It does? How so? The same thing you're saying you can replace GOP with DEMS and Obama with GWB. You can then also replace DEMS and replace GWB with Clinton.

One of the things I've envied about democrats/liberals in general is the lack of a tendency on their part to take pride en masse in some Limbaugh-esque idiot.

Oops.

No it can't. When did W ever do what we wanted that we complained about it? We complained because the idiot never did what we wanted. The only time I can recall that I supported one of his decisions was when he took us into Afghanistan in pursuit of bin Laden, and of course, he got distracted by the shiny in Iraq so that didn't even last very long.

The republicans claim to want tax cuts. Obama is actually giving tax cuts to 95% of the country. The republicans are bitching about that, and not only bitching, but claiming that it's a tax increase. Either the republicans involved with the tea parties are insane, stupid, or just want to make shit up so they can still bitch about the evil democrats.

Again, i'm going to state that it is the same rhetoric that the Dems and GOP play and have been playing within the media since as long as I've been reading politics going back to Jimmy Carter days. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it's a matter of them taking a position within the media and keeping that position, no matter the facts.

With regards to the tax cuts, they way that I understand the tea parties when I read what people are suggesting is that the increased spending WILL become increased taxes in some fashion in the future.

If you don't agree that that is the case, please explain to me where you see that the bailout monies will be paid for. Let me remind you that we paid the Federal Excise Tax for the Spanish American war from 1898 - 2006, well over the costs. So while it wasn't collected by the government directly, I'm not so interested in paying any extra fees to buy a car, get a mortgage, transact within my 401k. I'm not interested in a future VAT or federal sales tax.

So, where does the money come from?

I've already explained that but it was many pages ago so I'll rephrase:

Yeah, no one's stupid enough to say that increased government spending won't lead to more taxation down the road (except the republicans, that is, who think (or claim to think) cutting taxes and upping spending will make us all rich). The choice now is between being poor until the country finally implodes, or in agreeing to a given tax burden in the future in exchange for saving the country and our wallets. I don't see why people would have a problem with this.

Additionally, the increased taxes will fall upon the wealthiest of society, which is doubly fair because they got their wealth because of society and therefore owe society more, and because for 30 years they've been unfairly gobbling up the wealth thanks to the dumbassed policies that put us in this situation in the first place.

Finally, I find the entire concept of the tea parties disingenuous because none of these guys banded together to howl about Bush's bailouts, and none of them banded together to bitch about the crazy governmental spending of Reagan and the Bushes. Where were they then? Is it only Democrat spending that increases our taxes? That's an awfully interesting magical world they live in, doncha think?

So they're mad as hell about something that hasn't happened yet and may not happen, and they're not going to stand for it anymore.

Asking how the bailouts will be paid for communicates a misunderstanding of how the bailouts work. We invested in the companies. If they become successful, we can sell our investments and make back even more. Sure, some may fail, but you're talking (posting) as if this is simply spending. It's not. The bailouts are not spending, they're investing, and there's a big difference.

eh, maybe Will. Some of the bailouts are going to be straight spending, because the bastard corporations are gonna figure out a way to not pay the money back if they survive. And of course, some of the corporations will probably fail even with the bailout money (as I think GM/Chrysler would) and so that, too, will be straight spending.

But I think you missed a larger issue. It's not just investing in the companies with the expectation of a payoff down the road. It's investing in the /country/ with the expectation of a payoff down the road. If we all wanna be like Germany was after World War 1, where it takes a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread, then I can see where we'd be pissed off at the government spending. But if we want the possibility of a strong economy again, then we have to invest now, which means spending money.

The tea parties were really thrown by Fox News and other conservative groups who WANT to bankrupt the country because they WANT to change the US into a peasant economy where the few rich landowners have all the resources and everyone else is poor. We've listened to those bozos for 30 years. I think it's time we stop.

shak, it is an awfully interesting world both the Dems and the GOP live in. Again, I say that both sides are quite hypocritical in stances and statements. Today's latest comes to mind of Mr. Obama stating he will end warrantless wiretaps, and yet, that never happened, but hey it was a campaign promise right? IMO politics is an endless loop of hypocrisy.

