| Author |
 Topic  |
|
sailawaybob
Forum Member
|
Posted - 08/13/2010 : 10:49:23 PM
|
well since daffy brought up history has anyone seen the news stories about teaching less history and less about the constitution in the schools, the left does recommend reading the writings of saul alinsky though, yup were headed down the toilet...
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 1268 |
 |
|
|
homenude
Forum Member
|
 Posted - 08/13/2010 : 11:19:38 PM
|
Maybe you are being too glum. November is apt to change things considerably.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 56 |
|
|
|
sailawaybob
Forum Member
|
Posted - 08/17/2010 : 5:29:11 PM
|
homenude that may happen and i hope it does but our politicians are the for two things , the dollar in their pocket and power, it starts from local government to the white house and yes i pray there will be a change but i won't hold my breath there are a lot of stupid people that are able to vote. but the vote is around the corner but then even if voted out they still can impose their socialist votes and laws on us till january 2011.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 1268 |
|
|
|
homenude
Forum Member
|
Posted - 08/17/2010 : 6:03:30 PM
|
Actually, the replacement Senators from Delaware, Illinois and West Virginia will leave office as soon as their successors have been duly certified, which probably will be in late November.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 56 |
|
|
|
Jim in Boston
Forum Member
|
Posted - 08/24/2010 : 9:51:36 PM
|
quote:
Originally posted by NaturistDoc
jbsnc: quite true that 46% of income earners pay no federal INCOME tax, but that is a long way from saying they pay no federal tax. Payroll tax, Social Security and Medicare are all federal taxes. Your third point about how the higher income earners are paying an increasingly higher percentage of the total tax take each year is highly misleading. The reason they're paying a higher percentage of the total tax take is that their share of the total income is rising even faster. It is an inarguable fact that, despite the supposedly 'progressive' nature of the federal income tax, people in the lower brackets end up paying a larger percentage of their income in taxes than do the wealthy. Bush's tax cuts may have "benefitted everybody", but those in the bottom half averaged a couple of hundred bucks, while the top tenth averaged over a hundred thousand. And thanks to the Bush era of Crony Capitalism, there will be for the foreseeable future an even larger number of people paying no income tax because they're unemployed. Nor should we expect wages and purchasing power for the average American to increase any time soon. It's no wonder that while Wall Street is declaring the recession over, Main Street is unconvinced. And now we're treated to the spectacle of Mitch McConnell getting up on his hind legs to bitch about the proposed financial reform legislation, falsely claiming it's a bailout bill, just minutes after meeting with a roomful of bankers and lobbyists. It's obvious whose side he's on. The Tea Party's anger is understandable, but aimed at the wrong target. They have totally been played.
Last time I looked, the Payroll Tax was called "FICA" and was a mandatory contribution to a federally run pension plan (called 'social security'). They told me that I would get it back when I retired. They insisted it was not a "tax". Now, you can't have it both ways. If it is a contribution to a retirement fund it is not a 'tax' and it is unfair to describe it as such. If you want to describe it as a "tax" (which I believe it to be), you should get the tax and spend guys in DC (like my congressman, Mr. Frank) to admit it is such. This is more than I have managed to get the guy to do.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 79 |
|
|
|
balataf
Forum Member
|
Posted - 08/25/2010 : 11:59:06 AM
|
The general Tea Party movement scored notable recent victories in unseating a US Senator is Alaska, nominating a Governor in Florida, a Governor in Colorado, and others up and down the ballots.
Rather than voting to return to the Bush Era, we have a very different Republican mix today. This is likely to be the biggest Congreessional turnover since 1958.
