Originally Posted by Wallace 88

No, governemnts do "order" that. They recognize what is already agreed upon by those forming the business.

No businesses exist that were formed before the laws I'm talking about were passed. All businesses that were formed since those laws were passed are shaped by them.

This goes back a long way, but not to before civilization and laws existed. Consider a Medieval one-person cottage-industry type business, say a self-employed weaver.

The weaver invests the capital: he buys a loom, thread, and whatever else is needed to make cloth.

The weaver also does the work: he makes cloth on his loom out of his thread and sells it.

The weaver owns the cloth and so owns the proceeds of sale of the cloth. But does he own it because he invests the capital, or because he does the work? The question doesn't arise, because he is the source of both capital and labor.

When we separate the two, as in modern businesses, though, the question does arise -- and the law answers it. Ownership goes to the owners of capital. But there's nothing in nature that requires this (nature comes with no title deeds at all). The law specifies this, and it is at the heart of the capitalist system.

Government creates capitalism.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Omigod ... that was quite a list.
No one plays "gotcha" like Sir Glick.
We're not worthy!

-Oh, Rani. The list of Odin calling people he disagrees with "trolls" is much longer.

In the interest of "give a Rani a fish, she'll eat for a day; tech a Rani to fish, she'll eat for a lifetime,"

1) Click on "Advanced Search" button (upper right hand corner);

2) Click on the "Single Search Content" tab (left hand side);

3) Type "troll" in the "Keyword" space;

4) Type "Odin" in the "User Name" space;

5) Be careful to use the "Posts" button in the "Show Results As" section;

Oila! Instant results. It takes less than a minute.

Now you too can be worthy!

For practice, try to find all my inconsistencies!

JPT doesn't like to talk about the statistics from 2007 for teh simple reason that they destroy his narritive that voting Ronmey in and doubiling down on Bush II's policies is the cure rather than the primary cause of our current economic trouble. So how did perople on the street do in 2007? A lot better in the beginning of the year than later on.
The U3 started the year at 4.6% dipped to its low for the year of 4.4% as late as May and then began its slow rise as economic condiions began to deteriorate. It would hit the 5 percent mark in December and then as the Bush economic team was unable to keep the facade of prosperity in place 2008 turned into a year of almost uninterupted deterioration. And keep in mind that the inemployment rate is a lagging indicator. By the time it begins rising the next recession is usually already here. Conversely, when it begins to fall, as it is doing slowly now, it is a sign tha tthe recovery is if not here, at least getting closer.

Oh, and some say that our current dip in the unemployment rate is just the discouraged giving up looking ofr work. Well, things may be a little better than that.

Originally Posted by Erza Klein

There are lots of reasons people leave the labor force other than being unable to find work. They retire. They go to school. They start a family. They get married...

...they actually do check to see how many of the workers are out of the labor force because they’re discouraged about being unable to find work. And that number actually fell by 8,000 people between July and August, reaching it’s third-lowest point this year...

...So we don’t know why more than 500,000 people left the labor force between July and August. But the numbers we have suggest that it wasn’t because the number of discouraged workers rose

It does seem that we are seing shifts beyond economic reasons as to why the size of the labor force is shrinking. I suspect that the transition from one large generation, namely the boomers, being the primary driver of the economy to the entry level milles plays a part. There's just not a lot of jobs or disposable income for most millies yet. Many of them are in school or else changing their family arrangments in different ways in hopes of a beter future. We be 4T.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

...The U3 started the year at 4.6% dipped to its low for the year of 4.4% as late as May and then began its slow rise as economic condiions began to deteriorate. It would hit the 5 percent mark in December and then as the Bush economic team was unable to keep the facade of prosperity in place 2008 turned into a year of almost uninterupted deterioration. And keep in mind that the inemployment rate is a lagging indicator. By the time it begins rising the next recession is usually already here. Conversely, when it begins to fall, as it is doing slowly now, it is a sign tha tthe recovery is if not here, at least getting closer...

