So, apparently we don't disagree on everything... The progressive movement is a child of the Industrial Revolution just like Marxism is. So it's no surprise the Founders didn't expect it because they wrote the Constitution when America was still in the agrarian age. It was also the Age of Enlightenment when it was popular to adorn declarations with the lofty words of idealism and that was their mistake. They said things they didn't really mean, like how all men are created equal, but it served the rhetorical purpose of the time.

They didn't count on those words being held up to the new industrial reality.

So to be clear. I am 100% behind whatever changes are necessary to update the Constitution to better serve Americans in the modern world. We don't live in 1789. We live in 2020. It's a different world and our constitution should reflect that.

Good point!

You're 100% correct Milosia, and perhaps I am being insensitive to the red states, but I grow weary of their constant bitching about the blue states. A part of me just wants a divorce. They want to do things their way? Fine, let them. Let them hang themselves - maybe they'll learn.

Of course, your point about the blue states being profitable is a problem for any separatist. Because that profit is very important to the plutocracy that more-or-less owns the government.They actually have a pretty good deal involving the misrepresentation of the people. They WANT the profits from the blue states but the people smart enough to generate the profits are also smart enough not to just give it away to plutocrats. So the plutocrats depend on the growing imbalance of representation that started in 1910 that gives the red states, where people are generally less educated and more apt to be fooled, MORE political power per citizen than the people in blue states get.

This is exactly why Trump is our president. He was elected a smaller number of fools that have more powerful votes than the larger number of smarter people.

Just for perspective, it takes 5 citizens in California to equal the elective power of one citizen in Wyoming.

And just as you pointed out how your earlier argument can be verified by querying the GAO, my argument here can also be verified by looking at the official census data. It seems neither of us have to depend on rumor-mill media to make our points. ;)

I'm not sure who coined the term, but it was the Republicans under Teddy Roosevelt that first institutionalized progressivism as a policy motive.




I agree with this assessment but I think it's also worth pointing out that progressivism got its initial boost as an alternative to socialism. Keep in mind, this was at the start of the 20th century when workers were riled up and socialism was extremely popular. Progressivism was the compromise between the workers that wanted better conditions and the capitalists that wanted to preserve their ownership. This is still the pattern today, which is why we see the progressive Democrats and their corporate sponsors putting the kibosh on socialist Bernie Sanders... for the second time.


That's just mindless parrot chatter.

StraightUp is a name my friends gave me because it's how I like my whiskey.


First of all, most of the money earmarked for PP goes to treating women on a broad range of health issues that our shitty healthcare system fails to cover. Secondly, abortion services are one of many provided by PP but it's not funded with federal money, except for limited cases such as rape. Federal money goes to all the other health services they provide. Some people don't trust PP to be honest about that. I guess just like everything else it comes down to trust.

One thing I know for sure is that they treated my daughter's UTI when she got too old for my policy to cover, she couldn't afford insurance on her own and the POS company she worked for was always certain to cut her hours to escape the legal obligation to provide her with insurance. She was in pain and right-wing America had no answer. Planned Parenthood did.


I never said I hate corporations. In fact, over the course of my career I co-founded three of them. Don't get confused... Just because I don't think trickle-down is good for America doesn't mean I hate corporations.

I do see what you're saying about the pork and I agree in principle but so far I am finding no mention of PP being a part of the pork for this rescue bill... (It's not a stimulus bill). I see all the chatter on right-wing, rumor-mill media but I'm not finding it anywhere in the proposed bill and the fact checkers are saying it's a false claim.


You make a lot of erroneous assumptions.


zzzz

Yes... the U.S. is too big. The "one-size fits all" isn't working. Show me any country our size or bigger, with our level of diversity and I'll show you a failure to represent the people. China, India, USA, Indonesia... They're all too big.

The U.S. should break up into smaller sovereign nations to give people better representation. There are only two problems that stand in the way...

1. The ruling class likes the control they have over a 300 million people.
2. The American people don't have the guts to separate.

Muahahaa!!!

Obviously, they're trying to help the young and the struggling. But I'm betting you're in favor of giving all the money to the wealthy so you can grovel at their feet, shine their shoes and hope they'll drop a few coins for your trouble. What do they call it? Oh yeah, trickle down.

