe (which helped Columbus find the New World), and brought the invention paper to the West from China? And you think the U.S. is powerless to effect long-term change hither and yon? Why is it, then, that the bulk of Latin America is now functioning democracies? Some people know something of the world, and know that the U.S. has made enormous change abroad, not just in Latin America but also in Europe, which used to have one general war a generation but no longer does -- because of US.
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So the Government of the State of Hawaii is co-conspiring in a massive fraud, is it? Seek professional help.
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Yes, the President of the United States should have to wait for a bus or subway, and do his own typing. Shut up.
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NPR gets very little money, and YES, we do need publicly funded radio. Or do you LIKE nothing but crap on radio?
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You don't listen to anything you don't want to hear. I have heard President Obama refer to his personal relationship with Jesus. You WON'T hear that, tho, not because Obama didn't say it, but because you refuse to hear it.
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The Government agency in charge of futures markets IS looking into ways to regulate speculation without interfering with the legitimate functions of a free market.
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What outrageous, stupid, lying CRAP! The dollar isn't worth 80 cents today when it was worth $1.00 yesterday. You're just LYING! The cost of a barrel of oil has gone up and down with absolutely no relationship to the value of the dollar. Why on Earth are you defending speculators' driving up the price of oil to absolutely unjustifiable levels? If you really believe what you said, you need to be under a doctor's care. But you COULDN'T believe it. You just have a compulsion to answer every Liberal point no matter how much you have to twist the truth out of all recognition, because you have a serious mental disorder that does not permit you to accept ANYTHING that ANY Liberal says, about ANYTHING.
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Please do not ever tell people that about Welfare to Work. They don't want to hear it.
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The GAO says that the President's health program would SAVE money. It is not ENTITLED to save money by compelling people to buy something they don't want, but it would save money.
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Huh? Tax cuts to the rich ARE handouts. To the rich.
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Stop calling the President by his middle name. it has nothing to do with anything. Did YOU tell your parents what to name YOU? Apparently you have no idea how small the cost of the Libyan action is as a component of the budget. Nor do you have ANY justification in calling the Libyan "freedom fiters" -- a term Republicans are supposed to favor -- "terrorists".
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The world LOVES Obama, and thinks much better of us since his election. But that is just tearing you up inside, so you have to lie about it.
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Obama is not an idiot, and you make YOURSELF look stupid by asserting he is. Idiots don't graduate from prestigious major universities.
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I suppose you correctly predicted the numbers in this week's lottery drawings, all of them. Why do you people think that your prophecies will fulfill themselves? No Obama supporter is going to stay home because YOU, nobodies, say that Obama will be defeated.
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Do you people really think any sane person is counting the President's vacations? or mischaracterizing Presidential official visits as vacations? Don't you have any serious issues to talk about? You make yourselves look not just petty but also RIDICULOUS with this vacation nonsense, esp. since Dubya took a full 1/3 of all his time in office in vacations.
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Your country. Yes, it's only yours, not anyone else's. Now we know where you're coming from. And all that legislation, like the law that stopped banks from charging outrageous fees, doesn't count for anything, eh? How is it that when the CEO makes spending decisions, he's doing his job, but when the President of the United States makes spending decisions, he is -- what? -- committing crimes?
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You can list a lot of nonsense, but it's all nonsense. EVERYONE who visits a mosque takes his shoes off. It's simple respect, like a woman's putting on a scarf when she enters a Catholic Church. Your 20% figure for Liberals is a fabrication of no conceivable meaning, because "Liberal" is not a narrowly defined term. The Radical Right is probably substantially less than 25% of the total population, and 95% of them are Radical Rightists because they are racists.
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This is why I have long called him "Barack the Faithless". He is so desperate for approval that he will betray the people who already backed him to try to get DIFFERENT people to like him. Never mind that they never will. It's part of the problem of biracial children being raised in a species that doesn't like racial mixing. Eventually, he had to take sides, so chose black. You'd think he'd have learned from that to take sides in the Liberal/Conservative divide. But he still wants to believe you can be BOTH a Liberal AND a Conservative at the same time.
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That's what happens when you cut taxes on the people who have all the money. Fortunately, the cure is simple: SOAK THE RICH.
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You're talking nonsense that makes you look like, at best, a liar, and at worst, a fool. When Obama took office, hundreds of thousands of people a MONTH were losing their jobs. Now they're not, which means that hundreds of thousands of people a month have been finding work during the Obama Administration. Donald Trump does not employ even a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that.
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Only people who are PROFOUNDLY ignorant think that foreign aid is a significant portion of the Federal budget.
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Most unlikely [that Donald Trump could be elected President]. But I'll be that almost nobody remembers that the last time Trump said he was interested in running for President, he said that the rich are now SO rich that we could pay off the entire national debt with a ONE-YEAR tax on the rich.
