There's this picture painted of the tea party people which depicts them as old gray-haired people who champion socialism (Medicare) and hate it at the same time (for other programs-- like the Health Care Legislation), which makes them look like dumb hypocrites.
Just like in any other group, some of them probably are. But, I'm sure many of these people have thought it out, and are riding the wave of emotion that's out there currently to hopefully change things.
I did read it, Byrnzie. I don't entirely disagree with it. I like how Taibbi referenced Dr. Paul, and the true roots of the movement, and how he didn't necessarily disagree with all that much about it. Everything that is being said about the Tea Partiers could essentially be said about the anti-war protesters of the Bush years. Where are THEY now? I'll tell you that a more than a handful of them were at the original tea party rallies in 2007, as anyone who is paying attention knows that big government yields big war. There IS common ground, if only more people would realize it and run with it. To call everyone in the movement a moron is unfair-- check out campaignforliberty.com once in a while and read the articles and blogs on there. You may disagree with their viewpoints, but to say they aren't argued intelligently is just not true.
Houston Tea Party Group Accused Of Voter Intimidation
A Houston tea party group called the King Street Patriots is being sued by Democratic groups because of its behavior on during early voting.
…witnesses in minority precincts had reported representatives from the group “shouting misinformation” and “following voters and standing behind them” as they tried to vote.
There have been 14 complaints in 11 locations on the first day of voting Monday.
The complaints included poll watchers “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots.
As Tommy Christopher at Mediaite notes, don’t expect this to get the attention the New Black Panther Party got for one allegation in 2008. There you had video of a black guy with a nightstick. The charges against the tea party group are less sexy, but potentially show a pattern rather than an isolated incident.
regardless of one's political views, one can't seriously want a person who doesn't even know the first amendment of the constitution to help govern the country...voting out incumbents and replacing them with dolts will solve nothing
"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.
When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"
Video: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2 ... bama-video 'As he continues his US midterm elections road trip meeting ordinary American voters, Gary Younge speaks to a resident of Salida, Colorado, who believes that Obama wasn't born in the US, has Muslim affiliations, and has prompted an increase in firearms sales'
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Needing a ride to Forest Hills and a ounce of weed. Please inquire within. Thanks. Or not. Posts: 58,276
Video: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2 ... bama-video 'As he continues his US midterm elections road trip meeting ordinary American voters, Gary Younge speaks to a resident of Salida, Colorado, who believes that Obama wasn't born in the US, has Muslim affiliations, and has prompted an increase in firearms sales'
haha... at least this guy wasn't too painful to watch.
No one's saying you can't like the president, i just don't get what's SO different now from say, 4 years ago...
And it's safe to say too many American's probably don't know what socialism is... :roll:
There is no need to worry about Social Security. It's solvent even under the worst case scenarios. The only retirement accounts people should worry about are those that are invested in the stock market - that is the system that swindles money from people. I find it absolutely fucking ridiculous that in 2010 so many Americans are still debating the merits of a public pension system, and criminal that we don't have public health insurance for all. These things, just like the roads, and police and fire departments, shouldn't ever be privately financed. It's madness. Who honestly wants to live in a society where they have to worry about paying for their basic expenses when they are elderly? I am so very tired of the stories of people who have worked hard all their lives facing financial ruin at the end of their lives - and that is what capitalism inevitably does to people. Not all people, but enough. People shouldn't be allowed to make out like bandits when the result is that others will suffer. It's just that simple, and if you don't agree, YOU are to blame for the misery. I will fully admit that, unlike Obama, I am a socialist. The one thing that the Tea Party has got right is that the Democrats have become entrenched and corrupt. But the same is true of Republican administrations. Washington DC is a magnet for corruption because a shit ton of money flows into it, and the only solution for that is to abandon it as our capitol. You cannot have a functional capitol for 300+ million people in such a vast land. Government should be decentralized and robustly democratized - but this will only work out when people are no longer living to exploit one another.
So you'd advocate a public pension system on the state or local level, as you admit that one central government is too attractive to be co-opted by special interests? I'd take that idea over the current system, at least the waste and spending would be easier to monitor, and the pot wouldn't be so big that people would be less attracted to the idea of robbing it. I still don't know why we all can't have our cake and eat it too? Why can't you trust the government with your retirement, and I trust a bank, the stock market, gold bars, cash under my mattress, etc...? Why shouldn't I have the opportunity to opt out of this system, risking my own ruin to do so? No system is foolproof, especially those that eliminate choice and promote waste as typically found in government.
I don't know how you can argue that Social Security is solvent? How? Because the Fed could always print the money to satisfy everyone's ration no matter how much revenue it actually takes in? What if they printed so much money that it became WORTHLESS, which is not inconceivable? Also, I recall a statistic where Social Security is horribly underfunded to the tune of trillions. But again, you trust it more than I do, so you can have it-- why must I be kept in it?
