What frustrates me most about the birther crap is that there are real issues with the way our government is run, and instead of voicing these concerns in the media, we get news coverage full of woo.
How do we feel Obama will come away from this whole budget mess?
Does anyone actually think the US is going to be OK as a country when spending a trillion+ dollars more than it earns every year? It's an economic game that works as long as you can keep kicking the can down the road for the next guy, but debt has been tacking on exponentially. It will get to the point where you're trying to kick a can steeply uphill. That shit will come back and hit you in the face.
It's just frustrating to read any news as someone who feels this way. All I want is for the government to only spend what it earns, but there is a huge gap. Republicans claim (at the moment) that they want to close this gap but we all know that is just a bunch of bullshit. In my eyes, Obama and George W are the same damn person (this is usually enough to make people's heads explode). Both Republicans and Democrats are going to keep it going because bringing home the bacon keeps them in office.
How do we feel Obama will come away from this whole budget mess?
Does anyone actually think the US is going to be OK as a country when spending a trillion+ dollars more than it earns every year? It's an economic game that works as long as you can keep kicking the can down the road for the next guy, but debt has been tacking on exponentially. It will get to the point where you're trying to kick a can steeply uphill. That shit will come back and hit you in the face.
It's starting to look like the democrats are doing the smart thing and showing that the reason the budget is being delayed is that republicans are using other issues like defunding EPA and planned Parenthood to cause a impasse. If they continue the Democrats will look pretty good considering as one democrat said "we already agreed to 70% of what they asked for".
As for the second half it's pretty common to run up big deficits when you are in a recession. But we were supposed to have a surplus of money to float us through a downturn...... Wonder what happened to that?
It's starting to look like the democrats are doing the smart thing and showing that the reason the budget is being delayed is that republicans are using other issues like defunding EPA and planned Parenthood to cause a impasse. If they continue the Democrats will look pretty good considering as one democrat said "we already agreed to 70% of what they asked for".
If they've really given in to 70% then I think that's fair and they'll be in the clear as far as public opinion is concerned. The GOP is def in a position to win on a few sacred cow arguments, simply because the Democrats were supposed to have passed this budget last year when they were in total control. Now they're being held by the balls, but I don't think it's fair to squeeze someone's balls with more than 70% strength, or you might do irreparable damage.
But we were supposed to have a surplus of money to float us through a downturn...... Wonder what happened to that?
GWB happened. I agreed with him cutting taxes, but if that's your gameplan then you've got to cut expenses to match. Clinton got us to a surplus, so it was time to go republican and start scaling back gov't, and what did we get? A few trillion $ in the hole.
NO, GUNDABAD! BAD GUNDABAD! The Republicans are the fiscally conservative party, didn't you know? If you want smaller government and less spending, you turn to the... what? This just in: Republicans spend more and enlarge government? Really?
Does anyone actually think the US is going to be OK as a country when spending a trillion+ dollars more than it earns every year? It's an economic game that works as long as you can keep kicking the can down the road for the next guy, but debt has been tacking on exponentially. It will get to the point where you're trying to kick a can steeply uphill. That shit will come back and hit you in the face.
No, however there are two(three really) ways to deal with this. One is to cut services that the government provides. The second is to raise taxes and maintain the current services. Or some combination there of.
The issue here is that the republicans wish to cut services and lower taxes. So If we lower the amount of services we provide by 100 billion dollars and we give out 100 billion in tax cuts (revenue reduction) we've essentially changed NOTHING.
But they're not hearing that.
They're not paying attention to the (recent) past.
Clinton raised taxes, Congress implemented paygo and voila we find ourselves with a surplus for the first time in the past what, 60 years? 100 years? Then Bush lowers taxes, heavily weighted towards the higher end, the largest (unpaid for because paygo expired as a rule of congress at this point) expansion of medicare. And with the help of a few depression era laws that Clinton repealed, we find our selves in a bubble that explodes staring down a second Great Depression with no reserves, because they were squandered by not paying down the debt when we had a chance instead giving them to the most well off and buying off the middle class with a 300 dollar check.
Why is it so hard for them to codify that they will not authorize new legislation that can not be paid for (paygo). Why is it so hard for them to say "As per the Constitution we are raising taxes to pay down our debt"?
As for the government spending tons of money now, it's what you do. Well unless your name is Herbert Hoover and you believe that when the country is suffering financially the government should tighten it's belt too. If that's how you feel then I believe I have a cardboard box you can live in down by the river.