First of all, you're responding to a post that doesn't even mention the economy. But since you brought it up, I may as well point out that technically, this economic crisis *IS* created by the moneyed groups. Covid-19 doesn't trade stock. You can't blame Covid-19 for buying up all the toilet paper either. In both cases it the blame goes to paranoid people who buy and sell based on fear and suspicion. This is what drives Wall Street.

So, I agree that we can't put ALL the blame on Trump for what's happening to the economy because he can't really control the wild reactions that people have to a pandemic (although his poor handling of the crisis doesn't exactly help to ease the paranoia).

But by the same token, one can certainly see the stupidity of measuring a president's success by something as fickle as the stock market, like Trump has been doing since he took office. The indices and the unemployment rate were the only two flags he's been waving and neither of them mean anything. The unemployment rate only counts the people claiming unemployment benefits. Count all the people without jobs and you're looking at 37%. That's BEFORE the pandemic.


Established businessmen will tell you how much the people need THEIR business but it's actually the other way around. Business depends on consumers. Without consumers they die. And with the U.S. economy being 80% consumer driven, it's idiotic to continue believing this trickle-down nonsense, which is only a scheme to protect old business from new ones. It would be far better to give ALL the money to the people and let the pandemic weed out the weak businesses instead of protecting them. That way new and improved businesses can take their place, as long as the people have money, the demand will be there.

First of all, Trump isn't in Congress and secondly, if your going to be the expert on it you might want to consider spelling it with a capital "C" because it *IS* a proper noun. And in case you do catch the joke, let me just point out that there are a lot of legislators in Congress who are incredibly successful capitalists and most of them are far businessmen than Trump could ever be. They just know that business and government are not the same thing.


That's what some businessmen with an interest in corrupting our republic will tell you. They're hoping enough of us will be dumb enough to fall for it. It's that simple.

Look, government and commerce are completely different animals. One has a very simple bottom line, which gives almost every decision a default value, the other has no bottom line at all. This is why business decisions are increasingly being automated... money is easy to calculate. Governing a democracy on the hand has no bottom line. Feel free to post me an algorithm to drive King Solomon's decision on the baby and two mothers, if you feel like proving me wrong.

I do realize that many politicians fail, so I understand the frustration, but I just wish people would think about it a little more before they start redefining the role to suit the underqualified.


I hate to remind you but Obama inherited an economy in its worst state since 1929 and war debt not seen since WW2. Under his presidency, our economy recovered and drove it's way to the heights that we see Trump taking bows for. There's no way a rational person can dismiss this elephant in the room. We all know what the hatred toward Obama is about.


LOL - Are you for real? Yeah, Trump just decided to do America a favor and be president pro-bono. Wow.


Ugh... zzz.

It's so funny how politics completely changes the attitude people take. It wasn't so long ago that the Democrats were doing the same thing, suggesting massive spending bills to bail out the economy and the rabid right were calling it communism. Now it's Trump, so all the rules change. Spending bills are necessary now because there's a Republican in charge. LOL

Pelosi and the Democrats put the brakes on the bill because they want assurances that the money will help the People not just line the pockets of the wealthy like the 2017 tax cut did. It's very simple... They want to add a few sentences like... "the money will not be used to buy back stocks". If they were working with sensible Republicans (that apparently don't exist anymore) it would be a one-day session, then send the bill to Trump. But the problem is the Trump Republicans are trying to take advantage at your expense. If you paid any attention to what the administration has actually done instead of parroting what they "say" they've done, you would know this.

Trump is a well-known con-artist. I wouldn't trust him to "help" us if my life depended on it and I am glad Pelosi is there to defend us from the next big scam.

Yes, it is... literally. Trump (the millionaire) beat all those other Republican candidates because the people got tired of being screwed by Republican politicians and they're too stupid to know how to choose better politicians so they decided a businessman would be better. That makes as much sense as asking a car mechanic to perform your open heart surgery because you don't trust doctors, which would also be insane.

Business and government are not any more the same than a car and a human body. Both take money to maintain, both require energy to operate, but a sane person would not assume those similarities are enough to qualify a car mechanic as a surgeon or vice versa


Milosia2 is the only one making any sense on this moronic thread.


