Originally Posted by annla899

Jim Webb isn't too bad, though.

Virginia is on the political borderline of North and South, and probably has been since the Civil War. It ended up on the wrong side of the question of slavery and paid a high price. Note that it went for Hoover in 1928 and Eisenhower twice... was the only former Confederate State to not vote for Carter; it never voted for Clinton. It did vote for Obama, the definitive d@mnyankee pol.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

We can discuss generations, without discussing our birth years? I dunno.....

Can you talk of romance without revealing your little dinky?

If not, I would think we would have a lot less romance novelists.

It's about the numbers, gentlemen. You can be as impolite as you want, but you have basically narrowed YOUR field to Seattleblue and other non-fragile ladies who don't give a Fuckin-A if you want to talk about their age -



- note the length of that cigar however - you may have other problems with such ladies.


Note - I think this Fuckin-A lady is just awesome, but I should also note that I kinda look like her. My field has been narrowed by factors beyond my control - why would I want to narrow it further by being impolite?

Originally Posted by B Butler

Not only that, but going in FDR was a strong advocate for farming reforms. During World War I, a lot of European farming production was off line. The US increased its production to make up for the loss. At the end of WW I, when Europe's farms came back on line, there was a surplus production that killed prices. This, and the replacement of animals pulling plows with tractors was turning things upside down in rural areas.

Today we think of the Democrats representing urban interests while rural folks live a slower more conservative life style, having less need for change. This was not true in 1932. Farm policy was badly broken. What Marx & Lennon said about the south being desperate for change sounds right.

Barack Obama has a political style well suited to urban politics and succeeded in Suburbia to the extent that Suburbia has become legitimately urban and lost most of its rural qualities. He relied heavily on getting mass audiences that one can get in big cities and their suburbs and on college campuses. The only really-rural state that he won was Vermont. The three Southern states that he won (Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia) have urban giant areas well suited to his political style. Georgia does have greater Atlanta, but outside Atlanta Georgia is very rural. Texas suburbs are much newer than those of the Northeast, Great Lakes region, and even the Far West... and still maintain some bucolic qualities and right-wing politics.

Republicans have gotten complacent about rural America... but where is the Farm Bill of the 112th Congress? It could have been a win-win, but Congressional Republicans had other priorities, like ensuring that Barack Obama be a one-term President. Farm policy is broken again, as is much that got neglected during the Devil-take-the-hindmost 3T. Political failure that might be tolerated in a 3T is not a viable option in a 4T, when everything matters.

Rural America used to think itself exempt from urban problems -- but it has always had much poverty. It now has meth. It has much environmental degradation. Rural jobs that allowed families to keep a hold on marginal farms are being outsourced. What has differed between rural America and urban America as a divide on government philosophy is that public services and infrastructure are far cheaper in rural areas. Big cities have to pay teachers well enough to keep them from getting desperate for cash and abandoning teaching for selling furniture or cars, and must pay cops well enough to keep them from moonlighting on behalf of gangsters while slacking as cops. An eight-lane expressway that would be a preposterous waste in an area in which two-lane blacktops suit the low volumes of traffic in the Plains states would be grossly inadequate in northeastern New Jersey, greater Chicago, or the San Francisco Bay Area -- and in view of real estate costs and the need to relocate utilities, any upgrade of an urban expressway is fiendishly expensive.

President Obama is the definitive urban pol. He cannot and will not take the lead on rural reforms... but he can cooperate with rural liberal and populist politicians who can lead on rural issues.

This thread is really going downhill...

Originally Posted by playwrite

Let's check that fragility - what is your cup size?

A little mystery is usually appreciated by all parties.

Screw mystery, show everyone what you got....

from my email this morning:

Gov. Dean said it best: control of the House is up for grabs and every seat matters.

Democrats are surging. We've pulled into the lead or into tight races in all our must-win districts -- and new polls this week show Democrats closing in on tough districts in Iowa, Wisconsin and more. This is our shot to take back the House from John Boehner and his Tea Party majority. But we can't do it without your help.....