Ten short weeks at this point.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 661 |
|
|
|
FlCpl4NewdFun
Forum Member
|
Posted - 08/25/2010 : 10:09:33 PM
|
The Tea Party didn't give Rick Scott the primary win. $50MM of his own personal funding bombarding us Floridians with nasty negative ads is what did it. Scott isn't evan a real Tea Party candidate, granted, he did receive much support from their ranks due to his opposition of Obamacare. Here's the highlight of a one I got in the mail last week. As Attorney General, McCullum hired anti-gay activist George Reker as an expert witness while fighting to stop a gay adoption ---> turns out Reker was a closet homosexual himself and traveled throughout Europe with a male escort he found on Rentboy.com ----> McCullum therefore supports gay prostitution. Well maybe that's not verbatim, but it was clear that's the message he was trying to send. It was the second worst negative ad I have ever seen.
His affiliation with the Tea Party was a savvy (perhaps brilliant) opportunistic play on his part in the primaries. He now needs figure out a way to not gloat in the face of the Florida GOP establishment, create a way for them to save face for 100% of them backing McCollum, and hire a moving van to transport his household goods from his $15MM mansion in Naples to his future home in Tallahassee because his Democratic opponent Alex Sink doesn't stand a chance.
|
|
Country:
| Posts: 219 |
|
|
|
CalTom
Forum Member
|
Posted - 08/28/2010 : 11:55:27 AM
|
quote:
Originally posted by FlCpl4NewdFun
The Tea Party didn't give Rick Scott the primary win. $50MM of his own personal funding bombarding us Floridians with nasty negative ads is what did it. Scott isn't evan a real Tea Party candidate, granted, he did receive much support from their ranks due to his opposition of Obamacare. Here's the highlight of a one I got in the mail last week. As Attorney General, McCullum hired anti-gay activist George Reker as an expert witness while fighting to stop a gay adoption ---> turns out Reker was a closet homosexual himself and traveled throughout Europe with a male escort he found on Rentboy.com ----> McCullum therefore supports gay prostitution. Well maybe that's not verbatim, but it was clear that's the message he was trying to send. It was the second worst negative ad I have ever seen.
His affiliation with the Tea Party was a savvy (perhaps brilliant) opportunistic play on his part in the primaries. He now needs figure out a way to not gloat in the face of the Florida GOP establishment, create a way for them to save face for 100% of them backing McCollum, and hire a moving van to transport his household goods from his $15MM mansion in Naples to his future home in Tallahassee because his Democratic opponent Alex Sink doesn't stand a chance.
A great post. The problem in Florida isn't the message, it's the messenger. Rick Scott with the fixed smile and eyeballs that raise suspicions he's been reading The Idiot's Guide To Mass Hypnosis, should be sharing a jail cell with a seven-foot rural Appalachian named Bubba, not running for a Senate seat from the fourth most populous state in the country. Anyone can produce sound bites about "getting to work" and lowering taxes- the party I've been affiliated with is essentially a one-trick pony- but the man himself has all the credibility of a Barnum & Bailey huckster and a snake oil salesman. One has to believe if the establishment Republican candidate Bill McCollum had a fraction of the charisma of a Scott Brown(R) Mass., that three percentage point primary loss would have been a landslide victory for the Florida AG.
You don't run a guy who looks like a myopic marshmallow man against a fast talking crook selling "Dr. Denton's Happy Tonic."
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 207 |
|
|
|
balataf
Forum Member
|
Posted - 09/10/2010 : 3:01:36 PM
|
Looking at the continuing results in this question. There are ery few ststes left to vote their primaries yet, with New York and Delaware coming to mind.
One thing that I have noticed personally, is the extent to which Big Business type Republicans are fading and shrinking in influence. While there are exceptions, like Cslifornia, this trend is very clear and pronounced.
One factor that has had me puzzled for years is the irrational belief many on the liberal and left side of the political spectrum have that, despite the massive evidence, "Corporations" and "Big Business" have an overwhelming dominance within the Republicans.
It's just not true. And it dovetails with the leftish viewpoint that greatly overstates how much of political life is based on economic issues. Many Democrats are quite unable to deal with campaigns in which economic issues are overshadowed by social questions like "Gay
Marriage," Abortion, Gun Control, or the Ground Zero Mosque. They just have an emotional bias that these issues are less "real" when there is no dollar sign.