I don't really feel like doing the research, but to put it quickly, sources that I find reliable say it's fine, and sources I don't find reliable on a number of issues say it's on a road to ruin. Ultimately, any problems with it are solvable. HOWEVER, it's not impossible that the entire Federal government could collapse under it's own weight, so that would obviously take social security with it. But it's a perfectly sound system, and it just needs to be managed by a responsible government. If people were allowed to opt out of it, I think that would put the whole system in jeopardy. Because we, as workers, are the ones currently paying the social security checks to the retired. Suppose a third of us say, nah, we don't want to pay for it, we could really use that money to pay bills (and who couldn't) and we will worry about it on our own? Well, how do we now pay for all of the retired people who had been paying into it their whole adult lives? It just can't be done without taking the money from something else, and from what exactly? I'm pretty sure we are the only country in the world that even talks about privatization, or even partial-privatization. And frankly, many people think they can prepare for their retirement completely on their own, but they really can't, and even for those that can, they like anyone can have bad luck. There's too much uncertainty, and the reason we established it during the New Deal was because the elderly were hit the hardest during the Great Depression - over half of seniors were in poverty! There's too much social disarray without it, and nobody wants that. Consider it a tax that's needed in order to establish basic social sanity.
There is no need to worry about Social Security. It's solvent even under the worst case scenarios. The only retirement accounts people should worry about are those that are invested in the stock market - that is the system that swindles money from people. I find it absolutely fucking ridiculous that in 2010 so many Americans are still debating the merits of a public pension system, and criminal that we don't have public health insurance for all. These things, just like the roads, and police and fire departments, shouldn't ever be privately financed. It's madness. Who honestly wants to live in a society where they have to worry about paying for their basic expenses when they are elderly? I am so very tired of the stories of people who have worked hard all their lives facing financial ruin at the end of their lives - and that is what capitalism inevitably does to people. Not all people, but enough. People shouldn't be allowed to make out like bandits when the result is that others will suffer. It's just that simple, and if you don't agree, YOU are to blame for the misery. I will fully admit that, unlike Obama, I am a socialist. The one thing that the Tea Party has got right is that the Democrats have become entrenched and corrupt. But the same is true of Republican administrations. Washington DC is a magnet for corruption because a shit ton of money flows into it, and the only solution for that is to abandon it as our capitol. You cannot have a functional capitol for 300+ million people in such a vast land. Government should be decentralized and robustly democratized - but this will only work out when people are no longer living to exploit one another.
So you'd advocate a public pension system on the state or local level, as you admit that one central government is too attractive to be co-opted by special interests? I'd take that idea over the current system, at least the waste and spending would be easier to monitor, and the pot wouldn't be so big that people would be less attracted to the idea of robbing it. I still don't know why we all can't have our cake and eat it too? Why can't you trust the government with your retirement, and I trust a bank, the stock market, gold bars, cash under my mattress, etc...? Why shouldn't I have the opportunity to opt out of this system, risking my own ruin to do so? No system is foolproof, especially those that eliminate choice and promote waste as typically found in government.
I don't know how you can argue that Social Security is solvent? How? Because the Fed could always print the money to satisfy everyone's ration no matter how much revenue it actually takes in? What if they printed so much money that it became WORTHLESS, which is not inconceivable? Also, I recall a statistic where Social Security is horribly underfunded to the tune of trillions. But again, you trust it more than I do, so you can have it-- why must I be kept in it?
I don't really feel like doing the research, but to put it quickly, sources that I find reliable say it's fine, and sources I don't find reliable on a number of issues say it's on a road to ruin. Ultimately, any problems with it are solvable. HOWEVER, it's not impossible that the entire Federal government could collapse under it's own weight, so that would obviously take social security with it. But it's a perfectly sound system, and it just needs to be managed by a responsible government. If people were allowed to opt out of it, I think that would put the whole system in jeopardy. Because we, as workers, are the ones currently paying the social security checks to the retired. Suppose a third of us say, nah, we don't want to pay for it, we could really use that money to pay bills (and who couldn't) and we will worry about it on our own? Well, how do we now pay for all of the retired people who had been paying into it their whole adult lives? It just can't be done without taking the money from something else, and from what exactly? I'm pretty sure we are the only country in the world that even talks about privatization, or even partial-privatization. And frankly, many people think they can prepare for their retirement completely on their own, but they really can't, and even for those that can, they like anyone can have bad luck. There's too much uncertainty, and the reason we established it during the New Deal was because the elderly were hit the hardest during the Great Depression - over half of seniors were in poverty! There's too much social disarray without it, and nobody wants that. Consider it a tax that's needed in order to establish basic social sanity.
Considering that the Great Depression was caused by The Federal Reserve, the central bank created to stave off financial panics, I strongly disagree that government is the solution to "save" people from making poor decisions with their own money. Since the early part of last century, people have hardly had the chance to plan for their retirements considering what percentage of their paychecks is already taken-- it's a horribly unfair assumption to say that people cannot fund their own retirements seeing as how no one in the past few generations waste a substantial amount of their paycheck by sending it to a program that clearly mismanages it. As for your statement, "it just needs to be managed by a responsible government," Given the government's track record of never taking responsibility for ANYTHING, I would say that it's a long time coming before they get their shit together. How long? Probably longer than the system can survive, and its complete failure will probably be the only thing that could potentially bring about honest or responsible government-- or just the opposite: incredibly repressive government. Social Security is dependency on something that isn't even there-- or actually worse, trillions in unfunded liabilities. http://www.usdebtclock.org/
The fact is, the only thing that keeps this system going is belief in it. That's it, there's your solvency-- that is, the public not actually understanding how truly fucked it all is. It's a bubble that will continue to inflate until it inevitably bursts, no matter how many people equate the good intentions of this program with its actual effectiveness. In the end, it's a Ponzi scheme that will collapse.