I don't know how they know this. But maybe they know something that Real Clear Politics doesn't know yet, since the latter's estimate seems to be based on no polls whatsoever.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Barack Obama has a political style well suited to urban politics and succeeded in Suburbia to the extent that Suburbia has become legitimately urban and lost most of its rural qualities. He relied heavily on getting mass audiences that one can get in big cities and their suburbs and on college campuses. The only really-rural state that he won was Vermont. The three Southern states that he won (Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia) have urban giant areas well suited to his political style. Georgia does have greater Atlanta, but outside Atlanta Georgia is very rural. Texas suburbs are much newer than those of the Northeast, Great Lakes region, and even the Far West... and still maintain some bucolic qualities and right-wing politics.

Republicans have gotten complacent about rural America... but where is the Farm Bill of the 112th Congress? It could have been a win-win, but Congressional Republicans had other priorities, like ensuring that Barack Obama be a one-term President. Farm policy is broken again, as is much that got neglected during the Devil-take-the-hindmost 3T. Political failure that might be tolerated in a 3T is not a viable option in a 4T, when everything matters.

Rural America used to think itself exempt from urban problems -- but it has always had much poverty. It now has meth. It has much environmental degradation. Rural jobs that allowed families to keep a hold on marginal farms are being outsourced. What has differed between rural America and urban America as a divide on government philosophy is that public services and infrastructure are far cheaper in rural areas. Big cities have to pay teachers well enough to keep them from getting desperate for cash and abandoning teaching for selling furniture or cars, and must pay cops well enough to keep them from moonlighting on behalf of gangsters while slacking as cops. An eight-lane expressway that would be a preposterous waste in an area in which two-lane blacktops suit the low volumes of traffic in the Plains states would be grossly inadequate in northeastern New Jersey, greater Chicago, or the San Francisco Bay Area -- and in view of real estate costs and the need to relocate utilities, any upgrade of an urban expressway is fiendishly expensive.

President Obama is the definitive urban pol. He cannot and will not take the lead on rural reforms... but he can cooperate with rural liberal and populist politicians who can lead on rural issues.

Obama has a political style that's suited for American Idol/Pop culture and urban glitz and glammer. Obama is running for Mr. Popular and the beloved King of The Nanny State title.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Screw mystery, show everyone what you got....

show em what you got, yea you got it baby, let it show!

Originally Posted by Odin

This thread is really going downhill...

Odin, this thread has been going downhill since page 2 or thereabouts. How else do you think we got to 10408 posts?

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by The Rani

Playdude giving lessons to others on politeness (and doing so correctly) surely signals that The End Is Near.
For those who still don't get it, it's about privacy, not age. Sort of like "outing" a gay person. STFU and MYOB.

Agreed. Xers have a thing about privacy--I do as well. I think it comes from Silents overemphasizing that Xers needed their "privacy" (my dad made sure I had loads of that)--and yet disturbed their kid's "privacy" if it suited them anyway. What was the old Xer teen stereotype from TV? Oh yes. Xer daughter gets a diary to keep all her "private thoughts" in and Silent/War Baby mother reads it (for entertainment--after all, if she wanted it to be kept from being read it shouldn't have been left out for anyone to read) between cleaning, cooking, eating bon bons on the sofa, and watching soap operas. Boomer mothers with Xer daughters did the same thing, but managed to justify their doing so better (usually in an attempt to try and "understand" why their daughter is acting so weirdly) and ends up punishing the daughter for whatever is discovered in the diary, and giving a lecture on why they're doing so. Those are the stereotypes at least.

Hell, Millennials even have it to some degree--usually worrying about different things though. Where's that thread that says Millennials are more likely to be the most covered up in the community Y's locker room and Boomers are more likely to just walk around stark naked? That's one I found quite true. And then there's the one where some Boomers don't mind going to the bathroom with the door wide open for everyone to see them, while Millennials prefer it being closed.

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

Obama has a political style that's suited for American Idol/Pop culture and urban glitz and glammer. Obama is running for Mr. Popular and the beloved King of The Nanny State title.

Then why does he do so well with people with PhD degrees -- people who, I presume, watch little television and have little time for glitz and glamor?

Nanny State? "Medicare for all" would be the right way to do medicine.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Then why does he do so well with people with PhD degrees -- people who, I presume, watch little television and have little time for glitz and glamor?

Nanny State? "Medicare for all" would be the right way to do medicine.

How many people with PhD's rely on or recieve government support? I don't know the exact percentage but I'll guess that it's around 47%.