This was the entire mistake behind the book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?"
Part of the image of Republican "Big Business" is a leftover from older features, like Eisenhower's Cabinet, which was a historic anomaly. Republican Federal Cabinets
always have some such figures, but with Eisenhower it was near total. Influences from large corporations were sharply reduced under Reagan and more recently as the Rockefeller wing of the Party was replaced by more conservatives But the Cabinet has not been the critical
power center for well over a century.
This process is now continuing as the libertarian Tea Party people replace the centrist Bush era cadre. (We tend to forget that Rove engineered a series of 37 primaries in which conservatives were knocked out by those supported by Bush. Example: Pennsylvania 2004 with Toomey
vs. Specter.)
Actually, from 1990 to 2008, Big Business donated more to Democratic candidates. Small Business is the Republican home base, and closely aligned with the current populist Tea Party, which is highly anti-corporate.
A current ad in Kentucky tries to pretend that Rand Paul is a corporate stooge. This is ridiculous at best. His campaign is about as anti-corporate as you can get, so he could care less. He won't trim his ideas for them, rather it is up to them to either support him or not.
This is like one Pennsylvania Congressional district, in which, supporting Obamacare, a left-leaning magazine accused the Blue Dog of being a corporate stooge for Big Pharma. The line was that "he'd better listen to his voters" than to the drug makers. When I analyzed his district, near my home, I found, to my estimate, 38,000 local voters with ties to the big pharmaceutical companies. These are sophisticated and well-educated voters. Maybe he WAS listening to them.
Much of the supposed "corporate toadying" is in fact, just paying attention to the actual voting base. Parallel interests even strong ones, do not mean subservience. Neither do they
imply that a politician was "bought." This type of leftish feel-good mantra actually gets in the way of understanding the dynamics of elections and legislation.
The one place where corporate money has had a large but uneven impact is in the burgeoning field of ballot questions and referenda. Most often different interests and industries line
up on both sides and partly cancel each other out.
To sum it up, I've spent 47 years involved in politics, with time off for the Army and Viet Nam. I've been to hundreds of political meetings in a town of 90,000, in a county of 650,000
people, and a few at the Pennsylvania state level. The voters are loud and rambunctious, but corporations are seldom and faintly heard.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 661 |
|
|
|
jbsnc
Forum Member
|
Posted - 09/10/2010 : 6:17:14 PM
|
quote:
Originally posted by NaturistDoc
What worries me is that what Balataf refers to as "the progressive people" is in fact a small and despised minority. Should we be in the business of imposing "modernism" on people who genuinely seem to wish to live life as it was in the 16th Century?
Further, Patience is no doubt a virtue, but at what point does "patience" turns into "throwing good money after bad"? According to Pentagon figures, the Afghan cost $6.7 billion dollars ... in February! (And February was a short month!) And the estimated costs going forward do nothing but increase. All that money might do wonders for our own deficits.
Hey Doc, Which segments of Afghan's population want to remain in the 16th Century? The women? Given substantial exposure to foreign societies, which segments would want to remain in the 16th Century? The women?
$6.7 billion or more a month spent in Afghanistan. So far about $700 billion in Iraq since the spring of 2003. What wonders would this money have done if applied to the deficit? As Senator Claghorn (LM-FA) often expressed, its a joke son. Add Medicare and Social Security financial collapse and $40 or $60 trillion in unfunded federal and state liabilities, it is not a joke, it is a crisis.
Happy Nuding.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 153 |
|
|
|
jbsnc
Forum Member
|
Posted - 09/10/2010 : 6:58:13 PM
|
quote:
Originally posted by Jim in Boston
quote:
Originally posted by NaturistDoc
jbsnc: quite true that 46% of income earners pay no federal INCOME tax, but that is a long way from saying they pay no federal tax. Payroll tax, Social Security and Medicare are all federal taxes. Your third point about how the higher income earners are paying an increasingly higher percentage of the total tax take each year is highly misleading. The reason they're paying a higher percentage of the total tax take is that their share of the total income is rising even faster. It is an inarguable fact that, despite the supposedly 'progressive' nature of the federal income tax, people in the lower brackets end up paying a larger percentage of their income in taxes than do the wealthy. Bush's tax cuts may have "benefitted everybody", but those in the bottom half averaged a couple of hundred bucks, while the top tenth averaged over a hundred thousand. And thanks to the Bush era of Crony Capitalism, there will be for the foreseeable future an even larger number of people paying no income tax because they're unemployed. Nor should we expect wages and purchasing power for the average American to increase any time soon. It's no wonder that while Wall Street is declaring the recession over, Main Street is unconvinced. And now we're treated to the spectacle of Mitch McConnell getting up on his hind legs to bitch about the proposed financial reform legislation, falsely claiming it's a bailout bill, just minutes after meeting with a roomful of bankers and lobbyists. It's obvious whose side he's on. The Tea Party's anger is understandable, but aimed at the wrong target. They have totally been played.
Last time I looked, the Payroll Tax was called "FICA" and was a mandatory contribution to a federally run pension plan (called 'social security'). They told me that I would get it back when I retired. They insisted it was not a "tax". Now, you can't have it both ways. If it is a contribution to a retirement fund it is not a 'tax' and it is unfair to describe it as such. If you want to describe it as a "tax" (which I believe it to be), you should get the tax and spend guys in DC (like my congressman, Mr. Frank) to admit it is such. This is more than I have managed to get the guy to do.
Hey Doc, Have you read the The FairTax' book? Please do so. You fudged on 'progressive' tax. This was originally associated only with federal income taxes.
Doc, Consider this. If you verbally and staunchly supported conservative beliefs at work for the next three years, would you still have a job? Would you be promoted? Do you believe that a college student of great intellect can get a masters degree in social sciences (oxymoron?) espousing moral values above political values?
Happy Nuding.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 153 |
|
|
|
jbsnc
Forum Member
|
Posted - 09/11/2010 : 6:27:21 PM
|
quote:
Originally posted by FlCpl4NewdFun
The Tea Party didn't give Rick Scott the primary win. $50MM of his own personal funding bombarding us Floridians with nasty negative ads is what did it.
Don't know rats about Rick Scott but enjoy your use of MM, a thousand thousand. For pure amusement, I would enjoy a street interviewer to ask passerbys what MM means. I think a hit TV show would grow from the responses.
Given a choice between self funding and funding from special interest groups such as unions and ambulance chasing lawyers, I choose self.
Happy Nuding.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 153 |
|
|
|
Warmskin
Forum Member
|
Posted - 09/14/2010 : 01:43:28 AM
|
As a Libertarian (I am former GOP'er), I would love it if Americans would re-discover the Constitution, the Founders of this country, and a strong yearning for freedom and liberty.
We tried socialism back in the eary 1600s and it was a huge flop. The leader of these colonists saw his immense mistake and put everyone on a free enterprise arrangement, and there were plenty for all to eat, wear, and enjoy.
After FDR (Fraud, Deceipt, and Ripoff)overthrew our free government, we have been on the course of failure ever since. When is the last time the federal government ever did anything right?
We're right back to where we used to be under King George III. The main difference between then and now were the tax rate (quite a bit less under George III), and the less freedom we have today.
Combine the FRS, the IRS, FDR, Bush the younger, neo-conservatism, and the takeover of our schools, it is a wonder that we are still here at all.
Now we have a nation which is bankrupt, and cannot survive unless a foreign country loans us more money for our grandiose, unconstitutional schemes laid down by our government.
It's no wonder that there is a Tea Party. If the USA were a hospital patient, it would be in an IC unit, with monitors, IV bottles, and electrodes attached all over. Most "Americans" simply don't realize how close we are to self-destruction. I use quote marks, because it should be the duty of Americans to know how their government works. Only an educated people can stay free. I should point out, I said "educated," and not programmed or propagandized.
British Prime Minister (former) Callaghan said in a speech, Woolwich, 30 January, 1976:
"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step."
Interestingly enough, Callaghan was Labor Party policitian. So, we have the Pilgrims discovering this point in the early 1600s, and this British Prime Minister discovering a very similar point, but Obama thinks he can suspend the immutable laws of economics and "improve" the American economy with probably unworkable gimmicks.
One thing about stimulus spending tis this: When you throw money at one sector of the economy, you necessarily deprive another sector of the economy of its ability to keep its jobs, let alone increase the number of jobs. It's just like taking money out of one pocket, and putting into another pocket and losing a lot of it in the transfer. Who wins in this arrangement, except a few privileged politically correct employees?
It seems enough of the public is now conscious of what is going on, thus the Tea Party. GOP establishment candidates are feeling the wrath of their angry fellow Republicans. The Tea Party is not in love with the Democrats, either. The Tea Party will not be satisfied for nothing. What the Tea Party needs to do is to keep this movement self-sustaining. It had also better keep out the neo-conservative Republican party leadership.
Freedom is what we should be all about. Try it, if you haven't thought it was a good idea. Ron Paul had it right all along. It took this much suffering to make a fair amount of people to realize his words are true. Even Fox News has realized that, and they now allow him to be in their interviews. Some folks make good prophets, and some don't. Fox didn't, in my opinion, and Ron Paul does.
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
James Madison
|
Edited by - Warmskin on 09/14/2010 01:44:35 AM |
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 1964 |
|
|
|
balataf
Forum Member
|
Posted - 09/15/2010 : 12:42:31 AM
|
Well, the last round of primaries took place a few hours ago. All the candidates are now in place for November. The Tea Party movement ovetthrew the estqablishment in several major races, including Delaware and New York. The only truly equivalent is whern the Populist Party and related movements captured the Democrats for a generqtion in 1896, remaining pretty well dominant until the New Deal, 36 years later. But they never were able to form a national majority, altho electing Wilson for two minority presidencies when the Republican majority had splits.
Now the question comes down to the ability of the Republicsn establishment and the TP groups to win a governing coalition, for Congress and state offices now, and for President in 2012. I expect a following round of Democratic Party shrinkage and collapse in 2012, before the balances again return toward America's long-term healthy equilibrium.
Party balances in a free democratic republic are like the water level in a lake. Periods of rain and drout will make it higher and lower at times, but USUALY the water stays near the medium range. Meanwhile many issues come and go, new problems arise, and the ever-changing lists of candidates reshffle from election to election. One key to stability is that there's always the possiblity open for "next time," for people and ideas.
|
Edited by - balataf on 09/15/2010 01:01:30 AM |
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 661 |
|
|
|
jbsnc
Forum Member
|
Posted - 09/21/2010 : 2:05:31 PM
|
A recent recap of our financial situation posted on Lew Rockwell's web site:
"The actual debt numbers are insane. Public Debt is over $13,433,000,000,000.00 (13.4 trillion). Add the GSE (Freddie/Fannie) debt to that and we are over 18 trillion. Pile on the unfunded liabilities hidden on the government’s off balance sheet ledgers: Social Security (14.6 trillion), Prescription Drugs (19.2 trillion), Medicare (76 trillion) and we come up with 128 trillion dollars.
128 trillion dollars of debt is why workers toil 227 days just for Uncle Scam and have no money to save. Stealing their savings and blowing it like they blew social security will not fix anything."
President Obama has identified the root cause, G. W. Bush, who fought two unfunded wars and implemented two unfunded tax cuts.
Happy Nuding.
|
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 153 |
|
|
|
Topic |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Nudist-Resorts.Org Discussion Forum Bulletin Board Nudism Clothing Optional Resort Naturism Nude Beaches |
© 2002-2020 SUN |
|
|
|
Tea Party Ten Point Platform
