:How about being more specific? I think that most of us disagreed with a lot of things that Bush did and agreed with a few other things, but Bush hasn't had a free pass since, for most of his time in office, the Democrats have controlled congress. Also, while I disagree with most of what Obama has done, he has done a few things right. What I'm opposed to and what I belive that most of the people on this site are opposed to is the unfettered expansion of the federal government and that's essentially a libertarian, not a Republican, not a Democratic, not a liberal or conservative idea, even though many conservatives and liberals are also libertarians.
Also, the division of the parties is not a clear cut as you seem to think. There are some Republicans, who are more liberal than most Democrats and vice versa.
I have to ask. Since it appears that no court will hear the case, since there's a lot of disagreement on the meaning of natural born citizen, since the state of Hawaii has stated that the birth certificate is legitimate, and since nobody has presented any solid or even credible evidence to the contrary, the why are we wasting precious time discussing this. While I appreciate your arguments, I think that this time would be better spent informing people about how his policies are destroying this country. Continuing along these lines not only is going to get us nowhere, it's going to cause us to lose credibility among a lot of people.
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Those, who are pushing for so called universal health care, are primarily basing it on two false premises.
The first is that the plan will provide health care to more people with better quelity and at lower cost. Any first year business student knows that doing any of these three things means that you can't do the other two.
The second is that health care is a right. How can access to a limited resource be a right? E.g., if I need a liver transplant, do I have a right to get a liver? As there are fewer livers available than patient that need them, there must be a way to determine who gets a liver and who doesn't. At present, this decision is made in accordance with medical ethics. Under a government system, the decision would be made on a political basis just as most, if not all of the economic decisions under the current administration have been made on a political basis even if they made no economic sense.
A second principle is that, for those things on which the government needs to spend money, it should always be spent at the lowest level of government possible. The reason for this is that there's much less overhead when a local government spends money they raised locally than if they send the money to the central government and then receive it back. All that handling costs money, not to mention the corruption that it invites. Another principle is that, if capitalism is to work, then businesses, no matter how big, must be allowed to fail. If we capitalize profits and socialize losses, it encourages reckless, rash, and over risky behavior.Finally, for an economy to thrive, the rule of law must be followed, beginning with those who are in the highest positions in the land. If the government continues to bully investors and financial institutions to accept less than what is rightfully theirs, the eventual result is that nobody will be willing to lend money or, if they do, it will be at very hight interest rates and, without the means to raise money, what should have been a deep and painful recession will turn into a depression out of which it wiil be difficult, if not impossilbe, to correct.
There are several principles that indicate why a government can't tax and spend its way into prosperity. The first is that the government has no money and they have only 3 ways to obtain it: increase taxes, borrow it, or print money, all of which take money or the ability to raise money from the healthy portion of the economy. Thus, government spending always is a drag on the economy. The less the government spends, the better off the economy will be, the more, the worse off.
Science, which claims to be settled, is not science at all. It's superstition. To call superstition science and attempt to use it to expand one's power is the worst form of deomogaguery. The crowd that claims to care and believe the most about climate change don't reflect it in their life style. This is about money, control, and a way to bypass the protections given in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It's also an invitation for no end of corruption.
To listen to the news here, you'd think that this was a takeover of the country by the military. This is not the case and it's not a coup. It's a case of the military enforcing the law as directed by the Honduran Supreme Court and the Honduran Congress. The new president was legally installed in accordance with the Hounduran constitution and there seems to be every intent to hold elections as was originally planned.
This, in fact, was stopping a coup by Zelaya, who was attempting to install himself as a dictator.
The answer to how is to get the word out. This whole bill has been largely ignored, and I don't think that people have any idea what its passage would do to them both politically and economically. It's clear that, so far, we can't depend upon the press. That means that we'll need to inform people ourselves.
The good news is that, for the first time, Obama's negatives are about equal to his positives in job approval, which is an effective job approval of zero which might help stop this juggernaut toward neofascism.
I actually saw this predicted by people like Dick Morris. Unfortunately, a good many people, who voted in the presidential election, voted the way they did not because they were well informed but because they were ignorant.
E.g., one poll I've seen said that, when voters were asked which party controlled congress, more than half said the Republicans. Also, when I told one Obama supported that Obama wanted redistribution of wealth, he vehementlay objected that it wasn't true despite the fact that he'd already said it and it was on his web site.
What's happening now is that people, including some of those who voted for BHO, are witnessing the policies and not liking what they see.
How about using the actual words in the Constitution? It reads as follows in Article 1 Section 8: Congress shall have the power to:
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To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
It doesn't say that there can't be a standing army, only that the funding must be renewed at least every two years.
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Contraption