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You still want to punish the poor and benefit the rich. How much do you think $2 million is? It's a FORTUNE. Why should someone inherit a fortune for doing nothing? $900,000, the old limit of no-estate-tax, was more than generous. Taxes on the rich were on the order of 78% in the 70s, and the rich were still rich. Why should there be a cap on Social Security taxes at all? Most people pay SS on every dollar they earn. So should EVERYONE. If Medicaid recipients, who have NO MONEY, are forced to pay for medical care, they WON'T go to the doctor until it's too late. So you are really advocating that a lot of poor people die. As for Afghanistan, you do NOT see into the future, so do NOT know that Afghanistan cannot be brought into the modern, democratic world.
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Cut the crap. NO small business makes $2 million. None. Not one. Never have, never will (unless the dollar loses 90% of its value). The typical small business makes only enuf to pay a few employees and give the proprietors a comfortable income, perhaps in the range of $40,000 a year, not $2M. Moreover, anyone who has a business that grows beyond that level knows to INCORPORATE or form a limited liability company, so that the death of a principle does NOT subject the COMPANY to estate tax.
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Yes, we must cut the deficit -- by RAISING TAXES ON THE RICH. Why would ANYONE who is not rich object to that? Surely no one is so delusional as, any longer, to believe in "voodoo economics", that old "trickle-down" con.
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I realy am astounded that the entirely humorless Radical Right keeps trying to 'crack wise'. Do you REALLY think you're funny? If so, your delusional world is wider than I thought.
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The only favor Ryan did was reveal the utter evil of the Republican Party, which wants to make life miserable for people of modest means so the rich can live lives of obscene luxury at our expense.
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If you see corruption in Massachusetts, report it. If not, be quiet. Massachusetts state employees have, in any case, NOTHING to do with the Federal Government. And yes, Obama wants to raise taxes -- ON THE RICH. I very seriously doubt you are rich, so why are you protecting them from taxes they could EASILY afford to pay and would get the Nation's finances in good order?
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All this birther nonsense shows everyone who sees it that you are a RACIST fool who deserves NO respect and NO attention. If you want to turn everyone off, keep up the b.s.
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If your reference is to Donald Trump, he has NOT presented a birth certificate, only a hospital record. But you don't pay attention to anything that does not accord with your insane delusions.
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Liberals don't take marching orders. We THINK, which is something WE can do. Liberals have said they are indignant that the spending cuts will hurt the vulnerable and benefit the rich and powerful. Race is plainly the ONLY reason the Radical Right is so livid at Obama. And as for Libya, Liberals are FOR defending pro-democracy movements. Why does the Radical Right hate democracy?
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Corporations are not people. The equal protection clause does not apply to businesses.
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No amount of b.s. will camouflage the FACT that Bush DOUBLED the national debt: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm.
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So the President of the United States, who has a job that would crush the life out of you in 17 minutes, is not entitled to a vacation, eh? Just be quiet, you foolish, petty person. "Millions" means nothing in the national budgetary context. You're talking complete and utter nonsense.
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Let's put this Radical Right lie to bed once and for all, OK? From CBS News, January 16, 2009: >>today's trip marks Mr. Bush's 149th visit to the presidential retreat. The planned three-day stay, during which the president is being joined by family and former and current aides, will bring his total time spent at Camp David to all or part of 487 days.

Yes, that's 487 days. And Camp David is not even where the president has spent the most time when not at the White House: Knoller reports that Mr. Bush has made 77 visits to his ranch in Crawford during his presidency, and spent all or part of 490 days there.<<
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URL for that CBS report: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-4728085-503544.html. Feel free to check it. Now what are you going to do, say that CBS News is a bunch of liars?
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Yes, I suppose Obama did vote for TARP, because it was NECESSARY. It wasn't designed right, and wasn't applied right, but something of its sort did have to be done. Bush and Obama agreed that the economic collapse was not going to correct itself without Government intervention. But now the Radical Right disowns even Bush. How quaint.
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Liberals are not "regressives". The Big Lie Technique really doesn't work, you know.
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Your confused and quixotic rant makes absolutely no sense. Shut the Government down for several months? You need to be incarcerated in a mental institution. Draft the poor, only, and send the poor overseas to die in foreign military misadventures, eh? "Redistribution"? The only redistribution that has been going on in this country, since 1986, is redistribution UP, FROM the poor and middle class TO the rich. That was fine with you? But UNDOING that redistribution would be wrong? Since your recommendations contradict each other -- take care of military families but shut the Government down! -- we can see that you are very seriously confused. Perhaps you should think before you type.
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Why not compare us to Germany, which has a much more modern view of the relationship between workers and corporations? Germany is doing very well.
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"We all" know no such thing. What we do know is that Obama has repeatedly said he is concerned about the deficit, and thus wanted to restore the pre-Bush tax rates on the rich, rather than add $700B to the national debt. But Republicans wouldn't LET those tax cuts expire by their terms, and now they want to cut taxes on the rich another 10%, so we will have even less money to work with.