-I keep forgetting. We're you touting the collapse of the stock market (MAR 2000) as a leading indicator and unemployment as a lagging indicator when Bush was running for reelection in 2004?

Just wondering.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

-I keep forgetting. We're you touting the collapse of the stock market (MAR 2000) as a leading indicator and unemployment as a lagging indicator when Bush was running for reelection in 2004?

Just wondering.

Actually I also saw that one coming ahead of time too. Specifically I worked in the late '90's for a company that had an ESOP plan. We worked with subcontractors who supplied tech related companies. Long story short, In 1999 I took a different job and sold my ESOP stock back in 1999.
I got real money out of the deal and just three months later the decline began and the company that I worked for then no longer exists.

So yeah, I saw that the last two bubbles were going to pop a year or so ahead of time. My track record is better than Alan Greenspan's. He did see the tech bubble collapse coming but he missed seeing the much bigger real estate crash coming, I didn't.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

Actually I also saw that one coming ahead of time too. Specifically I worked in the late '90's for a company that had an ESOP plan. We worked with subcontractors who supplied tech related companies. Long story short, In 1999 I took a different job and sold my ESOP stock back in 1999.
I got real money out of the deal and just three months later the decline began and the company that I worked for then no longer exists.

So yeah, I saw that the last two bubbles were going to pop a year or so ahead of time. My track record is better than Alan Greenspan's. He did see the tech bubble collapse coming but he missed seeing the much bigger real estate crash coming, I didn't.

-Congragulations. I saw both bubbles coming, too. I thought they were obvious, but I guess not everyone.

So, you weren't one of those decrying "the worst economy and job growth since WWII" during the 2004 election?

Originally Posted by herbal tee

JPT doesn't like to talk about the statistics from 2007 for teh simple reason that they destroy his narritive that voting Ronmey in and doubiling down on Bush II's policies is the cure rather than the primary cause of our current economic trouble. So how did perople on the street do in 2007? A lot better in the beginning of the year than later on.
The U3 started the year at 4.6% dipped to its low for the year of 4.4% as late as May and then began its slow rise as economic condiions began to deteriorate. It would hit the 5 percent mark in December and then as the Bush economic team was unable to keep the facade of prosperity in place 2008 turned into a year of almost uninterupted deterioration. And keep in mind that the inemployment rate is a lagging indicator. By the time it begins rising the next recession is usually already here. Conversely, when it begins to fall, as it is doing slowly now, it is a sign tha tthe recovery is if not here, at least getting closer.

Oh, and some say that our current dip in the unemployment rate is just the discouraged giving up looking ofr work. Well, things may be a little better than that.


It does seem that we are seing shifts beyond economic reasons as to why the size of the labor force is shrinking. I suspect that the transition from one large generation, namely the boomers, being the primary driver of the economy to the entry level milles plays a part. There's just not a lot of jobs or disposable income for most millies yet. Many of them are in school or else changing their family arrangments in different ways in hopes of a beter future. We be 4T.

The discussion of how the crisis developed is a separate subject, which includes the Democratic Party's refusal to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the CRA, and so forth. Politicians of both parties for years encouraged home ownership, and in some cases (mostly Democrats) strong-armed banks into giving loans to risky buyers with easy terms, which investment banks then bundled into securities as a solution for spreading the risk -- all of which was done under the explicit understanding that if anything went wrong, the government would be there to bail everyone out. Which is exactly what happened. If that's what you mean by "Bush policies", I'll give you partial credit. Bush did encourage home ownership, but he also tried to reform Fannie and Freddie, and the Democrats blocked it. The policies that caused the Crisis were Clinton policies as well as Bush policies. If Romney wants to prop that scheme back up, he can rightly be said to be "continuing Bush policies". If what you mean by Bush policies is low taxes and deregulation, you have no leg to stand on in the first case, and in the second case, you only have an argument where Wall Street is concerned. Not the rest of the economy. But the Dodd-Frank bill has been passed, and all that did was to fix in cement the current standing of the big investment banks, making them even more "too big to fail" than they were to begin with.

The other main cause of the problem was Federal Reserve policy. Interest rates were kept too low for too long. Guess what the result of low interest rates is? People are incentivized to borrow money.

In all of those regards, we don't need to elect Romney to continue Bush policy, because Obama has already continued Bush policy. He replaced one Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary with another, and retained Bush's Fed chairman. Obama and the Democrats supported TARP more strongly than the Republicans did. So what exactly are the "policies that got us into this mess" that Obama has abandoned and Romney would bring back? None, because Obama has continued them all. That rhetorical phrase is a bait-and-switch, intended to suggest that low taxes and deregulation of industry was somehow responsible for the crisis, which is ridiculous and completely divorced from reality. Considering how often he uses the phrase "the last 30 years", Obama is clearly trying to blame Ronald Reagan for the real estate bubble, which is outright lunacy, that only a complete idiot could fall for.

The question at hand for this election, however, is not how the crisis started, but how to fix the economy, and whether Obama has done anything to fix it. We know the answer, after four years. He is an absolute, abject failure. Period. End of story.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

The discussion of how the crisis developed is a separate subject, which includes the Democratic Party's refusal to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the CRA, and so forth. Politicians of both parties for years encouraged home ownership, and in some cases (mostly Democrats) strong-armed banks into giving loans to risky buyers with easy terms, which investment banks then bundled into securities as a solution for spreading the risk -- all of which was done under the explicit understanding that if anything went wrong, the government would be there to bail everyone out. Which is exactly what happened...

-Even Barney Frank admitted as much:

http://finance.townhall.com/columnis...cts/page/full/


For years, Frank was a staunch supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government housing agencies that played such an enormous role in the financial meltdown that thrust the economy into the Great Recession...
“I hope by next year we’ll have abolished Fannie and Freddie,” he said... “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it.”

Of course, GWB was in favor of this general policy, too.

Originally Posted by Alioth68

[/FONT]



Just because people for the most part "outside this forum" don't understand the nature of turnings, and therefore are likely not going to take that understanding into account, doesn't invalidate the argument itself.

People were fairly patient with the slow recovery in the 30s and the various trial-and-error responses to it (hell they gave FDR four terms--at least two full ones in the Depression), because they seemed to understand that the problems were deeper than normal (or were otherwise not as inclined to demand quick gratification from their leaders--maybe we can thank the Boomers for that changing in the general culture),.....

Or maybe it was the commercial culture and advertising given us by the previous civic generation...

and some of where they were was uncharted territory (a defining feature of 4Ts btw). No matter who is President (and no president is a magical god-king), some recessions and depressions are more severe than others, take a longer time to recover from than others, and have different sets of underlying causes which means different (and sometimes new, to-be-discovered--such are 4Ts) solutions are required.

Yes indeed, and when the people go crazy impatient and give Obama a congress dedicated to making the recession worse by blocking anything Obama wants, in the hope that this will defeat him, as they did in Nov.2010, then the recession does indeed linger quite a bit longer than otherwise-- and you can see that in the graph JPT posted. Recovery was going better before the Republicons took over congress in Jan.2011. Votes have consequences. People voted in Nov.2010 to continue the recession and not recover from it.

I do think most people understand that what began around 2008 was a worse recession (some even used the "d" word) than that of the early 80s, and had different causes. I know a lot of people, regardless of who would be elected, were not expecting a turnaround from this one in a mere four years. I heard many even make the thoughtful observation that getting elected in 2008 would be more of a curse (or thankless job) than a blessing for the one seeking it--whether it be McCain or Obama. I didn't expect miracles either, and still don't--but am concerned more with the candidates' difference in priorities, and how much (or little) their policies will take into account those most vulnerable in these hard times. And in that, I see Obama as having somewhat of an edge, albeit (sadly) not a big one.