Which makes me wonder, if Obama were to loose to a republican and he takes the same stance, are we going to rename cardboard shanty towns to "Palinville's" or maybe "Romneyville's"? While I'm a bit of a nostalgic person, I think we should lay the blame at the current cause rather than conjuring up visions of the 1929.
Anyhow, the Democrats were pretty screwed with the budget and the plan to stopgap and throw it on the incoming republicans was a good one. This fight is making them look really bad with their message of "Jobs Jobs Jobs" really was "ruin the environment and defund Planned Parenthood" sorta makes people think twice.
This fight is making them look really bad with their message of "Jobs Jobs Jobs" really was "ruin the environment and defund Planned Parenthood" sorta makes people think twice.
If you are confident, then I challenge you to prove it practically. Go convince a birther they are wrong. Let me know what key evidence you used.
That isn't my point. Here's my point:
Scott says there is no hope for people who are true believers, those who are immune to logic and reason and evidence.
I say that once I was a true believer, and that I was immune to logic and reason and evidence. I also know of many other people who once believed stupid shit, who were beyond logic and reason and evidence, and who now have other views.
Scott says I was not a true believer.
The definition of true believer is someone who has not YET changed his or her mind, and become open to logic and reason and evidence.
However, it is impossible to know who WILL use logic and evidence and reason in the future. And once they do, Scott will simply say "They were never a true believer." Which means the only definition of those who "can't be helped" and those for whom "there is no hope" is that they are not yet convinced, and if they ever are convinced, they were never beyond hope and could be helped.
Scott never came up with a way to tell apart true believers from non-true believers which didn't involve time travel. My reply to this is that while some unknowable number of non-beyond-hope non-true-believers are mixed in among the true believers, you can't class everyone who holds a current opinion or stance as being beyond reason and logic and evidence.
I have to agree with Luke here. Besides, straight-up logic and evidence aren't the only recourses available. Sometimes it may be better to appeal to emotion and then slip rational discourse in afterwards. People are complicated and different, and so I sincerely doubt that such a large fraction of these people are truly "beyond hope" - it's just that they haven't yet been approached in the way they needed to be.
I used to be a true believer, and logic and reason and evidence were not what started me on the journey to changing my beliefs. I'm good at using them now, but at the time it had everything to do with non-logical aspects of my personality.
I used to be a true believer, and logic and reason and evidence were not what started me on the journey to changing my beliefs. I'm good at using them now, but at the time it had everything to do with non-logical aspects of my personality.
I am sure that there are people who can change. But I've been growing more pessimistic lately about how the masses work. I think that human beings are machines that resist change, and as the years pass almost all of them become so rooted in their psychological programming that they are incapable of change.
I used to be a true believer, and logic and reason and evidence were not what started me on the journey to changing my beliefs. I'm good at using them now, but at the time it had everything to do with non-logical aspects of my personality.
You may be the only person I have ever encountered or even heard of who was a true believer with no seed of doubt. Everyone I know, including myself, who started out believing and then learning otherwise had some seed of curiosity, doubt, and intellect that grew and grew until it pushed all the nonsense away.
Inability to trim an extremely small percentage of the deficit (forget the overall budget) = bad.
Both parties have some exposure.
Using health care funding as a political pawn doesn't give me much confidence in the government's ability to administer health care. Certain things shouldn't be left to blow in the political winds.
I used to be a true believer, and logic and reason and evidence were not what started me on the journey to changing my beliefs. I'm good at using them now, but at the time it had everything to do with non-logical aspects of my personality.
You may be the only person I have ever encountered or even heard of who was a true believer with no seed of doubt. Everyone I know, including myself, who started out believing and then learning otherwise had some seed of curiosity, doubt, and intellect that grew and grew until it pushed all the nonsense away.
When I was 11 years old, I got stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool, under a steel fence type thing. I was only a foot under water, but I ran out of breath trying to pull myself free. I swallowed water, and presumed I was going to drown. You know what my thought was in that moment?
"This is fine. When I die in the next few minutes, I'll go to heaven. Simple as that."
And while many people, including yourself, can't understand this level of belief, it is a common thing. There might be doubts now and then, but when it is time to put your life on the line, people stick to their (incorrect) beliefs. For years, knowing that I had so much faith that when faced with death I was okay with dying helped me keep my faith in the face of evidence and logic and etc.
But even if I wasn't a true believer all along, my point still stands. The is NO WAY to tell a true believer from a non true believer, except wait until they die. If they die as a believer, they were a true believer and were beyond help. If they did change their mind, they were never a true believer. Which means that the whole idea of true believers who are beyond help is a false category!
In the case of birthers, I think some of them are beyond logic and reason and evidence. I'd say the vast majority of them just don't care enough to think that hard. There is no evidence that will convince them of the truth, because it wasn't evidence that convinced them of the falsehood. I'm never going to convince them otherwise, but then that isn't my job.
What will convince them is bigger issues that make this whole episode seem trivial. For example: Obama, in the primaries, did well because he was one of the only candidates not to endorse the war in Iraq. By the time he got to office, nobody gave a shit about that any more, as the focus had turned to the economy. The same thing will happen before and during and after the next election. Nobody will give a shit about Obama's birth certificate, because they'll be more worried about HOLY SHIT MY WIFE JUST DIED OF THE PLAGUE! When Obama's birth certificate is no longer an important thing for them, they'll just say "He really is American? Whatever. Give me those drugs, please."
Name one legitimate potential candidate who wouldn't renew the PATRIOT Act.
Don't get me wrong. All of those scumsucking bastards would have done it. It's the fact that he couldn't even do it by his own hand that is so disgusting.
If you're going to infringe upon my freedoms, be man enough to do it yourself. Don't ask the machine that signs all the letters and photographs for 1st grade classrooms to do it in your stead.
Being outraged by the renewing of the PATRIOT Act is fine.
Being outraged that it was renewed with an autopen is immaterial hypocritical Luddite crap that the GOP is using to steal "credit" for "protecting America" from Obama. Why not be mad that his order to kill bin Laden was enacted by proxy instead of POTUS shooting him in the head personally? What if Obama was "hospitalized and not fully alert" on that night? Would the GOP be mad then?
You wouldn't hear a single word about it if Obama was a Repub.
There are lots of reasons to be mad at Obama. Please be mad for real reasons instead of bullshit like this.
I don't get it. Is it a graph that shows two predictions and the actual unemployment rate is shown as those dots? Or does the "actual employment rate" include people who are no longer motivated for finding a job and it's being compared to the predicted unemployment rate sans recovery plan which does NOT include people who are not motivated (i.e. not comparing the same thing)?
Comments
How do we feel Obama will come away from this whole budget mess?
Does anyone actually think the US is going to be OK as a country when spending a trillion+ dollars more than it earns every year? It's an economic game that works as long as you can keep kicking the can down the road for the next guy, but debt has been tacking on exponentially. It will get to the point where you're trying to kick a can steeply uphill. That shit will come back and hit you in the face.
It's just frustrating to read any news as someone who feels this way. All I want is for the government to only spend what it earns, but there is a huge gap. Republicans claim (at the moment) that they want to close this gap but we all know that is just a bunch of bullshit. In my eyes, Obama and George W are the same damn person (this is usually enough to make people's heads explode). Both Republicans and Democrats are going to keep it going because bringing home the bacon keeps them in office.
As for the second half it's pretty common to run up big deficits when you are in a recession. But we were supposed to have a surplus of money to float us through a downturn...... Wonder what happened to that?
The issue here is that the republicans wish to cut services and lower taxes. So If we lower the amount of services we provide by 100 billion dollars and we give out 100 billion in tax cuts (revenue reduction) we've essentially changed NOTHING.
But they're not hearing that.
They're not paying attention to the (recent) past.
Clinton raised taxes, Congress implemented paygo and voila we find ourselves with a surplus for the first time in the past what, 60 years? 100 years? Then Bush lowers taxes, heavily weighted towards the higher end, the largest (unpaid for because paygo expired as a rule of congress at this point) expansion of medicare. And with the help of a few depression era laws that Clinton repealed, we find our selves in a bubble that explodes staring down a second Great Depression with no reserves, because they were squandered by not paying down the debt when we had a chance instead giving them to the most well off and buying off the middle class with a 300 dollar check.
Why is it so hard for them to codify that they will not authorize new legislation that can not be paid for (paygo). Why is it so hard for them to say "As per the Constitution we are raising taxes to pay down our debt"?
As for the government spending tons of money now, it's what you do. Well unless your name is Herbert Hoover and you believe that when the country is suffering financially the government should tighten it's belt too. If that's how you feel then I believe I have a cardboard box you can live in down by the river.