Shows: 6.27.08 Hartford, CT/5.15.10 Hartford, CT/6.18.2011 Hartford, CT (EV Solo)/10.19.13 Brooklyn/10.25.13 Hartford
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Comments
I did read it, Byrnzie. I don't entirely disagree with it. I like how Taibbi referenced Dr. Paul, and the true roots of the movement, and how he didn't necessarily disagree with all that much about it. Everything that is being said about the Tea Partiers could essentially be said about the anti-war protesters of the Bush years. Where are THEY now? I'll tell you that a more than a handful of them were at the original tea party rallies in 2007, as anyone who is paying attention knows that big government yields big war. There IS common ground, if only more people would realize it and run with it. To call everyone in the movement a moron is unfair-- check out campaignforliberty.com once in a while and read the articles and blogs on there. You may disagree with their viewpoints, but to say they aren't argued intelligently is just not true.
A Houston tea party group called the King Street Patriots is being sued by Democratic groups because of its behavior on during early voting.
…witnesses in minority precincts had reported representatives from the group “shouting misinformation” and “following voters and standing behind them” as they tried to vote.
There have been 14 complaints in 11 locations on the first day of voting Monday.
The complaints included poll watchers “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots.
As Tommy Christopher at Mediaite notes, don’t expect this to get the attention the New Black Panther Party got for one allegation in 2008. There you had video of a black guy with a nightstick. The charges against the tea party group are less sexy, but potentially show a pattern rather than an isolated incident.
http://www.alan.com/2010/10/20/houston- ... imidation/
only in america can morons get voted in office
Sammi: Wanna just break up?
People like this:
Video: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2 ... bama-video
'As he continues his US midterm elections road trip meeting ordinary American voters, Gary Younge speaks to a resident of Salida, Colorado, who believes that Obama wasn't born in the US, has Muslim affiliations, and has prompted an increase in firearms sales'
No one's saying you can't like the president, i just don't get what's SO different now from say, 4 years ago...
And it's safe to say too many American's probably don't know what socialism is... :roll:
I don't really feel like doing the research, but to put it quickly, sources that I find reliable say it's fine, and sources I don't find reliable on a number of issues say it's on a road to ruin. Ultimately, any problems with it are solvable. HOWEVER, it's not impossible that the entire Federal government could collapse under it's own weight, so that would obviously take social security with it. But it's a perfectly sound system, and it just needs to be managed by a responsible government. If people were allowed to opt out of it, I think that would put the whole system in jeopardy. Because we, as workers, are the ones currently paying the social security checks to the retired. Suppose a third of us say, nah, we don't want to pay for it, we could really use that money to pay bills (and who couldn't) and we will worry about it on our own? Well, how do we now pay for all of the retired people who had been paying into it their whole adult lives? It just can't be done without taking the money from something else, and from what exactly? I'm pretty sure we are the only country in the world that even talks about privatization, or even partial-privatization. And frankly, many people think they can prepare for their retirement completely on their own, but they really can't, and even for those that can, they like anyone can have bad luck. There's too much uncertainty, and the reason we established it during the New Deal was because the elderly were hit the hardest during the Great Depression - over half of seniors were in poverty! There's too much social disarray without it, and nobody wants that. Consider it a tax that's needed in order to establish basic social sanity.
Considering that the Great Depression was caused by The Federal Reserve, the central bank created to stave off financial panics, I strongly disagree that government is the solution to "save" people from making poor decisions with their own money. Since the early part of last century, people have hardly had the chance to plan for their retirements considering what percentage of their paychecks is already taken-- it's a horribly unfair assumption to say that people cannot fund their own retirements seeing as how no one in the past few generations waste a substantial amount of their paycheck by sending it to a program that clearly mismanages it. As for your statement, "it just needs to be managed by a responsible government," Given the government's track record of never taking responsibility for ANYTHING, I would say that it's a long time coming before they get their shit together. How long? Probably longer than the system can survive, and its complete failure will probably be the only thing that could potentially bring about honest or responsible government-- or just the opposite: incredibly repressive government. Social Security is dependency on something that isn't even there-- or actually worse, trillions in unfunded liabilities.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
The fact is, the only thing that keeps this system going is belief in it. That's it, there's your solvency-- that is, the public not actually understanding how truly fucked it all is. It's a bubble that will continue to inflate until it inevitably bursts, no matter how many people equate the good intentions of this program with its actual effectiveness. In the end, it's a Ponzi scheme that will collapse.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful