host

will....I'm sitting here in the wee hours, still smarting over the crossover of about thirty dem house members in the vote on the FISA (...give us what we want or we'll unleash a 3rd pearl harbor "event" on ya...and you know we will do it...and then blame you for tying our hands in the war on terr-urrr!...because you didn't vote to permit us to do any electronic surveillance and data mining that we demanded.....) "modernization".....

We're not going to know if the outcome of saturday's vote in the house will be that an "in house" orchestrated attack on some domestic target(s) was avoided, but to dismiss the idea that this is what would have happened, if the dems had voted in a solid bloc, is to deny our recent history.....

Do you notice that, since the october 2001, anthrax "scare", the vote on these national security issues gets done with only a coordinated wave of "if you don't do as we say, and then we get hit, it's on you"?

Just two closely spaced, high profile attacks in the latter part of 2001, and they were able to take it all..... our rights in exchange for their "we'll keep you safe, trust us..." rhetoric. Just like that....we're f**ked....ever since...

With just 15 months until the next election and with a new precedent for an unaccountable presidency that democrats harbor high expectations of inheriting in that election, was it simply "good politics" to avoid, at the least, being labelled as "soft on terror", along with the risk of "owning" the next "incident"?

....anyway....who do you think accomplished more with their politics, Pelosi, or Ron Paul...... ? ......Murray Rothbard, or Huey Long?

I read this about Rothbard, just yesterday, will;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothbard#Life

.....I think that you have both the intellect and the number of years potentially available to you to risk going in circles, politically, as Rothbard seems to have done. I'm not comparing your politics with his, as I think that you know.... I'm just passing along my impression that you risk a lot to achieve a low probability outcome....

The political figures of accomplishment....Roosevelt with social security, Johnson with civil rights and halving the national poverty rate, Nixon with environmental regulation and diplomacy with China, were neither the best nor the most principled...they knew how to get things done. Clinton is in that class, accomplished things that benefited the majority without significant inconvenience/injustice to the rest. Could Reagan or GW Bush meet criteria like that?

Clinton probably faced the greatest opposition, but he found common ground with the opposition, and they got things done. Clinton presided over spending by the end of his term, that included a budget that required borrowing just $18 billion of the year 2000 SSI collections surplus, compared to the last few years, when the government borrows the annual SSI entire surplus, and enough additional to total $412 billion per year....

You can either resign yourself to work with what we are handed....a badly polarized, two party dominated system that was making fiscal, jobs growth, escalating average standard of living and foreign policy progress, as recently as seven years ago, but suddenly reversed in november, 2000.... or you can attempt to do it your way...

What I'm lacking in intellect, I'm attempting to make up for with a combination of experience, research, and thoughtfulness......and I don't have the answers or solutions that I would hope to come by. The current government has been so secretive and deceptive, that I have to believe the worst of them. Before the era of the current government, the democrats certainly weren't perfect, but now, in hindsight and in comparison, they sure seemed like they were.

You seem a lot more sure of yourself...of your opinions, than I am, of mine. For one thing, I've lost the hope for the odds that the real problems that we face, can realistically be expected to be solved, that I possessed in fall, 2000, when the debt was 58 percent, and declining, of what it has grown, to....now.

I don't think any party is deserving of what they are going to be handed, if power shifts away from republicans, except republicans. I think that we are in deep shit, ironically in every imaginable category, except from a genuine foreign sponsored terrorist threat on the US mainland.....

I am expecting bad economic times to be evident by november, 2008, and that economic concern will distract from all other issues. I expect hard, hard days for the spending power of US currency, until the dollar collapses because the US treasury defaults, and I see this triggering domestic violence. I see no political party in the environment of a representative, republican form of government, being the means to achieve reform, in the forseeable future. I hope that I'm wrong, but that's what's on my screen.....