Originally Posted by Classic-X'er

How many people with PhD's rely on or recieve government support? I don't know the exact percentage but I'll guess that it's around 47%.

You seem to be KIA '67 and Exile '67 in view of your spelling errors, bad grammar, and logical fallacies.

College professors and researchers with grants earn what they get.

Rasmussen and FOX just published polls with Obama leading by 2 and 5 respectively...

Liberal media conspiracy?

Other interesting data: 95% of people say they have made up their minds and are unlikely to change it before the election. Undecideds are around 4% and third party support is near 3%.

The game of predicting the election outcome is all well and good. I don't believe all polls are false, and I think Obama has a small lead. The polls do overstate support for Democrats, and the actual result is almost always more favorable to the Republican than the final polling. If Romney does well in the debates and makes a strong final push, he could win. But I want to talk right now about what will happen if Romney loses.

Previously I listed a few possibilities of what might happen over the next four years. But they are not all equally likely. If Obama wins, it is overwhelmingly likely, based on nothing but obvious logic and the experience of the last four years, that things will not get better in the next four, but will instead get worse. If the current policies we have been functioning under do not change (and they will not if Obama is re-elected), a host of chickens are going to come home to roost over the next four years.

1. The "fiscal cliff" is approaching early next year. If the current state of intractability on the part of Obama remains, we will go over it, almost certainly triggering another recession. Nothing constructive will be done about the national debt and the budget deficit. Nothing.

2. Obamacare will go into effect. The economic impact will be catastrophic to a limping economy.

3. We have just had "QE4" on the part of the Federal Reserve, a purely political move to juice the stock market and get Obama re-elected. Each time it is has had less of an effect, and each time the inevitable inflation it will produce gets more massive. Gas and food prices are not included in the official inflation rate. We all know that in spite of a deep economic downturn, those prices have continued to stay high, while people are less able to afford them.

4. There are things going on in the Middle East that threaten a combustion of some sort, and the Obama Administration has been ignoring it. "Leading from Behind" is the operative phrase. If something happens there, while it may not plunge the U.S. back into war, it will send the price of oil through the roof, which will trigger another recession, or make one that we are already in worse.

The left loves to sit around and talk about the disappearance of the Republican Party. It may in fact happen, because the failure of Romney will be the final failure of the party's establishment and leadership. They will have proven themselves to be completely incompetent fools. But recall what happened the last time a major party dissolved and was replaced. It was the Whigs, and the new party was a Republican Party that ended up dominating American politics for the next 72 years. The Democrats will not change. The Republicans are already in the process of changing, or being changed. Four years from now, with the country clearly in a depression and on the verge of total collapse, the people will no longer tolerate business as usual from either party, and something will have to give. Although I do not believe there will be widespread violence, there will be unrest. The Tea Party movement of the last few years will look like a minor blip in comparison (although it will obviously form the core of whatever the next step is).

If we were in a 3T, maybe Obama would wise up like Clinton did and the economy could have a chance of recovery. He has made it emphatically clear that he will not. He has admitted no mistakes, and has offered no new policies. Instead, he thinks that if he wins, the Republicans will suddenly go along with everything he wants, and everything will be fine. Good luck with that. If he is re-elected, it will not only prove that we are in a 4T, it will provide the seeds for the inevitable climax of the Crisis, which will not be civil war. It will be a collapse of federal authority. "Throw the bums out" will not be enough, something major will have to happen. And it won't be left wing, because the final disaster will have come under left wing leadership. There is a comparison to be made to the Weimar Republic. But the result will not be anything like Nazism. There will be no anti-semitism or wars of expansion. Those elements were unique to Germany in that period of time. I do fear that it could turn authoritarian. And it will be right wing, not left wing. But more hopefully, and more likely considering the ideology of the Tea Party movement, it will be a reiteration of the American Revolution, without bloodshed, where strict limits on federal power are re-imposed.

The other historic Republic obviously worth looking at is Rome. So much time and distance exists between then and now that I don't think a lot of direct comparisons can be made. But the trajectory from Republic to Empire to dissolution at the hands of barbarians is worth noting. The commonality is the global reach the U.S. has had, in terms of economics and culture. I don't think the country will cease to exist or shrink the way Rome did, because it has not expanded territorially the way Rome did. But the possibility of some kind of modern Dark Age is not remote. Given how much the country has already decayed from within since the 1960s, the pampered, frivolous mindset of recent decades will be replaced by dealing with basic questions of brutal reality.