Obama is not correct in all his policies. But his edge is a big one, because the Republicans have nothing to offer but going back to the policies that caused the mess, and which are now keeping us from recovery. And if we don't vote them out, and not Obama, the recession will just continue.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

...Yes indeed, and when the people go crazy impatient and give Obama a congress dedicated to making the recession worse by blocking anything Obama wants, in the hope that this will defeat him, as they did in Nov.2010...

-Uh, Obama had a Democratic congress, including a filibuster proof majority in the senate between Franken taking his seat and Chappaquidick Ted going to the same place he sent Mary Joe (or was it a different place?). You know, the same type of Democratic majority in both houses which helped create the crisis between JAN 2007- DEC 2008:

Originally Posted by JDG 66;442965
[URL

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/larrykudlow/2010/08/21/barney_frank_comes_home_to_facts/page/full/[/URL]

For years, Frank was a staunch supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government housing agencies that played such an enormous role in the financial meltdown that thrust the economy into the Great Recession...

“I hope by next year we’ll have abolished Fannie and Freddie,” he said... “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it.”

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

The question at hand for this election, however, is not how the crisis started, but how to fix the economy

Yeah, and the options before us seem to be, "do inadequate amounts of the right thing" and "give the economy a second dose of what broke it in the first place."

I don't find either option all that exciting, but it's clear as can be which one is better. I'm reminded of the Hypocratic Oath: First, do no harm.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Yeah, and the options before us seem to be, "do inadequate amounts of the right thing" and "give the economy a second dose of what broke it in the first place."

I don't find either option all that exciting, but it's clear as can be which one is better. I'm reminded of the Hypocratic Oath: First, do no harm.

And what does even Barney Frank now admit constituted harm?

Originally Posted by JDG 66

http://finance.townhall.com/columnis...cts/page/full/


For years, Frank was a staunch supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government housing agencies that played such an enormous role in the financial meltdown that thrust the economy into the Great Recession...
“I hope by next year we’ll have abolished Fannie and Freddie,” he said... “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it.”

..stop electing progressives?

Originally Posted by JDG 66

-I keep forgetting. We're you touting the collapse of the stock market (MAR 2000) as a leading indicator and unemployment as a lagging indicator when Bush was running for reelection in 2004?

Just wondering.

Urgh, the economy circa 2004 featured a thin job base as it was so centered on home construction but was a symptom of what is likely to be true in the future--jobless or almost jobless recoveries.
Over time we are becoming more efficent and production. In many ways that is a good thing but we are now close to the point where there may not be enough work for eveyone even in boom times.

Short answer yes I was critical of how thin the basis of the Bush economy was. But longer term I saw the bigger problem that our political system currently has no way to address. I will ad that I doubt it will be totally addressable in our lifetimes.

Nevertheless, unemploymnt rates will likely remain a good lagging indicator of where we are economically. But they may lag even more over time.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

The discussion of how the crisis developed is a separate subject,

No, it is not. You can't cure a disease if you don't know what caused it. Easy money had a lot to do with the real estate bubble forming. But the biggest area to go bust were in high cost/ high growth area like Florida, Nevada and California. Where I live there wasn't really a bubble at all. Areas with relatively low housing prices such as the rural south and the midwest.

Originally Posted by JPT

If what you mean by Bush policies is low taxes and deregulation,

Umm, we've been trying supply sde for 30 years and from the S and L crises to the real estate bubble the only things that has grown is the size of the economic bubbles and subsequent crashes.

to suggest that low taxes and deregulation of industry was somehow responsible for the crisis, which is ridiculous and completely divorced from reality. Considering how often he uses the phrase "the last 30 years", Obama is clearly trying to blame Ronald Reagan for the real estate bubble, which is outright lunacy, that only a complete idiot could fall for.

The question at hand for this election, however, is not how the crisis started, but how to fix the economy, and whether Obama has done anything to fix it. We know the answer, after four years. He is an absolute, abject failure. Period. End of story.