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The Tea Party are ordinary folks who are being USED by their betters.
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Obama is NOT a Marxist. "Marxist" actually means something, and its meaning does not cover ANYTHING Obama has either done or even proposed to do.
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Perhaps Bush is not saying anything because his puppetmasters aren't pulling his strings any more.
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If the Tea Party gets its way, people around them will be hurt, and the will see that they have done evil when they wanted to do good.
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Paul Ryan has now been in Congress for 12 years. Isn't he supposed to leave office now?
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Liberals are much better educated than conservatives, have higher, tested IQ's, have better jobs, and make more money than the bulk of conservatives, many of whom dropped out of high school.
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It never occurs to them when they talk about Obama as a Communist or dictator that if he were either of those things, they would be dead.

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There is too much nonsense to address in your fatuous and dishonest post, but let's take one point, the assertion that under Obama "we've literally seen jobs eliminated intentionally" . What are you talking about? Nothing, that's what. Just as with everything else you say: all nonsense.
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I see Radical Rightists talking about Bush more than Liberals do. YOU raise the issue, then accuse US of raising it. YOU make assertions about how wonderful things were under Bush, and then we have to correct you with FACTS. Then YOU complain that we keep talking about Bush.
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Obama did not write the tax code that GE abused. Immelt should, however, definitely be told to get off the President's advisory panel. If GE violated any laws, the responsible executives should be sent to PRISON.
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President Obama has visited Kenya, it's true. But he never lived there, is thoroughly American, and has no desire to live there.
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I suppose you weren't paying attention in November 2008, when the people elected Barack Obama President by almost 10 million votes. Kindly stop misrepresenting the will of the people. You represent nobody.
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Obama has not hidden his birth records. The State of Hawaii has them, and the State of Hawaii says he was born in Hawaii. Why do you find that impossible to believe? No, you actually know full well that Obama WAS born in Hawaii, but you somehow think that if you keep saying he was not, you can undo that fact. Sort of like self-fulfilling prophecy in reverse. That's not the way reality works.
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Who or what is the American Small Business League, and why should we believe anything it says? There is NO article about it in Wikipedia. So maybe it's some kind of front organization funded by the Radical Right. Pls cite to a REPUTABLE media or organization for your assertion.
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A Google search on American Small Business League produces almost nothing not put out by itself.
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The Republicans are pressing for the destruction of Social Security, starting with people under 55 and working downwards. Remember that Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, and after leaving office has dared to say that his greatest regret is having failed to privatize Social Security. Mind you, when the stock market plunged, millions of seniors would have seen their portfolio wiped out! Obama and the Democrats MUST end all talk of ending benefits for most people on Social Security, but RICH people should get NO Social Security. Let's see who is targeted for what cuts before getting hysterical.
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Learn how to QUOTE. And everyone please stop talking about shariah in the United States. The First Amendment won't let Christians or Jews impose religious law; certainly it would not permit Moslems to impose religious law. Kindly stop raising phony issues.
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The amount is the ENTITLEMENT, and should not be higher for people who made more money, and not be lower for people who made less money thru life. Think about it: one person who does nothing is to be paid more than another person who does nothing? How does that make sense? The fact is that payment into Social Security provides only an ENTITLEMENT to receive in the future. The amount actually paid, even with interest, NEVER equals the benefit. CURRENT workers' taxes pay for current recipients. It is not a bank account, from which you can draw only what you paid in. It is an ENTITLEMENT to draw in perpetuity once you qualify, no matter how long you live.
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Stop the birther nonsense. No one has spent millions to cover up President Obama's birth in Hawaii, or to create, after the fact, a birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper. But keep harping on this idiocy. You hurt only yourself, by showing yourself incapabable of coping with reality.
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The United Nations does NOT tax Americans. Stop this insane propaganda.
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Pls note that every President is blamed for the deficit/national debt during his Presidency, not Congress. Note the attacks here on the OBAMA deficit.
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No, the Nation's enemies are the racists and liars who want to set us against each other.
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It's not Liberals who are trying to undo the progress of a century.
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Kindly stop pretending you know the future. You know nothing about the future, even less than you know about the present or past.
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Perhaps you are confused. I virtually never see anybody attacking white people here, but anti-black bigotry plainly underlies EVERYTHING irrational that the Radical Right says about the President. They don't speak to issues and say, "I wish the President would do X or Y". They call him "Obummer", "chimpanzee", and the like, attacking him viciously and totally irrationally in a way that plainly speaks ONLY of racism. They call his wife "moochelle" and talk about sending the Obamas a crate of bananas. But to you, that is civil discourse.
