Crazy... It's difficult to take you seriously when your language is so weighed down with derogatory BS. First of all Obama isn't Muslim, secondly even if he was, there is no law saying the President can't be a Muslim. So already you are sounding like a prejudiced r****d. Thirdly, only one of his measures that I know about was ever interpreted by anyone of authority to be unconstitutional, and that argument is still being debated. Also, I don't know what "programs" you are referring to... At this point my perception of you allows me to believe you think ANYTHING Obama signs is a social program because you just see a dirty word, not an actual concept. I'm not sure which programs zonked is talking about either, but I do agree with him that the Republicans, under Bush have expanded the size of the government tremendously and more importantly (and this is where Republicans and Democrats differ most significantly) The Republicans use the most irresponsible methods possible to fund their programs.

Democrats try to levy taxes to pay for their programs. They don't have to worry about alienating themselves from their v**ers because their v**ers tend to understand how laws and taxes work. They understand the concept of "getting what you pay for" and that applies to government as much as anything else.

Republicans on the other hand, promise their v**ers that they will not levy taxes which makes their v**ers happy for reasons I honestly don't understand, unless it's just simple ignorance of the fact that Republicans STILL have massive programs to fund and will do it by borrowing money, which is so much worse.

so, in simple terms...

Democrats = (programs + taxes) = pay-as-you-go = responsible.
Republicans = (programs + loans) = national debt = irresponsible.

If the Republicans from Reagan to Bush were not allowed to borrow money, there would be no national debt crushing our economic system right now. (Nor would thousands of Americans have lost their lives in Iraq.)


1. I think it's a better idea than anything anyone else has come up with. Historically, state provided employment has HAS helped pull economies out of a recession. There has not been a single instance where tax cuts have done the same.

2. Obama has ALWAYS made it a point to source the funding and that $800 was no exception. He included the answer to "where will the money come from" as part of the act. When Bush asked for $700 billion (yeah, you forgot about that one didn't you), he didn't explain the funding at all. He just used the old Republican stand by... "Yes, Federal Reserve? Can you print out a few billion dollars so my Treasury Department can BORROW it from you? The American tax payers will pay you back, plus millions in interest, sometime after I'm gone."

Yeah, Republicans are sooo fiscally responsible :roll:


That's a reflection of the cost for healthcare for a booming generation of Americans projected over the expected population spike. $3 trillion actually sounds cheap when you consider the fact that right now (and we haven't even reached the spike yet) we are already spending $2.6 trillion WITHOUT Obamacare.

This is the argument that angry little peeps like you can't consider because you're too pissed off about a MUSLIM, C*******T, BLACK man in office to understand anything he is doing. As soon as he say's "My fellow Americans..." You're already throwing tomatoes.

Kind of a d**g because the rest of us would like to explore avenues to reduce and manage the cost of healthcare. Meanwhile, the Republicans have done NOTHING.

N-O-T-H-I-N-G....

...to reduce healthcare costs and because of that, current healthcare expendatures in the private sector have reached 17.6% of our GDP... Roughly $8,233 per American, which is two and a half times more per head than what citizens of most developed nations pay, including the British, French and Swedes.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html


Of course. :roll:

Fair enough... Here goes...

True, the word can be applied to a lot of areas... I think the first listed definition in your American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is the best fit for govenrment policy otherwise known as "law".

So.. "The right and power to interpret and apply the law."

This definition assumes the existence of law. Otherwise there would be nothing to interpret or apply. Therefore, with each law comes a right for an authority to interpret and apply it. In that sense we can say the jurisdiction of an authority might expand or contract depending on the laws and what areas of commerce, environment, personal business, etc... such laws affect. When an industry is deregulated, what is happening is a law or a set of laws that previously gave the state authority over specific areas of that industry are being eliminated and with it the right for the state to apply it. Hence the idea of a shrinking jurisdiction.

Now, my use the term was in direct relation to the article referenced in the OP. So I made the assumption that the context would have been understood. I really wasn't expecting the need to whip out the dictionaries.

But now that I've belabored the definition of a shrinking jurisdiction, I hope what I was saying about civil rights being coded in law, will make more sense to you. Indeed, if you're first approach to my comment is to think I am attacking deregulation per se, then I can see how you would miss my point entirely.

What I am saying is actually far more simple...

1. 100% of our civil rights are coded in law.
2. Deregulation shortens the reach of the law.
3. (make your own conclusions)

Well said.

(I wouldn't think being a politician is the best road to riches, they only make around 200K/yr... but you are 100% on who to blame.)

Well, it's your right to say what you think but the only people listening are the people who are already convinced. So really you're only chewing it over and over among the same people. Emotional satisfaction is the only advantage I can see.


Actually, they are. Occupy Wall Street is an example of where these people are and how relevant they can be. As the plutocracy continues to fleece the American people, the interest in liberalism will naturally resurge. I predict a swing back to the left within in the next ten years.


It may seem ironic but the progressive movement was established by Teddy Roosevelt as a way to appease the people who were at the time very annoyed with the extreme forms of capitalism that fostered child labor, intolerable work conditions and economic s***ery. There was a lot of injustice to feed liberal movements then which included very strong surges in the socialist and c*******t parties and the potential for revolution which was already starting to unleash in places like Russia.

What Roosevelt did was he offered the people an alternate route of compromises with the existing system. This allowed much of the frustration that would have charged the potential for revolution to be siphoned off into agreements with a Progressive government. There is a very good chance that the reason c*******m never took over here in the U.S. is that we had the progressive movement which unlike the Russian Monarchy, was willing to compromise with the people.

Today, it can be said that the Democratic Party *is* the party of progressives. Mostly moderates that prefer the idea of working within the current system to establish better laws to protect the people. The Republican party, on the other hand seems to have shaken off all their progressives, probably along with all their old-school conservatives and are now obsessed with putting capital first despite what it might do to the people.


Not even... Socialists and progressives sometimes agree on certain issues, but that doesn't make them one and the same. Obama for instance is a progressive but he is NOT a socialist. I have found that many of the people that insist Obama is a socialist, don't even know what socialism is, including Sarah Palin who is about the most r****ded bimbo ever to enter politics.


How can you claim to be such an expert on liberals then if you don't even know any?

As for me, I explained in my intro, I do not associate myself with any political direction in the absolute sense that people on this forum do, because I think we should be able to change direction depending on where we want to go or what we want to avoid.

Currently, I think our perception of the center is quite a bit to the right of where it was 30 years ago, meaning that what was once considered center is now considered left and I think this shift has allowed the Bush administration to bring extreme politics into play for the first time since Wilson. So in light of my perception of the current state of affairs and what I think needs to be done to protect my family I stand on the side of the liberals. They just make more sense to me. They seem to know more about the real issues.

Finally, don't tell me that I can't stand to hear t***hs, just because I don't buy everything you say. I have no problem with t***h - I just think it should proven and not accepted blindly.


Yes, well today there is a war on terrorism. There is an entire book of laws called the PATRIOT ACT that explains how terrorists will not be given the same due process that had previously been guaranteed by our Constitution to be extended to everyone, including mass murderers. So maybe calling anyone with a political view different than your own a terrorist is little excessive.


Yeah, that sounds like a personal problem.

Correct... although I'm not sure I would call it a misnomer. Liberalism in it's most general sense refers to the act of liberation. As in liberating ourselves from the social and political constraints on personal freedom, or liberating our markets from the constraints of regulation.

It just so happens that Democrats tend to offer more support for social liberation but less for economic liberation. Republicans tend to offer more support for economic liberation and less for social liberation. Only the Libertarians seem to remain consistent by supporting both social and economic liberalism. Ah, the advantage of basing your ideology on pure, untested theories.

;)

Powell is old-school Republican, which has very little in common with the new blood in the GOP today...

My dad was old-school Republican too and he also v**ed for Obama. I find it amusing that so many people have their heads so far up the "I'm a Conservative" myopic that they haven't noticed how the GOP has changed since 9/11. According to many of the classic conservatives I know, Bush was the worst president ever and Obama is a chance to return to the way things were during the Reagan era, including raising taxes on wealth to the levels that Reagan set back in the 80's.

But the extremists, sometimes referred to as neo-conservatives, have discovered how easy it is to pull the wool over the younger and the less-astute Republicans, especially when they harbor such a hatred toward liberals. It seems to me that this hatred and it's associated obsession with any and all derogatory remarks about liberals eclipses their view of the real issues that are actually shaping the world we live in.

Same thing happens on the other side, but you don't hear as much from them and most liberals are moderate anyway and have far more in common with the classic conservatives who also tend to be moderate than they do with extremists on either side.

Wow... so you're an expert on Angela Davis then. You call her a terrorist too. I had no idea. Then being a terrorist, who did she k**l or threaten to k**l? Seriously, you even know her thoughts... That's just amazing! And to KNOW that she's done more damage to "true" education than any group existing in the world today means that you understand how to measure that damage and you are also aware of every group of people existing in the world today and exactly how much comparative damage they've done to "true" education.


And this is how I can tell you know very little about politics... Neoliberalism is a term that was first used in the 1930's but came into forefront of political discussion during the Nixon era and it's been in common use ever since to describe one of the most predominate geopolitical movements of our time. When I made that crack about people here probably thinking neoliberalism has something to do with social liberals I was only half joking. But I was right, wasn't I?


I am a liberal and I started three businesses in the past 20 years. One of which I ran for 12 years before selling it. I also know a LOT of business owners who are in fact liberals.

So my eye witness says you're full of sh*t.

Honestly, what purpose does this constant story telling about liberals and who they are and what they want serve? Does it just make feel better when you say these things?

So... you're saying that something which is unequivocal is an equivocation?

...but since you brought it up, I decided to investigate. Here's the excerpt of the Executive Order related to what you are talking about.



I still stand on principle that even here, there is no lie. This may seem like an intentionally narrow view, but it's my personal choice to spare certain words the misfortune of overuse. Like when my dad used to tell me that "h**e" is a pretty strong word. It's the preservation of language for the purpose of precision.
That being said, it doesn't mean that I am insensitive to perhaps a trend, high on promises and low on follow through. That, if proven to be excessive (compared to other presidents I guess.) would in my mind decrease the value I place on his words when he's making his next promise.

Once again, this was a promise about the future (one year from now). Not a misrepresentation of present reality (which is what a lie is) such as saying we have absolute proof of WMD in Iraq, when we really don't.

Fox doesn't miss anything. They are very good at vending information that they know their audience wants to hear and they make a lot of money doing it.


Don't c***t yourself by obscuring the t***h with partisan BS... What you are describing is not liberalism at work... it's politics at work. You don't remember Bush and his very conservative government, excluding all journalists from covering the war except for "embedded" journalists?

There isn't anything going on today that wasn't already going on during the Bush administration.



I guess one reason why I might be considered liberal is the same.. ...Because I saw the Bush administration systematically shutting down our open democracy, the same way the f*****ts did in Europe in the 1930's.

Naomi Wolf wrote a book during the Bush administration called the "End of America" in which she outlines 10 significant steps taken by 20th century f*****ts and associated each step to something the Bush administration was doing. I'll just sample the first four.

1. invoke a terrifying external enemy: Terrorism was elevated to the "biggest threat to America during the Bush Administration, they even created a color-coded alert system to scare the crap out of people. But the fact of the matter is terrorism does very little damage to American , even though . Fact is actual patterns of )
2. create secret prisons (Guantanamo and a whole network of similar prisons created by the Bush Administration that actually bypasses the Judicial Branch.. (so much for checks and balances in the government).
3, Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens. (Blackwater and a whole collection of similar private security companies are not limited by agreements such as the Geneva Convention or by Congressional oversight.
4, Set up an internal surveillance system. (the PATRIOT Act: struck off the books a wide range of laws protecting our civil rights, among them the telecommunications laws regarding the right to privacy and sure enough, it wasn't long before we started to see headlines like "Government Wiretapping of American Citizens" and "Bush Government Spying on Americans."

So, please excuse me for not jumping on the "oh, we just found out we're screwed" party. I've been awake long enough to have seen the power grabs and shadow governments in the previous administrations too.

I bet more white people v**ed against him (because he's black) than black people who v**ed for him (because he is black).

Oh, and you know this from two or three short remarks I made about neoliberalism. Well then, Sherlock's got nothing on you. LOL I bet you know what kind of toilet paper I buy too.

Just to be clear, I never said ANYTHING about how regulated business is or isn't. All I said was that the prevailing trend is to deregulate and that the inverse effect is a shrinking jurisdiction of the democratic process.

I'm not even here to say if it's wrong or right. I'm just making observations or in this case, acknowledging the observation made by the author of the book that the article in the OP is about.

I searched the thread... I never said "No it isn't and you're dumb." Not only that but YOU were the one who started the contrary crap when you said "business isn't deregulated".

As for being uninformative... I'm sorry but I can't help you understand the things I am saying if you're too busy being contrary.

Try talking to me when your recreational drugs wear off.

Jurisdiction
1 : the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law
2a : the authority of a sovereign power to govern or legislate
2b : the power or right to exercise authority : control

Merriam-Webster seems to understand what I mean.