LOL - I've never quite figured this one out... It's become quite common for uptight deplorables to throw that out there but is it because they know it's more insulting to people who think for themselves or is it because they really don't understand how independent thought works and they can't imagine it's possible for people to have original thoughts?

Both things happened. You are trying to say because one thing happened the other didn't. Not all of us are idiots blade. Also, a huge reason why Ziemer left is because Trump refused to listen to him.

I also noticed that after you dismissed CNN, MSNBC and the NYT as "commie propaganda machines" you failed to list you own source, which for all I know is just your ill-informed opinion.


Streamlining is a cheery synonym for slashing. When a company outsources jobs to overseas labor markets, do you know what they call it? Streamlining - without having to pay American wages they can produce more for less = streamlining. In this case, the streamlining means we can save money by cutting our defense against disease which I know for a fact was never a priority on the right. We're paying for that now.


Yeah, not a big surprise.


Sure... why get a doctor to operate on your heart when there's a car mechanic in the house?


the WHO was sending test kits to underdeveloped nations without the facilities to develop their own. It's not their fault the Trump administration cut our own capacity down. We can't expect the WHO to baby us because we don't know WTF we're doing.


Yup, that's the kind of thing we can expect from a hobbled agency.


Yes, because the federal government, including the CDC and the FDA, is being managed by idiots in the Trump Administration. Thank God for the local governments and the business sector that have done outstanding work to protect us, if not for them... things would be much worse.

OK. I understand. So, let the virus runs its course and save the shelter for the sick and the old. I totally get that. I mean look at China. They reported zero new cases today. The virus ran its course. Italy will be next. So far, that is the only way any country got from any number of cases to zero. And chances are, there will be an aftershock as the sheltered are released without immunity.

It may come to that.

But the problem is we have a lot of old people in this country. Old people who are loved. We have sick people too. I have an old mother and my brother has an autoimmune disease. It would be really cool if we had more faith in science because we really do have the minds to shortcut the pandemic to immunity and save these people that we love so much. But the odds of doing that get worse by the hour because this stuff spreads... it's exponential. That's why we should all just minimize the spread to give those minds a chance to save my mom and my brother.




I agree with you regarding any kind of lock down for any kind of reason. It's a very last resort thing in my mind. But I think this is a rare occasion where it's worth considering. I'm an anti-Federalist bro... That actually makes me more Libertarian than the nationalists and their Trumpian brethren. But I'm also a Realist and a Humanist. And ALL those arrows are telling me we should keep our asses home for a bit.


Oh, I get it... It's not a question of understanding, it's a question of priority. I am not unaffected by the market but I know this virus will have to sustain much longer than it did in China for industry here to be hurt that badly. People need to calm down about the economy and worry more about the virus.

The economy has no direct correlation to the virus anyway... the people react to to the virus... the market reacts to the people. Put it this way... a virus doesn't carry American Express. And dude... people were buying up toilet paper the minute they thought OTHER people were going to buy up toilet paper. It's the same basic instinct that drives the stock market. It's like the deal we made with God when we thought we were big enough to evolve into capitalism and God said...

"ok, so you wanna to flood your village with gold... fine. Only one thing... you will be forever enslaved to the idiocy of supply and demand."

- straightUp 12:7

Why don't you look it up instead of just calling people liars because they mention facts you don't like?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/18/coronavirus-did-president-trumps-decision-disband-global-pandemic-office-hinder-response/5064881002/


Dude... just because you're not prone to die from it doesn't mean you can't spread it. WTF is wrong with you? Hasn't this been explained to you hundreds of times already?

I sure hope you're not running around spreading filthy disease to people who CAN die from it just because you happen to feel fine.

So tired of hearing this tripe from people who never actually do the research. So, you didn't like Obama... whatever. The fact is. Trump cut funding for the CDC. The fact is Trump dismantled the global health security department in the NSC. The fact is Trump ignored the warnings from the experts on biodefense and medicine when they told him as recently as last year that the potential for a pandemic was a high security risk.

All you have is "uh... it's ovomit fault because he hated the US"

This is exactly why we think Trump supporters are the most retarded people on the planet.