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That is all LIES from the corporate elite. If they get tax cuts, they will STILL export jobs. How do we know? Because they HAVE gotten tax cuts, and they HAVE exported jobs. Do you REALLY think that corporations should be permitted to poison the air we breathe and water we drink and cook with? In China, "a World Bank study done with SEPA, the national environmental agency, concluded that outdoor air pollution was already causing 350,000 to 400,000 premature deaths a year. Indoor pollution contributed to the deaths of an additional 300,000 people, while 60,000 died from diarrhea, bladder and stomach cancer and other diseases that can be caused by water-borne pollution." (NYTimes, 8/26/07: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html?pagewanted=all). Do you want that for Americans? I don't even want it for Chinese, yet the export of U.S. jobs to China contributes to Chinese deaths from environmental devastation.
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Republicans don't want any restrictions on corporate bonuses or compensation, and want the rich to pay a lower tax rate than the middle class. The bulk of people on Social Security would LOVE to make $20,000 a year.
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You're talking nonsense. Total foreign aid is on the order of $15 billion out of a total Federal budget of $3.7 TRILLION. Read before you write.
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You plainly do not understand what "racist" means. Calling someone out for racial bias is not racism. Calling a black person a "chimpanzee" is racism. The Radical Right attacks not the President's proposals but his person. They do not speak to ideas; they attack the man in ways that can be explained ONLY by racial animus, since he is NOT a Marxist, NOT a Socialist, NOT born abroad, etc. No amount of documentation can budge the Radical Right from its delusional accusations. It is not possible for rational people to assign anything but racist motives to such attacks upon President Obama.
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What "state run media" are you talking about? There are NONE in the United States. There are some news and public-affairs programs on PBS and NPR, but the bulk of Americans get their news from PRIVATE media owned by CORPORATIONS. But truth means nothing to you.
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What an excellent way to raise money and reduce the deficit [$100 tax on bullets].
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Barack Obama has indeed betrayed Liberals, and you are quite right to land on his hypocrisy. As for 4.4% unemployment under Bush, that is a half-truth: >>From December 2007 when the recession started to December 2008, an additional 3.6 million people became unemployed. And, in January 2009, his last month in office, the nation lost 655,000 jobs, raising the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent, the highest level in more than 15 years.<< (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_W._Bush_administration#Unemployment) What this means is that during the housing bubble and stock-market bubble, we had a few years of prosperity built on war spending and debt that subverted the basics of the economy, so by the end of his tenure, the Nation's economy collapsed. When Obama arrived, 655,000 a month were losing their jobs; now it's down to almost none, or actual job growth. As for Bush spending "a few days at his ranch", he spent 490 days at his ranch and 478 days at Camp David. (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-4728085-503544.html) I don't know how many days he spent elsewhere, but he spent about 1/3 of his entire term on vacation.
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Pls learn to use QUOTATION MARKS. It had to read your comment twice to figure out what you were saying, because your text contradicts itself. I live in NJ too, and tho I haven't heard the particular statistic mentioned, I do know that Christie's Republican administration is doing very severe harm to the economy, education, and localities. My property taxes went up 16% because Christie cut state aid to Newark. It's the same story, with different numbers, for a host of NJ towns and cities.
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Learn to QUOTE correctly. As for how many people are posting Radical Right propaganda here, I haven't done a count, but it's a reasonably small number of familiar names, who seem to be part of a carefully coordinated Radical Right propaganda machine which posts hundreds of short, inflammatory remarks designed to mislead casual visitors into thinking they speak for most people. They do not.
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What are you talking about? Feeding the hungry, providing healthcare to the sick and education to children is about power and money? The Radical Right Big Lie Machine thinks that saying something that is exactly contrary to fact will persuade people.
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So you can plan for an auto accident or catastrophic illness, can you? NO YOU CAN'T. Not even millionaires can plan for such things, esp. if the stock market crashes. You're living in a fool's paradise, where the best-laid plans of mice and men NEVER go awry.
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No, he's not. I was paying $477 a month for health insurance as a single person, which is close to $6K a year, and for one person, not two. If we cut Medicare not to the rich, who don't need it, but to the poor and middle class, who do need it, $6,000 a year (as against the current $1,164) is completely believable.
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What people have not yet realized is that the rich are pitting group against group so they don't focus on the real cause of social problems, the viciously greedy behavior of the RICH.
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Cut the crap. President Obama DID consult Congress: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/obama-consults-with-congressional-leaders-on-libya/2011/03/18/ABc4iNq_blog.html. Simply saying something that is utterly false doesn't make it true.
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Again, The Big Lie Technique in action. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Lewis Black, and a host of Liberals are professional comedians, who laugh all the time. It is the Radical Right that is humorless, as evidenced by some amazingly off-the-wall unfunny attempts at humor in this comments area.
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No, we are, and I think I'm quoting a lot of Conservatives when I say this, "the richest country in the history of the world". We're only "broke" when it comes to doing justice to the poor and middle class.