The biggest problem with Boomers and with the left has always been that they take so many things for granted. They think you can keep hacking away at the roots, jack-hammering the foundations, and everything will still be fine just like it always has been (i.e. since Boomers were born, because no history exists before that). If we have four more years like the last, that illusion is going to be exposed, in very ugly ways.

I don't know that things will be significantly better if Romney wins. But at least there's a chance. If Obama wins, we already know what the next four years are going to be like. And if that doesn't produce rock bottom for those still living under illusions, I don't know what will.

To add some specificity to the above post:

We have a "ruling elite" in this country that is shallow, superficial, narcissistic, incompetent and completely out of touch with the people that it seeks to "rule". While it is true that economic elites, especially Wall Street, are a part of that would-be aristocracy, and elite Republicans are handmaidens to it, the rest of it, in its entirely, is far to the left of the American people: government, education, media.

The priorities and "values" of the ruling class bear no resemblance to those of the people. The last four years have been incontrovertible proof of that fact. Wall Street has been taken care of, and the ideological dogma and cultural agenda of the far left has been imposed. But the people are still left suffering. "Let them eat cake" will not stand for much longer. The analogy to the conditions that produced the American Revolution and the French Revolution is the best we have. The fancy snobs in their powdered wigs and pantyhose who think they rule by divine right are in for a fall. And again...they are overwhelmingly left wing.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

You seem to be KIA '67 and Exile '67 in view of your spelling errors, bad grammar, and logical fallacies.

College professors and researchers with grants earn what they get.

Yep, they earn it by not having enough money or having political connections. One other thing, I'd rather write like shit than intelligently write paragraphs with proper grammar that come across as PATHETIC.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

The game of predicting the election outcome is all well and good. I don't believe all polls are false, and I think Obama has a small lead. The polls do overstate support for Democrats, and the actual result is almost always more favorable to the Republican than the final polling. If Romney does well in the debates and makes a strong final push, he could win. But I want to talk right now about what will happen if Romney loses.

That all would have been wise assumptions in a 3T when the youngest voters were Generation X and were under-polled. Reagan and the elder Bush both did better than polls suggested because of generational reality that no longer holds. The Millennial Generation has been committed to huge debt just to have a chance to avoid relegation to a permanent underclass as has no previous generation -- or faces the prospect of permanent poverty with no escape. Debtors are on the Left, seeking inflationary tendencies to trivialize their debts or create opportunities to pay them off easily; creditors are on the Right, seeking to ensure that debt is a precious asset. Such is an old political reality. When people have good jobs that allow them to save and make low-risk, low-yield investments in savings accounts, insurance policies, and bonds those people become conservatives as when Eisenhower was President.

No reason exists to indicate that the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 will not poison attitudes toward a return to the economic practices of the latter part of the recent 3T for a very long time -- like the lives of people who remember that meltdown.

.....

1. The "fiscal cliff" is approaching early next year. If the current state of intractability on the part of Obama remains, we will go over it, almost certainly triggering another recession. Nothing constructive will be done about the national debt and the budget deficit. Nothing.

There is no speculative boom to go bust. The Republicans have practically ensured that there will be no huge expenditures on public works for the simple reason that they want the President to fail -- and there are no such infrastructure projects to come to an end with the certainty of large number of construction workers and workers in the glass, steel, and cement industries to lose jobs. The biggest use of steel is in construction. (I could make the case that the end of the Big Dig in Boston precipitated a recession much as did the end of the great bridge projects (the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge near San Francisco in the 1930s, the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan in 1957). We are not in a boom and are not on the brink of a bust.

2. Obamacare will go into effect. The economic impact will be catastrophic to a limping economy.

The cheapest solution -- the one that would create reduced costs for American manufacturing and reduce the incentive to import consumer goods -- would be the singer-payer system, basically Medicare for all. The special interests who own the politicians prefer our high-cost system want a cost-loading, profit-maximizing system that bleeds American workers and raises the costs of competing with imports. We have the highest medical costs in the world, and a big chunk of those costs go into private, for-profit bureaucracies that exist nowhere else in the industrialized world. We have in effect a private tax that does not get reinvested yet gouges us all.

