Politics The Elephant in the room...The GOP today

This one calls on the POTUS to deport anyone who signed up to have their state secede, it's got over 4k alredy.

Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America. | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government
--- merged: Nov 13, 2012 at 2:35 PM ---

You're not from the US, right? 'Cause that's not how we roll. When something new needs done, say airport security, national defense etc... we don't use stuff already in place we create completely new department and divisions. That's how we ended up with the TSA and Homeland Security.

Obama was floating the idea of a Dept. of Business. I guess because the Dept. of Commerce and the Small Business Admin. weren't enough red tape to "help" businesses.

 

The Dept. of Business was more like one person overseeing business ideas/strategies etc. It was never meant to be something large.

 

Having worked almost all my adult life in either the military or for a government agency color me skeptical when the federal government wants to starts a "small department."

 

I'm there with you but it's worth noting considering the vitriol the GOP threw at this. Then again, based on the whole GOP campaign it isn't exactly surprising.

 

The left had the same reaction to almost anything Bush Jr. did, myself included. I found myself having to step back and think twice about some of Bush's policies when I found myself dismissive of a program Bono helped him come up with to fight AIDS in 3rd world countries.

I do think the right has reach new heights with their lows but that could just be a sign the US is becoming more and more angry with the "other" side.

 

I agree for the need to restructure. I'd even say downsize. But there needs to be careful planing and coordination. Same thing for cutting back on military spending. I say cut and cut BIG. I also say cut smart. Regardless of what many on the right are saying I believe the US is in a recovery, a fragile recovery. We start cutting the federal workforce and defense programs right and left without regard to the effect on the economy we could create a mess bigger then the one Bush left. On Dec. 7th 1941 FDR was presented a situation where massive military spending was not only widely accepted, though not 100%, it was easily approved. He was able to take civilian factories (more factories actually since he'd been helping the Brits) and have them quickly retooled to make military gear and equipment. Today we're faced with an opposite version of that but on a much smaller scale. We need people, factories and companies supplying military gear to somehow switch to rebuild our own infrastructure. If we cut the funding for a significant percentage of jobs in the defense contractor field without thought of the effects on the employment we'll be making a major error. Same thing with the federal workforce. It's likely bloated but laying off a bunch of folks right now will undoubtedly bite us in the ass.

We need a plan. One where we stop making fighter jets and outrageous military equipment designed to fight an enemy that no longer exists and somehow start creating civilian jobs. We need a smart plan.

 

Gotta agree with Glory. There's a guy with a team of 11 who is heading up a $2 billion business support task force in Afghanistan, and the size of his team hasn't increased as far as I know.

If small is appropriate, it may just stay that way.

Something like that is where the company DuPont is often cited as a prime example. After WW2, their gunpowder factories were facing a huge slump in demand and the management decided to start producing a range of chemical products where same/similar equipment could be used as for the gunpowder production.

They were quite successful in their conversion to civilian, and even introduced a new organizational structure for businesses (divisional structure) when they figured out how to best product and market their different products.

Companies with mechanical and technological advantages should be fairly "easy" (very relative) to convert to civilian industries. If the necessary political will exists.

At the same time, somebody should let the American public know in advance that it will probably not be a smooth ride and that several companies may need to restructure/downsize for a while.

 

It's been my experience that nothing remains small once the US federal government is involvement. If a little is good and little more if even better. Then pretty soon a whole lot will solve all.

It's that "if the political will exists" that will usual fuck stuff up in the US. That and the need to ask people to be patient and ask them to put up with a bumpy ride for a while. Look at the current situation. The country was in a complete economic free fall with bank collapsing and employment dropping like a rock and the stock market lost 1/2 it's value. We can argue over whose fault that was but that was the situation. In less then four years the stock market was almost back to where it was, the private sector jobs growth occurred for like 27 months, I can't remember the last time I read about a bank failure. But almost half the country were pissed things weren't better fast enough. I seriously think some people we're willing to give Obama about a week to resolve all the countries problems.

Patients, understanding and political will are not in huge supply in the US.

 

if the republicans announce that their primary objective is a one-term obama administration and proceed to advance that objective by systematically blocking proposed legislation in the hopes that the fuck-up that will result gets blamed not on them but on the administration--which is what they did with the 2010 election---then it is reasonable to see the party as a Problem. what's amazing is that the strategy nearly worked.

the republicans have a basic responsibility for the on-going paralysis of conventional political institutions at the federal level. the only principle involved in that followed from their collective fixation on power.

just to repeat, there are many areas in which i am not a fan of the obama administration---most of them have to do with its center-right orientation in foreign policy and its seeming inability to mount compelling arguments for even their own rather tepid initiatives in domestic politics. the central problem is that obama, like clinton, is a neo-liberal. neo-liberalism offers no way out of the crises that neo-liberalism has generated. none at all.

 

neo-liberal is a way of designating the absurd beliefs clustered around the assumption that capitalist markets are somehow rational, that they tend toward equilibrium outside the masses of qualifications and rules specific to introduction to economics classes, etc. the term is a bit confusing because in the states this ideology has been so dominant (ideological monocropping in this the "land of the free") that it hasn't had a single name (trickle-down, the "washington consensus," laissez-faire, cowboy capitalism, "globalization" blah blah blah). there seems little to be done about this confusion, so i try to be consistent personally in using the term neo-liberalism. but that doesn't always help.

the neo-cons are different. they fancy themselves "realists" in the kissinger sense. i like the term "mayberry machiavellians" that once was bandied about to label the particulary incompetent pnac crew that, to our collective misfortune, were central players among the bush people.

 

I

I think the first thing any US citizen would have to concern themselves with both countries is getting in, legally that is unless of course they want to be illegal aliens in another country. I looked into NZ when I moved here. I'd been there back in the 80's thanks to the US Navy and really liked the place. Immigrating there from the US, at the time I checked, was near impossible. I've heard similar things about Switzerland.

 

President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as "Delphi" to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities. That's according to a four-hour briefing delivered to Republican state senators at the Georgia state Capitol last month.

Top Georgia GOP Lawmakers Host Briefing on Secret Obama Mind-Control Plot | Mother Jones

wow.

 

On the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory, it would be bad enough if it was just the bat shit crazy Tea Party wing, but the Republican National Party platform now includes language opposing Agenda-21, the 20-year old UN non-binding resolution (signed by GHW Bush and upheld by Clinton and G W Bush) that encourages sustainable development.
--- merged: Nov 14, 2012 at 6:12 PM ---


This is a good one too.

Glenn Beck accusing the Obama administration of manufacturing the Petraeus sex scandal to "discredit" the military. And he has the chalkboard to prove it.

 

hate on glenn beck all you want (im not a fan myself), but there's clearly something going on with this whole benghazi thing that we're not being told. obviously they waited to oust petraeus until after the election. is there some internal power battle between cia, fbi, or the administration going on? are the syria gun running rumors true? did the administration fail to act on known intelligence to protect the ambassador? why did the administration try to divert attention to the stupid mohammed video?

there's so much going on here it makes my head spin.

 

I agree that the facts need to come out, particularly on the chain of events in Benghazi.

But I dont take seriously anything alleged by Beck, Limbaugh, Fox News, Alex Jones, etc. and I dont think any objective person should give their unsubstantiated rumors a second glance. It is just more of the same old crap from them, with one goal in common, as always -- their political agenda is more important than the facts.

The focus should be on getting the facts first, not assigning blame first based on rumor and innuendo and sheer contempt for the current administration in their typical fashion of "fair, balanced and objective" reporting.