Re: the taxation, there's a point in time where the piper has to be paid. I'm sure as an automotive enthusiast you know the Fram oil filter commercials, "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later." IMO Implosion is a matter of fear tactics from both sides of the aisles. Conservatives are ready and prepared to weather the storm, but of course the assholes who lived off credit don't have a pot to pee in.

Will, I have never seen a government instrument of investment like this. There's no bond, there's no paper, it's a law that SAYS it's going to give money and doesn't outline how the investment is to work. There's nothing in TARP explaining how the monies are to "be" investments or what the rate of return is to be. There's nothing close to a prospectus. There's nothing close to an explanation of the investment instrument save a very thick paged bill that no one completely read when it was voted upon. In other words, many including myself see this as a flat out wholesale give away of monies.

If you believe that this is an investment instrument, then you have no idea how investments work.

Yeah, I'm pissed off about that too, and I think we oughta nail him to the wall for it. But that doesn't mean he's wrong about everything.

Conservatives ARE the assholes who lived off credit. They're the ones who borrowed money and spent it like it was going out of style on crap like Star Wars and the Iraq war. They caused the storm that we now have to weather.

So you say you don't know how this is going to work, then chastise me for thinking it's an investment? You can't see the future any better than I can. Sure, it's a gamble (like any investment), but for the time being calling it pure spending is dishonest.

Will, I don't see it as an investment. I see the bailout as a divisive tool for practical purposes. If there was any kind of investment, then there would have been some sort of explanation or expectation set within the bill. It has not been, thus it is not an investment in the conventional understanding and definition.

Until there's an explanation of what the investment return is, there's no investment any different than equating it to: "I'm investing in buying groceries because it is what is needed to power my body so that I can go to work." or even better "I'm investing in a car so that I can drive to work in the next town over." Those aren't investments in the definition of investments, but are the colloquial accepted function of investments.

well that's the problem--your viewpoint seems to exclude multiple types of state action, cyn--you seem to want to see it in only one way and to interpret state action as a type of partisan politics. fact is that in this situation had the state not acted the whole house of cards would have fallen in. fact is that one of the main reasons the patterns of action are as incoherent as they are was that the shit did not wait to hit the fan until obama was in office, so he finds himself stuck with a series of poorly designed, very large=scale actions that came out of the endgame of the bush period. there's no debate about this, btw: this is simply a matter of record.

it isn't the case that the state is simply a giant individual whose actions have to operate like yours and mine, simply because the state is in a position to create money. there are constraints around that, but in the end, the state can do it and you and i cannot. so it isn't the case that all state instruments have to be understood in the way that you frame them, nor is it the case that the way the obama administration is acting so far is deliberately partisan.

what i see instead is a very significant political Problem unfolding for the right and a whole series of empty positions staked out with reference to obama with the sole objective of doing brand triage. this seems transparent to me.

btw i am not an unequivocal fan of obama at all--i think he should be moving to totally marginalize the right, that there needs to be a coherent plan behind state actions, clear objectives---the main obstacles to that remain the incoherence of the bush administration when the shit hit the fan, and the fact that these actions persist.

you wanna see something interesting, though--track what's happening with the imf.
fundamentally, the important actions are happening at a transnational level.
the american conservative movement--as a movement--is fighting the wrong battle, fundamentally.

When Bush was President, I was told that all protests were patriotic. Now these same friends are telling me that these protests are embaressing. Odd how things change.


I am amazed that there can be upwards of 250,000 protestors without any reports of violence and arrests. That has to say something.

Funny, I was told it was treasonous and unpatriotic to protest a wartime president when Bush was in office, by the same people who organized the tea parties to protest a wartime president. Odd how things change indeed.