3. We have just had "QE4" on the part of the Federal Reserve, a purely political move to juice the stock market and get Obama re-elected. Each time it is has had less of an effect, and each time the inevitable inflation it will produce gets more massive. Gas and food prices are not included in the official inflation rate. We all know that in spite of a deep economic downturn, those prices have continued to stay high, while people are less able to afford them.

Oil prices are extremely cyclical. Food prices have risen because of severe droughts that have cut the food supply. Need I tell you what happened to the corn crop this year? Corn crops are tailor-made to the fire-and-ice climates of the Corn Belt -- snowy winters and a reliable supply of spring and summer rains. Corn may not grow during blizzards, but it certainly needs the ground moisture that melted snow provides during the rapidly-warming springtime. Don't blame President Obama for climate change if such is the culprit. Cheap food is worth having to shovel some snow, and you are going to pay heavily for the Year Without a Winter, something more likely as the icepack of the Arctic Ocean vanishes. Think of the corn crop -- not of polar bears -- and you recognize the significance of climate change.

4. There are things going on in the Middle East that threaten a combustion of some sort, and the Obama Administration has been ignoring it. "Leading from Behind" is the operative phrase. If something happens there, while it may not plunge the U.S. back into war, it will send the price of oil through the roof, which will trigger another recession, or make one that we are already in worse.

There isn't enough oil and coal being produced now in the depths of the Earth to outpace human consumption of carbon-based and carbohydrate-based fuels that underpinned the industrial economy. Oil prices go up in times of political uncertainty and down when transportation risks (like war and piracy) abate. The decline of conventional energy is a certainty and the only question of when petroleum becomes a niche fuel (as whale oil did) is a question of time.

The left loves to sit around and talk about the disappearance of the Republican Party. It may in fact happen, because the failure of Romney will be the final failure of the party's establishment and leadership. They will have proven themselves to be completely incompetent fools. But recall what happened the last time a major party dissolved and was replaced. It was the Whigs, and the new party was a Republican Party that ended up dominating American politics for the next 72 years. The Democrats will not change. The Republicans are already in the process of changing, or being changed. Four years from now, with the country clearly in a depression and on the verge of total collapse, the people will no longer tolerate business as usual from either party, and something will have to give. Although I do not believe there will be widespread violence, there will be unrest. The Tea Party movement of the last few years will look like a minor blip in comparison (although it will obviously form the core of whatever the next step is).

A political party that stands largely for the enrichment of privileged industries at the expense of everyone else (like the GOP) gets increasingly corrupt and irrelevant. Its dependence upon the Religious Right implies a shrinking coalition that will eventually get squeezed into irrelevance. Such may not be quite how the Federalists and Whigs died; it may be different in the cause of its downfall. The GOP has gone in dangerous directions, becoming a cadre party, tampering with the opposition, and relying upon front groups -- the latter using propaganda techniques characteristic of fascists and commies. But tampering with the opposition (setting up stooge opposition sure to fail) and the ads of the Hard Right have backfired.

If we were in a 3T, maybe Obama would wise up like Clinton did and the economy could have a chance of recovery. He has made it emphatically clear that he will not. He has admitted no mistakes, and has offered no new policies. Instead, he thinks that if he wins, the Republicans will suddenly go along with everything he wants, and everything will be fine. Good luck with that. If he is re-elected, it will not only prove that we are in a 4T, it will provide the seeds for the inevitable climax of the Crisis, which will not be civil war. It will be a collapse of federal authority. "Throw the bums out" will not be enough, something major will have to happen. And it won't be left wing, because the final disaster will have come under left wing leadership. There is a comparison to be made to the Weimar Republic. But the result will not be anything like Nazism. There will be no anti-semitism or wars of expansion. Those elements were unique to Germany in that period of time. I do fear that it could turn authoritarian. And it will be right wing, not left wing. But more hopefully, and more likely considering the ideology of the Tea Party movement, it will be a reiteration of the American Revolution, without bloodshed, where strict limits on federal power are re-imposed.

This is a 4T. We cannot go back to the Indian Summer that was the Clinton Presidency. We can't get out of the mess that we are in now by going out the door that we came in through. The building that we are in is on fire, and the path that got us where we are is now blocked. Prior Crises have involved the re-assertion of or enlargement of legitimate authority in the wake of a breakdown of the authority of then-extant elites. Government leading into the last three Crises to have been completed all showed some combination of incompetence, corruption, irrelevance, and weakness. In a 3T perverse government, business, and culture have powerful constituencies behind them. In a 4T such fails.