Well, I'll tell you what Chipper. Four years ago this month we had a stock market crash. The economy wa in free fall losing about a half a million jobs a month by January 2009. And while I don't agree that the Obama course has been enough of a chnge from supply side to be the permanent solution, he has stabilized things enough that a slow recover is underway.

However, I'll grant you this. If we have another stock market crash between now and election day than I will conceed that we are not better off than we were 4 years ago.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

...Over time we are becoming more efficent and production. In many ways that is a good thing but we are now close to the point where there may not be enough work for eveyone even in boom times.

Short answer yes I was critical of how thin the basis of the Bush economy was. But longer term I saw the bigger problem that our political system currently has no way to address. I will ad that I doubt it will be totally addressable in our lifetimes...

...hmm... are you on your meds?

The fact that production is more efficient is a good thing (I'm glad to see you agree, whew!), but the same problem was a lot bigger in the 19th century wrt agrigulture. In 1860, about 50% of the population were aggie. I don't think we would want to go back to that.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

...Four years ago this month we had a stock market crash. The economy wa in free fall losing about a half a million jobs a month by January 2009. And while I don't agree that the Obama course has been enough of a chnge from supply side to be the permanent solution, he has stabilized things enough that a slow recover is underway...

-Actually, the recovery began in June of 2009. It takes between 6-24 months for government polices to show up in the general economy (particularly if it's not "shovel ready" ). So the recovery would not be a result of anything that occured before DEC of 2008, and possibly not before JUN 2007. Our current economic situation (for good or ill) is probably influenced by things which occured between SEP 2010 and MAR 2012.

FWIW.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

In the interest of including S&H, here's another thing to consider. Who were the most significant presidents during the 3T that began in the early 1900s? What was the new, growing philosophy that was sweeping politics? It was TR and Wilson, and the philosophy was "progressivism".

TR's program was the Square Deal.

Originally Posted by Wiki

The Square Deal was President Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking plutocracy and bad trusts while at the same time protecting business from the most extreme demands of organized labor. In contrast to his predecessor William McKinley, Roosevelt was a Republican who believed in government action to mitigate social evils, and as president denounced “the representatives of predatory wealth” as guilty of “all forms of iniquity from the oppression of wage workers to defrauding the public.”

The Square Deal was a predecessor to his nephew's New Deal. TR was trying to help what is now called the ninety nine percent and shield them from the one percent.

While TR and other early 20th Century progressives foreshadowed the New Deal trough Great Society era of Tax and Spend Liberalism, Reagan thought the progressives had gone too far and began to dismantle New Deal through Great Society programs. I'll add that to some degree Reagan was right. The GI's from the 1940s through the 1960s were crazy for Big Government doing Big Things. Too crazy. They wanted to contain communism and make war on poverty while flying to the Moon. They were optimistic about America in ways we can't dream of today. They had a ton of energy they could only burn off trying to do great things. Given the Fall of Saigon, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, the Hostage Crisis and the National Malaise, they finally burned all that off. Reagan's was time to go with smaller government, reduced taxes, and a sort of national vacation where we weren't trying to solve every problem in the world at once by throwing money at it.

Reagan was the right man for his time, but times change. One can't keep responding to every situation with tax cuts for the wealthy, larger militaries and fewer welfare queens. If one keeps doubling down on old policy there comes a different time and diminishing returns. The rhetoric that government isn't the solution, it's the problem, is the antithesis of the optimistic energetic do great things America of the middle 20th Century. It was a pithy pungent expression of where America had to go for the duration of the unravelling, but it is far from the central theme of traditional America.

Anyway, the Square Deal was a prequel to the New Deal. Morning in America started trimming excess from the New Deal. TR and Reagan were both men of their times and moved America in directions it likely should have moved. They pushed in opposite directions, though, at least from a class perspective.

But you do live in an interesting alternate reality.

Another thing to point out is that Ronald Reagan governed at the end of the Awakening, not its beginning, while TR was a purely Awakening president. It's inappropriate to compare the two for that reason. As for Woodrow Wilson, he was an Unraveling president, not a transitional one like Reagan (that would be W.H. Taft, who like Reagan governed in the 3T's first term). Although Wilson was progressive in his own philosophy, he did at least as much to retard progress as to forward it. In that way, the current saeculum's president to whom he bears the closest resemblance is Bill Clinton, not Reagan.

There's only a limited amount of comparison you can make from one saeculum to another and especially from one leader to another, but at the very least you should get the dates right. If any president's governance set the tone for our 2T in both a positive and negative way, it was Lyndon B. Johnson. And it was the 2T's Theodore Roosevelt, not the 3T's W.H. Taft or Woodrow Wilson, who previsioned the 4T's FDR.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

BR is a little self-important, isn't he? Nice deflation, Wallace.

Yea, where's that military history book of yours that you were so fond of telling us about?

Originally Posted by JDG 66

-Congragulations. I saw both bubbles coming, too. I thought they were obvious, but I guess not everyone.

And yet you're still in the trailer park.

What's more brainless - not seeing it coming or seeing it coming (supposedly) and not acting on it?

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

The discussion of how the crisis developed is a separate subject, which includes the Democratic Party's refusal to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the CRA, and so forth. Politicians of both parties for years encouraged home ownership, and in some cases (mostly Democrats) strong-armed banks into giving loans to risky buyers with easy terms, which investment banks then bundled into securities as a solution for spreading the risk -- all of which was done under the explicit understanding that if anything went wrong, the government would be there to bail everyone out. Which is exactly what happened. If that's what you mean by "Bush policies", I'll give you partial credit. Bush did encourage home ownership, but he also tried to reform Fannie and Freddie, and the Democrats blocked it. The policies that caused the Crisis were Clinton policies as well as Bush policies. If Romney wants to prop that scheme back up, he can rightly be said to be "continuing Bush policies". If what you mean by Bush policies is low taxes and deregulation, you have no leg to stand on in the first case, and in the second case, you only have an argument where Wall Street is concerned. Not the rest of the economy. But the Dodd-Frank bill has been passed, and all that did was to fix in cement the current standing of the big investment banks, making them even more "too big to fail" than they were to begin with.

The other main cause of the problem was Federal Reserve policy. Interest rates were kept too low for too long. Guess what the result of low interest rates is? People are incentivized to borrow money.

In all of those regards, we don't need to elect Romney to continue Bush policy, because Obama has already continued Bush policy. He replaced one Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary with another, and retained Bush's Fed chairman. Obama and the Democrats supported TARP more strongly than the Republicans did. So what exactly are the "policies that got us into this mess" that Obama has abandoned and Romney would bring back? None, because Obama has continued them all. That rhetorical phrase is a bait-and-switch, intended to suggest that low taxes and deregulation of industry was somehow responsible for the crisis, which is ridiculous and completely divorced from reality. Considering how often he uses the phrase "the last 30 years", Obama is clearly trying to blame Ronald Reagan for the real estate bubble, which is outright lunacy, that only a complete idiot could fall for.

The question at hand for this election, however, is not how the crisis started, but how to fix the economy, and whether Obama has done anything to fix it. We know the answer, after four years. He is an absolute, abject failure. Period. End of story.

This nonsense has been thoroughly debunked countless times.

It is, in fact, the first "Glick Schtick" that I did a few years ago. Like JPT, Glick (now know as JDG 66) just repeats such nonsense again and again. I found it more succinct to respond to the repetitive madness by simple reference. One can find this one, " Glickism #1 - Fannie, Freddie and the CRA did it!" here -

http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/s...889#post377889

Just further confirmation of the increasingly obvious fact that Republicans today lie about everything all the time.

Maybe I should add "over and over and over and over again."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
edit

I forgot if this is in the Glickism thread or not, but it so much fun, I didn't want to miss it here.

Since the real estate meltdown was global with much worst consequences in places like Spain and Ireland, how was it that Fannie/Freddie or the CRA caused those meltdowns? Last I checked, those things had nothing to do with foreign real estate markets. It must have been magic ponies? But let's see if JPT or Glick can explain that mechanism; it should be fun.

A facebook post just reminded me: are you better off than you were 12 years ago? Not if you were killed or wounded or mistreated by the 2 wars begun by the last Republican president. Many Americans might forget. But George W. Bush allowed 9-11 to happen; he went on vacation and ignored intelligence, perhaps due to his connections with the bin Laden family and the Saudi oil men; and then he started a war in Afghanistan; failing to put the troops on the ground necessary to catch bin laden and put the Taliban away for good; then he started another war without provocation or reason, justified by cooked up "intelligence," thus diverting resources from the first war and letting it drag on for 13 years. Now Romney wants to bring the same team back; the same neo-cons, so they can start more wars of choice, and/or neglect our security and screw up our intelligence again so they can start more wars. What is worse for our country than a war? Nothing is worse. If you don't think so, then YOU should go to Afghanistan and get yourself blown up or maimed for life!

No, the choice could not be easier. We can go in Reverse, or Drive. Go backward, or forward. And he needs some fuel in the engine; intelligence in congress, instead of the complete and absolute idiots who dominate it now. Give him a congress he can work with!

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

No, the choice could not be easier. We can go in Reverse, or Drive. Go backward, or forward. And he needs some fuel in the engine; intelligence in congress, instead of the complete and absolute idiots who dominate it now. Give him a congress he can work with!

Eric. Relax. Sit down. Breath deeply. Your navel. Meditate. One with the world. Peace. Ohmmmm.

Faraday. Coulomb.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Just further confirmation of the increasingly obvious fact that Republicans today lie about everything all the time.

Maybe I should add "over and over and over and over again."

But is it really and truly a lie if they sincerely with their whole hearts believe it? If their world view renders them entirely incapable of perceiving Reality as liberals know it, how does this effect how big a sin of lying they are committing when they attempt to speak on political issues?

Originally Posted by B Butler

Eric. Relax. Sit down. Breath deeply. Your navel. Meditate. One with the world. Peace. Ohmmmm.

Faraday. Coulomb.

No thanks! I think the facts as they exist, justify anything you might call emotional, but really isn't. Just the cold hard facts, man! Clarity is what it is!

Hey, I have meditated almost every day this week. Have you? If I remember, you find it too difficult, so you gave up.

War is hell, and often wrong; and if I remember correctly, you are less convinced of this than I too. It is a matter of disagreement, not a matter of me not breathing, iirc! Certainly everything I said about Bush's wars is absolutely correct. There was no justification for them, or for how they were waged. If you disagree, you can say so; though I think you have already made your case.

We can vote for Obama or Romney (or others, if we so choose). The choice is, more wars of choice, or winding the ones down started by Bush, and bringing the troops home. Thousands more dead and maimed for no reason, OR NOT! That is a clear and simple choice. Realize it.

(btw, a vote for Stein or Johnson is also a vote against more wars of choice)

Originally Posted by B Butler

But is it really and truly a lie if they sincerely with their whole hearts believe it? If their world view renders them entirely incapable of perceiving Reality as liberals know it, how does this effect how big a sin of lying they are committing when they attempt to speak on political issues?

The facts have been presented to them over and over again, and they ignore them over and over again. I think the word lie is appropriate. Come to think of it, almost any bad word is appropriate. Believing a lie does not strike me as an excuse for telling it, if they deliberately and demonstrably lie to support their positions. Some people are worth trying to deal with; not most of these Republican politicians. Give up on any idea of working or communicating with these people. The only appropriate action towards them is to defeat them.

If they are defeated utterly and often, maybe the voters in that party will demand that it come back to reality, instead of continuing to put up extremist idiots who always lose. Losing can be a good wake-up call.

I know, breathe and relax.....