Which makes me wonder, if Obama were to loose to a republican and he takes the same stance, are we going to rename cardboard shanty towns to "Palinville's" or maybe "Romneyville's"? While I'm a bit of a nostalgic person, I think we should lay the blame at the current cause rather than conjuring up visions of the 1929.
Anyhow, the Democrats were pretty screwed with the budget and the plan to stopgap and throw it on the incoming republicans was a good one. This fight is making them look really bad with their message of "Jobs Jobs Jobs" really was "ruin the environment and defund Planned Parenthood" sorta makes people think twice.
Scott says there is no hope for people who are true believers, those who are immune to logic and reason and evidence.
I say that once I was a true believer, and that I was immune to logic and reason and evidence. I also know of many other people who once believed stupid shit, who were beyond logic and reason and evidence, and who now have other views.
Scott says I was not a true believer.
The definition of true believer is someone who has not YET changed his or her mind, and become open to logic and reason and evidence.
However, it is impossible to know who WILL use logic and evidence and reason in the future. And once they do, Scott will simply say "They were never a true believer." Which means the only definition of those who "can't be helped" and those for whom "there is no hope" is that they are not yet convinced, and if they ever are convinced, they were never beyond hope and could be helped.
Scott never came up with a way to tell apart true believers from non-true believers which didn't involve time travel. My reply to this is that while some unknowable number of non-beyond-hope non-true-believers are mixed in among the true believers, you can't class everyone who holds a current opinion or stance as being beyond reason and logic and evidence.
Besides, straight-up logic and evidence aren't the only recourses available. Sometimes it may be better to appeal to emotion and then slip rational discourse in afterwards. People are complicated and different, and so I sincerely doubt that such a large fraction of these people are truly "beyond hope" - it's just that they haven't yet been approached in the way they needed to be.
Inability to trim an extremely small percentage of the deficit (forget the overall budget) = bad.
Both parties have some exposure.
Using health care funding as a political pawn doesn't give me much confidence in the government's ability to administer health care. Certain things shouldn't be left to blow in the political winds.
"This is fine. When I die in the next few minutes, I'll go to heaven. Simple as that."
And while many people, including yourself, can't understand this level of belief, it is a common thing. There might be doubts now and then, but when it is time to put your life on the line, people stick to their (incorrect) beliefs. For years, knowing that I had so much faith that when faced with death I was okay with dying helped me keep my faith in the face of evidence and logic and etc.
But even if I wasn't a true believer all along, my point still stands. The is NO WAY to tell a true believer from a non true believer, except wait until they die. If they die as a believer, they were a true believer and were beyond help. If they did change their mind, they were never a true believer. Which means that the whole idea of true believers who are beyond help is a false category!
In the case of birthers, I think some of them are beyond logic and reason and evidence. I'd say the vast majority of them just don't care enough to think that hard. There is no evidence that will convince them of the truth, because it wasn't evidence that convinced them of the falsehood. I'm never going to convince them otherwise, but then that isn't my job.
What will convince them is bigger issues that make this whole episode seem trivial. For example: Obama, in the primaries, did well because he was one of the only candidates not to endorse the war in Iraq. By the time he got to office, nobody gave a shit about that any more, as the focus had turned to the economy. The same thing will happen before and during and after the next election. Nobody will give a shit about Obama's birth certificate, because they'll be more worried about HOLY SHIT MY WIFE JUST DIED OF THE PLAGUE! When Obama's birth certificate is no longer an important thing for them, they'll just say "He really is American? Whatever. Give me those drugs, please."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/president-obama-delivers-statement
It's going to be very interesting seeing how the politics carry out with the election coming up.
If you're going to infringe upon my freedoms, be man enough to do it yourself. Don't ask the machine that signs all the letters and photographs for 1st grade classrooms to do it in your stead.
Being outraged that it was renewed with an autopen is immaterial hypocritical Luddite crap that the GOP is using to steal "credit" for "protecting America" from Obama. Why not be mad that his order to kill bin Laden was enacted by proxy instead of POTUS shooting him in the head personally? What if Obama was "hospitalized and not fully alert" on that night? Would the GOP be mad then?
You wouldn't hear a single word about it if Obama was a Repub.
There are lots of reasons to be mad at Obama. Please be mad for real reasons instead of bullshit like this.