Yeah, it says those numbers come from Grover Norquist the far right winger who runs Americans for Tax Reform - one of the big players in the tea parties. Another big player in the tea parties, Fox News Channel, was caught on video tripling the estimated attendance at one of the protests. Make of that what you will.

I'm going to suggest that we then change the word because there a number of fiscally conservative people that didn't live off credit. The only credit they live off of are the known 2 of house and education. I know many "conservative" companies that believe in leveraging credit as a fiscally sound policy. Many including myself don't find that a conservative value at all.

Again, I believe that's why many of the conservatives broke the GOP ranks and voted for Mr. Obama because the GOP was proving to not be conservative. GOP does not in my mind equal conservative, while they may have more conservative or had conservative values, they no longer seem to.

I don't believe that the assholes that I'm speaking of are the same assholes you are, since most of my democrat friends are in binds now because they leveraged their equity and used the house as an ATM and their credit cards to live a lifestyle they could not afford.

if you want to start making separations like that, cyn---how would you position the fiscally conservative people that you talk about (or are you the only one? hard to say, isn't it? im sure there are others. does prudent mean conservative? i haven't seen that. and i know alot of people some of whom are moderate enough to actually be democrats and none of them are in the boat you describe---are we playing a stereotype game here? what's the point?) anyway, how would you position these folk with reference of neoliberalism--cowboy capitalism---market fundamentalism--the dominant economic ideology from the thatcher-reagan period through about 2007?

As far as I know, these guys are not protesting the war, but taxation.

And if you have better numbers, and videos of violence and the true arrest acounts, please post them.

I don't know rb, someone else said GOP conservatives... I'm saying simply conservative valued people and showing were those ranks were changed and altered. It was talked about as such during the end of the election, yet now not so much but all conservatives being lumped back into the GOP.

re: isms, rb, sorry, I'm not into the labels and don't understand the labels, you'll have to expound more on that with better descriptions as to your meanings because the definitions I find don't seem to agree with your context in most of the conversations. I'm happy to continue these kinds of conversations, but need some assistance in the definitions in order to process the questions posed.

That number sounds about right; I think Nate Silver estimated about 250-300k.

And there's nothing wrong with thinking that protests are patriotic. This is true, exercising our right of free speech has been a big part of American tradition. But it doesn't contradict thinking that some protests are worse than others. I disagree with the tea-part protesters, and some of them are stupid or racist. But that doesn't mean they're not patriotic.

I'm frequently embarrassed by examples of excessive patriotism.

The main difference between the war protests and the tea parties is that the war protesters actually knew what they were protesting about

Plus, I've personally never said that the tea party protests were unpatriotic. Stupid, yes, but not unpatriotic. The farthest I go is to point out that according to the Bush supporting republicans, they're unpatriotic.

while i personally think that patriotism is a kind of mental disorder for the most part, the result of this is that i don't typically bother with the term. because that's the case, i can't imagine having ever said anything about anyone's "patriotism" in relation to these goofy tea parties. if you want to play this way, it is better than people are engaged enough to go out on the streets--or stand like docile citizens in the appropriately cordoned off "free-speech" area--than not. but the closer you get to having to revert to that as an explanation for what you're doing--in other words the closer you get to being out in the street just because, well, you're snippy but can't quite put your finger on why, or what it means, or what you would prefer to see happening otherwise, you're just snippy dammit--the weaker the action tends to be.

just saying.

Is this yet another example of this?

GOP fights over labeling Democrats as Socialists - Jeff Mapes on Politics

a critical element of brand triage republican style is finding a new wedge issue--preferably one that can be expressed in little tiny sentences or memes. the content is presumably optional, and i suppose the idea would be that a successful meme would generate something of it's own content--attract it more like.

what's strange about this is that there's a story in the press concerning the meme itself before it's been launched, so i assume it's been nixed outright.

and the funny thing is that you see the republican right flirting with heading over into john birch society territory.

it doesn't seem to me a great idea for the republicans to head further to the right if they want to remain something more than a highly funded fringe group. but because i oppose everything the republicans stand for, a side of me would like to see them try it.