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Yes, we always get our information from West Virginia, the most advanced and best educated state of the Union, right? And never mind the money saved consumers in the endless repairs that old cars cost their owners. And forget about the costs to public health of the air pollution from old engines, and the injuries and deaths from accidents in cars without airbags, and all the other costs of keeping old cars on the roads. I suppose you didn't notice that a very large proportion, if not outright majority, of all the Cash for Clunkers money went to JAPANESE carmakers who don't HAVE American union workers. That is the real problem with that program: that it was not restricted to AMERICAN carmakers. And what exactly does this have to do with the present budget controversy?
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Let me try to explain something to you people. This is NOT a chatroom. You are NOT entitled to waste everybody's time with personal messages. We don't CARE when you come on board or when you leave. And there's no God, to boot.
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Find someplace else to be. This is not your playpen. You are not funny. You are not witty (perhaps half-witty, but that's another story). You are not sensible. You are not fair. You ARE an annoying, miserable excuse for a human being who approaches much of the world with resentment. I'm tired of your dreary, contemptible, and really quite sad comments.
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So you really think $15B or $20B in foreign aid to STARVING countries will save us, do you? The budget is on the order of $3.5 TRILLION. But yes, everyone who has ideas as to what we should and should not be spending money on should feel free to convey their sentiments to their members of Congress. Of course, if the Radical Right gets its way, there won't be any Congressonal staff members to read those messages.
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Ah, there we see open racism [a reference to black farmers]. I guess you didn't get the memo: you must always HIDE your racism.
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Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth (8th or 9th poorest, by some measures), and long has been: http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world.htm. The mere fact that it has mountains does not mean that those mountains are filled with mineral riches that lend themselves to profitable extraction. And it is hardly so centrally located as to be important in oil and gas distribution.
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A lot of Liberals are very unhappy with the idea of causing ANY injury to the poor and middle class for the sake of the rich, and don't want to compromise on that at all. Republicans are very big about talking about "shared sacrifice", but then they announce their intention to cut taxes on the rich by 10%!
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Don't you mean a KANSAN [not Kenyan]? You want to speak to only one half of Obama's ancestry? Why not the Kansas half? Or are you uttering more "birther" nonsense?
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How convenient your memory is. You forget $4 gasoline under President Bush. Gas prices go up; gas prices go down. The President has precious little power over them. I think part of the problem with people in these comments areas is they attribute to the President infinite power, when his actual power in many regards is very slite.
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Of what conceivable relevance is the behavior of the First Lady? Odd that the Radical Right is so upset at Michelle Obama for her activism on behalf of healhty eating and physical activity for children, but you don't say a word about that. How wondrously flexible the mind of the Radical Rightwinger is, that it can make a mountain out of a molehill one week and a different mountain out of a different molehill the next, whereupon the first mountain becomes a molehill again.
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Learn how to quote. As to your poisonous points, let me first point out the inconsistency of the Radical Right, which keeps talking about term limits for Congress, but now praises John McCain for having been in Congress for eons. As for your silly assertion about people being told they won't have to pay rent, kindly stop talking nonsense. What Barack Obama did was to break the color barrier to the White House, and that shocked the racist whites of the South and Midwest, who thought that if nothing else was "safe" for "us", it was the Presidency. Obama didn't divide anything; his election just brought out the divisions we have had all along. Rather than let their racism go, and open their minds to see what this new President could do, the Radical Right mounted a new Confederacy of hate, and has worked to divide the Nation and foment intergroup hatred. And it doesn't matter what the issue may be. They will attack him for not being warmonger enuf AND for being a warmonger. They will attack him no matter what he does or does not do. And they will sell out their own future by handing everything over to the rich if the rich will save them from a black man.
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Haven't you posted this exact same crap at least once before? Stop repeating posts! As for your implication that we are going bankrupt, you forget that we can at any tme reverse the insane elimination of taxation of the rich, return to the tax rates of 1978 (a top bracket of about 78%), and be rolling in dough.
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No, provision for the poor, the disabled, the elderly, etc., must NOT be on the table. Let grandma die of starvation of preventable illness to feed the Pentagon's insatiable lust for money? I don't think so.
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Naturally the Radical Right disapproves of any effort to work together. Thumbs down on cooperation to save the Nation! We must consider the possibility that there are several million people in this country who are pure evil, and they hate all decent people who do want to work together.
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President Obama thinks he will NEED a billion dollars to counter the vast inpouring of money from the rich that the Supreme Court unlawfully unleashed upon our political system. The President's re-election fund will, in any event, arise for the most part from voluntary CONTRIBUTIONS by willing givers, so what is your problem with that? I thought you people WANTED people to put their money where their mouth is. And how much do you THINK the President of the United States should be paid? A dollar forty-nine? We can restore the Nation's finances by raising taxes on the rich, any time we want. But the rich want you to think that the only way we can restore the Nation's finances is by cutting spending. No. You can cut spending or raise revenues. That's the way REALITY works, but we are never to see reality, only illusion, the illusion that it is impossible to raise taxes on the rich.
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racquetguy1, the rich are to have their taxes CUT, not raised. They are to get NO cut in services or benefits. How do you not understand that they want OTHER people to sacrifice, not themselves?
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Obama has sold out, again. Real Democrats need to get rid of these pseudo-Democrats, like Clinton, who was more Republican than Democratic. We need a strong primary challenge from someone who doesn't need to be loved by everybody but is content to do the right thing for the people, not curry favor with Republicans.
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Nonsense. Just look at the past 30 years to see who was really spending crazily. Reagan-Bush QUADRUPLED the national debt, Clinton got it under control and produced the largest surplus in the history of the world, Bush the Younger (and Dumber) came into office, got rid of the surplus in 10 months, then DOUBLED the national debt again!
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Paul Ryan is NOT popular, and stands a very good chance of becoming the most hated man in the Nation in short order. I don't hear any call for Ryan to run for President.
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Naturally, you have it exactly backwards. A Radical Rightwinger, not a Liberal, bragged that someone has developed software to detect Liberal trolls, and urged people on the Radical Right to check it out and use that software. NOBODY who trolls these boards is wealthy, so it is really puzzling that these poor, mostly uneducated people, who will NEVER be rich but are told that if they take care of the rich, the rich will take care of them, keep believing the "trickle-down" b.s.
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Actually, Liberals are sorry for the poor, uneducated, credulous losers on the Radical Right, whose only solace was that they are white. And then along came a BLACK man (half-white, really, but self-identified as black) and took away their last basis for seeing themselves as anything but failures. Liberals take joy from the positive things in life; the Radical Right tries to enjoy the misery of others, and increase that misery. Liberals are generous, and that is not just ennobling; it also produces contentedness. The Radical Right is viciously selfish and intent on doing harm to others out of malice. It's sad, really. But the mere fact that Radical Rightists are nasty people choking on their own bile in no way requires us to take it easy on them and let them strike out at their betters without retaliating.
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None of the three current wars has anything to do with either oil or commerce. The Afghan war was to displace the Taliban, which had not just tolerated or turned a blind eye toward, but actually invited Al-Qaeda to train for war against the United States. The iraq war was ordered by Israel, which was incapable of destroying Iraq but thought Iraq might be capable of destroying Israel, so the U.S. had to do Israel's dirty work. That is why we did NOT "take out" but waged a full-scale war of destruction of the COUNTRY, not the dictator. The Libyan intervention is to protect and promote a pro-democracy movement, so Republicans who pretended to favor Dubya's pretense that he was trying to "liberate" Iraq and democratize the Middle East should be enthusiastically supporting the Libya intervention. And in fact John McCain IS gungho to help the rebels -- so of course the Radical Right denounces John McCain. Oil has NOTHING to do with any of these conflicts. Nothing. The Iraq war CUT oil supplies for years. The Libyan uncertainty is being used by oil speculators to raise prices, which victimizes the United States. Afghanistan HAS NO oil of consequence. And as for waging war for "commerce", what exactly is that even supposed to mean? War does not improve commerce; it invariably interferes with normal commerce.
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Why are Radical Rightists so illierate that they don't know how to show a quote? As for immigration, you plainly have not noticed, but immigration from Europe has essentially vanished, and did so decades ago. Only people from the poorest countries want to come here any more -- except of course for the rich, who have homes in more than one country. The people who have worked long hours for decades RARELY have gotten rich. That's just a scam on the stupid. Do you really think that the Chinese convenience-store operators in NYC get rich from their hard life? Get real. It's not how hard you work, nor how long, but in what industry, at what pay rate. Hard work is no guarantee of success, not in business, not in life, and certainly not in terms of accumulation of wealth. Many of the rich INHERITED their wealth; others lucked into an idea that just happened to work out; others got paid ridiculous amounts of money for playing a children's game. Nor is wealth secure. Today's big thing may be tomorrow's whatever-happened-to? (e.g., MySpace). The American Dream was, in any case, NOT about wealth but about freedom, family, comfort for oneself and security for the people you love. And fairness: liberty and justice for ALL, not fame and fortune for the few.
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Obama has said he came into a bad situation. Do you deny that? He's not looking backward, except to learn the lessons of the economic calamity Bush left him. He wants to move forward and help the people who need help, not the people who don't.
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Ron Paul is a lunatic who thinks that selfishness is a political philosophy.
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I think Boehner voted for all of Bush's budgets that DOUBLED the national debt.
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Democrats were in charge of both houses and the White House for only two years. Bush would never have gone along with raising taxes on the rich, so don't blame the Dems for his time in office. Yes, Democrats SHOULD have raised taxes on the rich as soon as Congress and the President were sworn in. But don't forget the Party of No behavior of the Republicans. Democrats kept refusing to believe that the Republicans would never cooperate in working on the people's business. I hope they have learned their lesson, so that if they regain control of the House and Senate, and retain the White House as well, they will ram thru the kinds of change the Nation needs, no matter what the Republicans try to do to stop them.
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Radical Islam is not the subject of this article, but there is a big difference between being concerned about extremism in the Middle East and worrying about shariah law's being imposed in the United States -- which the paranoids keep pretending to believe could happen, in as little as five years!
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Please do not make up statistics, but supply URLs to reputable websites for such assertions. Your figure as to jobs created is of course ridiculous. The economy was losing 655,000 jobs a MONTH whn Obama came into office. Had his emergency measures, including the stimulus, not worked, we would have lost 17,685,000 jobs ON TOP of the number unemployed at the end of 2008. In actuality, the total number of unemployed today is 13,500,000 (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm). So your 582,089 figure is a total fabrication.
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You don't have to cut spending if you increase revenues. Deficits and debt are the negative difference between income and outgo. Republicans want you to believe that there is only one element, spending. That is malicious nonsense.
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Lies. Democrats did NOT have four years to do anything they wanted. The first two they had to work with a Republican President who favored the rich over everyone else.
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There is no recall in the Constitution. You think a government of amateurs would do a good job of mastering the enornous mechanism of the Federal Government, do you? You are speaking emotionally, not rationally.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,446 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Unfinished Business in Egyptian Revolution. A story on AOL News addressed violence by the Egyptian military against a crowd in Tahrir Square who want the head of the military removed from power. Not surprisingly, the anti-Moslem, anti-Obama crowd of Radical Right propagandists descended upon the comments area following that story. So I countered some of their vicious propaganda. I present below 33 of my comments, comprising some 1,700 words. You can infer most of what I was replying to, but in some places I have clarified that in brackets. The distinct comments are separated by *. (I am working on a major post to draw together various strands I have been puzzling over for a long time, as to what lies behind the viciousness of political and religious discourse in the United States today, but that is not yet ready.)

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All lies. Egypt is NOT in the hands of Moslem terrorists and mullahs, and your quote is completely misleading: >>Here is the accurate and more complete quote: "Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."<< (http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/o/obama-books.htm) So it has nothing to do with Moslem terrorism or extremism of any kind, nor even with anything outside the United States. Kindly stop falsifying what the President has said.
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I have already shown your quote about Moslems as false and misleading. Let me now address your fatuous remark that the President's days in power are numbered. Of COURSE they are. We have fixed terms and a two-term limit to EVERY Presidency. POTUS is a temp job. For everybody.
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We see where your loyalties lie. Americans side with democracy and the United States, not military dictatorship and Israel.
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The only mention of [the Muslim Brotherhood] was a protest against Israeli attacks upon Gaza, so Liberals are completely content to have the inhuman behavior of Israel pointed out.
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The militia at Concord and Lexington were "rabble" in the eyes of King George III. Egypt needs elections, not military rule. Military rule does NOT create order, nor justice. Egypt had decades of "emergency" rule. Now it needs democratic elections. If after internationally monitored, "free and fair" elections, demonstrators or rioters still refuse to accept the legitimacy of the government, that would be an entirely different situation from what we are seeing now.
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Yes, I knew you RadRite racist[ ] loons would blame Obama. Not a sparrow falls from the sky but Obama shot it down.
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The Egyptian democracy movement PAUSED to let the military run the country after Mubarak left, but ONLY long enuf for the country to hold elections. The elections have not yet been held, and a field marshal who was part and parcel of the Mubarak regime is still in charge. Of COURSE Egyptians want him out.
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Obama has been very measured in regard to what [Middle Eastern countries' demonstrations and democracy movements] to involve the U.S. in, and what to stay away from. Many pro-democracy Americans, of all parties and persuasions, want us to promote democracy in the most effective way.
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The bulk of planet Earth has ALWAYS been ruled by despots, local or national or imperial. The demand for democracy in a region that has never had it is very good news, and we should do everything in our power to promote its best practices and goals.
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Obama is on the side of democracy. What side are you on?
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Stop lying. We have NO "self avowed King".
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Many established democracies would have had a new national government in place by now, if the former government/administration had been ousted. Egyptians do NOT want a caretaker military government to turn into another dictatorship. Who can blame them?
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So you think that not rushing to conclusions is a bad idea? that we should always rush to conclusions? "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread "Meaning "The rash or inexperienced will attempt things that wiser people are more cautious of." (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fools-rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread.html)
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The Egyptian military did NOT act in Bahrain. That would be the Saudi military, under the control of a King, not a military government installed after a popular uprising in Egypt. The U.S. military engagement with the Egyptian military has, over the long term, starkly reduced dictatorial temptations in that military force. I see absolutely no connection between Gates and any of this. Even if he was installed by a Republican, he serves a Democratic President who is forcefully on the side of democratizing the Middle East. But so was Bush. So rarely do we have bipartisan, Liberal/Conservative agreement that we should welcome democracy movements in the Middle East.
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Islam started 600 years after Christianity. What was the Christian world like 600 years ago? Hint: there were NO democracies in Christendom. Not one. The United States was the first modern democracy, and we were ALONE in the world in that. We are no longer alone, and the democracies of the world are now in position to help create other democracies, which we should be glad to do.
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You don't wonder any such thing [if the demonstrators wish Mubarak were still in power]. I have seen NO ONE demonstrating for the return of Mubarak.
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If Obama were [really] a dictator, you'd be dead.
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The Moslem Brotherhood is not in charge of Egypt, so we need not wonder if your characterization of what the Moslem Brotherhood wants is accurate or slanderous propaganda.
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You are exactly wrong. The crowds' demand is for more change, and the military has not asserted its right to govern in perpetuity.
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Military government in Egypt is supposed to be for the short term only. The people need to keep pressing for elections.
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Perhaps you need to stop looking into a crystal ball, and stop hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy. The mere fact that you say something means absolutely nothing in the real world. But you don't like the real world.
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So one incident undoes a mass movement, does it? Why are you people so quick to rush to judgment and project huge conclusions from trivial incidents?
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Obama helped oust a dictator. Radicals have NOT taken over Egypt, and there is precious little reason to believe they ever will. But the Radical Right -- speaking of radicals -- is HOPING that Egyptian democracy will be crushed, so they can beat up on Obama. And all because they can't stand a black man being in the White House. If innocent Egyptians must suffer so you can 'justify' your unjustified, racist hatred of President Obama, then innocent Egyptians must suffer and die -- because that's what you want for them. That is contemptible.
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No one should rely upon YOUR statements about the Moslem Brotherhood, nor Marxism, nor President Obama's mother, nor the President's upbringing. Your history (be it accurate or fanciful and slanderous) of the Moslem Brotherhood and any given member of that organization is IRRELEVANT to discussions of events in Egypt at this time, since the Brotherhood does NOT control Egypt and has modified some of its stances in recent years, long before the present democracy movement. As for whether President Obama will be "kicked out of office", re-elected along with a Democratic House and Senate in a landslide, or anything else will have to await late 2012. You will be 'heart'broken if Egyptians succeed in creating a democratic, multireligiously tolerant culture, and we can hear the hope for bad things to happen to Egyptians in all the comments from the Radical Right. Shame on you.
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Note the negative votes [to excerpts from Wikipedia about the Moslem Brotherhood]! There are indeed none so blind as those who will not see. But all this discussion of the Moslem Brotherhood is aside from the issue of the present pro-democracy/anti-military dictatorship movement.
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Few people have as yet seen how everything fits together in the complicated and highly sophisticated drive of the obscenely rich to reduce everyone else to slavery -- wage slavery and debt slavery. They promote division, so we are all fiting among ourselves -- white against black against Hispanic; middle class against poor; straight against gay; Protestant against Catholic against Moslem; and on and on -- while they take everybody's money, and future, and reduce us all to penury. All, that is, but the rich.
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You are MAKING ALL THAT UP. There has been no imposition of shariah law, no stonings, no governmental virginity tests, nothing of the sort. You're just MAKING IT UP.
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The American Revolution killed more people, per capita, than just about any other conflict in our history. Revolutions are untidy affairs, and not everyone is so lucky as to have a dictator thousands of miles away. Even after our Revolution, the British ruling class stirred up the Indians in our frontier areas, and otherwise fomented a second war, the War of 1812. They lost that one too, since its intent was to break up the United States and take us over again. They also lost the Civil War, in which they tried to destroy the United States AGAIN. We managed to overcome all that violence and move on. I hope Egyptians can too. But it seems to me that a lot of people in this comments area want Egyptians to fail. I want them to succeed.
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The article does NOT say the anti-Israel demonstration was 100% Moslem Brotherhood, only that it included "a large contingent of Muslim Brotherhood members".
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Whether the Moslem Brotherhood aspires to overthrow incipient democracy in Egypt is not yet established. Nor is it certain that an attempt to do so would succeed. I can't see into the future. You can't either.
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Human rights and civil rights are just two different names for the same thing. So there is no legitimacy to suggesting we need to forget about our civil-rights past and ignore the human rights of Egyptians or other people around the world. Liberals hold to basic principles entrenched in, among other places, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and our Bill of Rights. None of those documents is passé or irrelevant today.
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Actually, I try to balance a discussion that always turns unbalanced when the Radical Right descends upon an AOL News comments area to attack Obama, Moslems, etc. There are some people who don't understand that much of what they see here is a campaign of disinformation by the Radical Right to mislead casual visitors into thinking that the United States is dominantly Radical Right. I don't know exactly how these "wingnuts", as you call them, know which stories to descend upon. I'm certain that many of them are in independent contact with each other, as by email. What I don't know is if there is some kind of master email list that sends out the day's target articles and provides talking points and suggested language. I wouldn't be surprised.
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You know NOTHING about George Soros but what you have been told by your puppetmasters.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,446 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:46 PM