The other historic Republic obviously worth looking at is Rome. So much time and distance exists between then and now that I don't think a lot of direct comparisons can be made. But the trajectory from Republic to Empire to dissolution at the hands of barbarians is worth noting. The commonality is the global reach the U.S. has had, in terms of economics and culture. I don't think the country will cease to exist or shrink the way Rome did, because it has not expanded territorially the way Rome did. But the possibility of some kind of modern Dark Age is not remote. Given how much the country has already decayed from within since the 1960s, the pampered, frivolous mindset of recent decades will be replaced by dealing with basic questions of brutal reality.

Your history is superficial. Despite all the inner weaknesses of Republican Rome that continued in Imperial Rome, the Roman Empire in the West took five centuries to decline and become irrelevant. The Roman Empire 'fell' when the overlord Odoacer overthrew Romulus Augustulus and chose to appoint no successor. The United States, imperial in scale if not in government from its inception, has far more military and economic strength than Republican or Imperial Rome ever did. Relevant models for any quick fall of America are better modeled upon "Third Reich" or even "Soviet Union", prospects that no sensible person wants imitated.

The biggest problem with Boomers and with the left has always been that they take so many things for granted. They think you can keep hacking away at the roots, jack-hammering the foundations, and everything will still be fine just like it always has been (i.e. since Boomers were born, because no history exists before that). If we have four more years like the last, that illusion is going to be exposed, in very ugly ways.

The biggest problem with the Boomer Left was its unrealistic assumption that people wanted freedom from corporate hierarchies even if such implied destruction of their ways of living and the mass low culture that emanated from corporate America. Such failed badly and as a Boomer I know more than you do about that failure. The Boomer Right sold out any conscience that it had in return for a fast track into bureaucratic and political power and replaced the GI assumptions of a consumer-driven economy with an ethos best described as "Suffer for my greed!" The worst Boomers have been those who pretended that their exploitation of others was benefice and took offense when anyone challenged such a world-view.

Boomers have peaked in their control of political life. The 2008 election pitted an X Presidential nominee and a Silent VP nominee against the inverse. As Boomer executives age into retirement their narcissism will also go into retirement from the workforce. Don't be surprised if we get a late-wave Boomer as President in 2016. If there is any Idealist type who has proved appropriate to America that we have yet to see this time, then it is Mohandas Gandhi.

I don't know that things will be significantly better if Romney wins. But at least there's a chance. If Obama wins, we already know what the next four years are going to be like. And if that doesn't produce rock bottom for those still living under illusions, I don't know what will.

Mitt Romney, a trimmer in dangerous times, would be a disaster. He has sold out to the worst parts of America -- the Boom Right -- in his bid for power.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

We have a "ruling elite" in this country that is shallow, superficial, narcissistic, incompetent and completely out of touch with the people that it seeks to "rule". While it is true that economic elites, especially Wall Street, are a part of that would-be aristocracy, and elite Republicans are handmaidens to it, the rest of it, in its entirely, is far to the left of the American people: government, education, media.

Except that the faults of our government are most magnified when it is on the Right. The educational system is flawed largely in undergraduate education which used to give a broad base of learning in the liberal arts and now has become an intellectual playground that something so basic as teacher preparation is inept and inappropriate -- and that is before I even discuss the complete lack of values of people who go into MBA programs. Right-wing media such as FoX Newspeak Channel are even worse than their left-wing equivalents.

The priorities and "values" of the ruling class bear no resemblance to those of the people. The last four years have been incontrovertible proof of that fact. Wall Street has been taken care of, and the ideological dogma and cultural agenda of the far left has been imposed. But the people are still left suffering. "Let them eat cake" will not stand for much longer. The analogy to the conditions that produced the American Revolution and the French Revolution is the best we have. The fancy snobs in their powdered wigs and pantyhose who think they rule by divine right are in for a fall. And again...they are overwhelmingly left wing.

No, the values of the 'ruling class' are now as pedestrian as those of the semi-literate parts of the working class, but arguably worse because the working class is obliged to humble itself before the Master Class. The ruling class is as crassly materialistic as hucksters who never pretended to value anything other than personal gain and what they get from their personal gain, in part because it never learned any higher values in college. The Far Left no longer has cultural influence except as a fossil. People suffer because the ruling elite is cruel, selfish, rapacious, and tyrannical... and Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist exemplifies such.

... The fault of the reactionaries of the late-19th century wasn't the powdered wigs that hid their thinning, graying hair. The revolutionaries kept the style -- just as the Bolsheviks kept the suits and ties of plutocrats.

A Romney supporter in Virginia says that poor single moms should be executed and their kids put up for adoption.

I ask for some clarification: what do you mean, just starve them out? What if people can't find work? Let them starve?

"Look, there's always something you can do. You telling me people can't make a choice for a better life? We have to help all of them? No. I'll tell you what really need to do with these illegitimate families on welfare—give all the kids up for adoption and execute the parents."

I stare at him and blink in a glaze of shock.

Just to be sure I heard him right, I ask him to repeat it, twice.

"Yes, I mean it. Get rid of all of them, give the kids up for adoption, execute the parents, and you get rid of the problem.” (When I call him back to revisit the issue, he elaborates: “put the children up for adoption and execute the parents, and word would get out soon” that poor people shouldn’t have kids.)

This is a local Romney headquarters in swing-state Virginia, not some far-right Tea Party fringe group (or maybe that’s what the GOP has become). This is, at least in growing part, today's mainstream GOP.

The nuts are dropping all pretense and are admitting how they REALLY feel. This is the kind of rhetoric the f***ing NAZIS used.

Originally Posted by Odin

The nuts are dropping all pretense and are admitting how they REALLY feel. This is the kind of rhetoric the f***ing NAZIS used.

On the positive side, they at least have enough respect for the life of the fetus to allow the woman to give birth first. This is a plus.

Originally Posted by Odin

A Romney supporter in Virginia says that poor single moms should be executed and their kids put up for adoption.

The nuts are dropping all pretense and are admitting how they REALLY feel. This is the kind of rhetoric the f***ing NAZIS used.

Godwin's Law does not strike when one shows people using exterminationist rhetoric. It's hard to believe that people are so cruel and ignorant that they could spout such viciousness. I had to check the article to see that someone had said that. There was other stuff similarly objectionable, such as a suggestion that Americans should have exterminated the population of Iraq because "Saddam Hussein is a terrorist and everyone in Iraq agrees with him".

OK. Maybe it is more like what emanated from Rwandan radio just before the genocide, and mercifully it does not come from influential people. That is not to say that there are no Americans who would respond to a call equivalent to "It is time to cut down the tall trees", the code words used in Rwanda.

Originally Posted by Odin

A Romney supporter in Virginia says that poor single moms should be executed and their kids put up for adoption.



The nuts are dropping all pretense and are admitting how they REALLY feel. This is the kind of rhetoric the f***ing NAZIS used.

Do you actually believe that guy was serious? Do you believe he has any actual power, or if he did that he would go through with this joke? Do you know that you can use the controls on your post to make headlines smaller?

Originally Posted by The Rani

I wish I knew how to make headlines LARGER so I could SCREAM OUT MY OUTRAGE too.

Look for a button with a downward pointing arrow next to the word 'Size' on the formatting bar. Highlight outrageous text with your mouse, then go for size.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

Do you actually believe that guy was serious? Do you believe he has any actual power, or if he did that he would go through with this joke?

No joke. The Republicans actually believe this shit. Almost all of them, all of it.

From the article, quoting the Republican idiot:

When I call him back to revisit the issue, he elaborates: “put the children up for adoption and execute the parents, and word would get out soon” that poor people shouldn’t have kids.

“Hussein did his actions in the name of the entire country, men, women, and children…Was he Arab? Was he Muslim? Then he was a terrorist.”

“Oh, here we go,” he says. “Global warming? There’s no such thing. Seriously, the whole thing is complete nonsense. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the environment that man can have any effect over. The environment is fine. The environmentalists made all this up so they can profit off carbon trading. That idiot Al Gore created this whole thing so they can get rich off carbon trading, it's a complete scam, a total fiction. You know how you can tell? They started off calling it global warming, then changed the name to climate change."

No indication of any joke whatsoever.

Truly, this is what we are up against in America.