Political discussion thread

King of Loss wrote: AlexDOM wrote: ONE WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM Wouldn't work with the amount of cultures on earth that just aren't compatible with each other.

It isn't exactly working with the Euro at the moment is it - and those cultures are pretty similar.

Dean wrote: Epignosis wrote: Finnforest wrote: So many will suffer in the transition.....old people who couldn't take it, kids robbed of their childhoods.....yes we might end up stronger one day but I'd rather not wish for it.  It would be nice if things could improve without going through that.  I think seeing societal order collapse and animal survival take over large scale would be an overrated experience.  So many have been through it, many are going through it today around the world, sad to me  Kids are already robbed.  Money gets removed from my paycheck every month.  It will not be there when I am aged.  Will it?We are a relatively young country.  236 years ago we did something that quite a many people in mainland America thought was senseless and unnecessary.  It will happen again.  Believe me Jim, I hate that it will happen, but the fact that it will happen, only makes me thirst for its happening.You miss the 50s.  I miss the 80s.  Yet here we are.  Unfortunately.  Romney will increase the debt.  Obama will increase the debt.  The debt will increase the interest.  The interest will increase the mandatory spending.  And I predict this: By the time my children are all adults, America will no longer be America. (As an outsider looking in): isn't this a continuation of the same underlying problems and issues that were present in the mid 18th century? Because (as you say) many people in mainland America thought the WOI was senseless and unnecessary, just as the later War of 1812 probably was too (though that helped create a sense of US and Canadian identity and resulted in a better understanding between the USA and the British Empire). In that sense did the USA win the War of Independance but fail to resolved the American Revolution?

The War of Independence started out with a more modest revolutionary goal than it ended up with, while even as the fighting started a very large contingent of the Continental Congress was only interested in independence from British Parliament, anticipating a Commonwealth system. Lack of support from the King and poor communication across the ocean allowed it to escalate to full independence. Some people today, especially Tea Partiers, think WOI was a war against taxation, but they're just plain wrong, and have thus manufactured new unresolved issues in the dubious guise of old unresolved existential issues.

I had a teacher once who claimed that the War of Independence was actually a civil war and the Civil War was actually a revolutionary war. This still makes sense to me, and so the answer might then be yes. The WOI failed to resolve the Revolution. The Civil War perhaps may have. But we still have had issues about the after-effects of slavery continuing to this day, and we have been able to slowly fix and patch it up over time.

We had another crisis during the Guilded Age in which communist revolution was a serious threat, but we got past that with progressive reforms that let some of the steam out. Today is similar economically, but communism is no longer regarded as a solution or threat. How this will play out I'm not certain, but I think we will probably fix and patch.

As far as the national debt, we've had one and eliminated it. We have another debt now. I don't know what everyone is worried about. The debt is a long term problem to be dealt with in the long term. In hard economic times, we're supposed to worry about jobs not debt.

Dean wrote: King of Loss wrote: AlexDOM wrote: ONE WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM Wouldn't work with the amount of cultures on earth that just aren't compatible with each other. It isn't exactly working with the Euro at the moment is it - and those cultures are pretty similar.

HackettFan wrote: The debt is a long term problem to be dealt with in the long term. In hard economic times, we're supposed to worry about jobs not debt.

I keep hearing people say that we should wait until the economy is booming again to worry about the debt, seeming not to realize that if we don't start worrying about it now the economy isn't going to boom again. The more debt we accrue, the more we have to pay in interest, which necessitates the devotion of more and more of our resources to the unproductive activity of making interest payments.

Furthermore, the worse our debt gets the less confidence people at home or abroad have in our country to ever be able to pay it back. This will a) cause interest rates to rise (they haven't yet, but it's coming, especially when some other countries get their houses in order and the world realizes that they are a better bet than the US,) b) decrease foreign investment into our companies, further hurting the economy, and c) decrease the incentives for eager young talent from other nations to immigrate here, leaving us with a dearth of innovation compared to other nations.

The use of a crisis to expand federal power and spending "temporarily" or to delay the solution to urgent problems is an age old tactic, and should always be met with suspicion.

dtguitarfan wrote: Moral: the most dangerous thing to do is to elect a politician who is lying to you. Mitt Romney is a pathological liar. 'Nuff said.

Note that I do wish that Obama and team would NOT exaggerate, leave things out, or repeat things without checking the facts first...but I can excuse it to a degree.

It's easier to prove a statement is false than to prove it is a lie - the person may not have known it was a lie. HOWEVER, when you CONTRADICT YOURSELF, or continue to repeat a lie after you have been told it is, one can be sure it is a lie.

thellama73 wrote: I don't really care about who is the bigger liar, but it is demonstrably true that the Obama administration knowingly lied about the Libya embassy attack on television for a week after they knew what happened. Anyone who says otherwise has not looked at the facts or is being dishonest with themselves.

Um, no. I am married to a woman who spent 10 years in the Navy, and during a number of those years worked in Naval intelligence. She will tell you first of all that intelligence is not like Google - they can't just type in "who just bombed the Libyan embassy?" Second of all - it's FREAKING CLASSIFIED! Think of police officers - when they are investigating a killer, they can't just go on TV and tell you everything they know! Or it would ruin their investigation. Well, intelligence is the same thing but on a much grander scale. When she worked in intelligence (she has told me) she worked on a number of cases where she remembers watching the news (they had tv's all over the room she worked in, and they were all tuned in to various news networks) and seeing how the news organizations had gotten 3 pieces of a 100 piece puzzle, and would put together this completely false and wrong story based on those 3 pieces (she will tell you Fox did this more than all the other organizations), because they'd rather report a false story than have nothing to report. So basically, Obama has to stand up there and take the heat for all this because he CAN'T tell us what happened. And it's just not fair, and not very gentlemanly for Romney to continually attack him for this. Also, have you noticed Romney has grown quiet on the subject? Take a look:
http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/02/why-romneys-not-talking-benghazi-anymore/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true

thellama73 wrote: So basically what you are saying is, they couldn't tell us the truth about what happened because it was classified (even though Obama called it terrorism publicly the day after the event, before switching to the policy of refusing to call it terrorism) so they deliberately told us something that wasn't true? That's what I call a lie, but maybe it's just me.

What I'm saying is - neither you nor I have the full story. We don't know what intelligence they had, and we don't know when they had it. We don't know if they had some plan that necessitated them pretending something in order to catch the people that did it.

What are you saying? Are you saying it's the President's duty, no matter what is an is not classified, to tell everyone in America everything? Are you saying that if the intelligence given to the President was wrong, it's his fault that he told us something that ended up being untrue? Because you don't know what intelligence was given to the President, and you don't know when it was given to him, and you don't know what kind of investigation was going on.

thellama73 wrote: dtguitarfan wrote: thellama73 wrote: I don't really care about who is the bigger liar, but it is demonstrably true that the Obama administration knowingly lied about the Libya embassy attack on television for a week after they knew what happened. Anyone who says otherwise has not looked at the facts or is being dishonest with themselves. Second of all - it's FREAKING CLASSIFIED! Think of police officers - when they are investigating a killer, they can't just go on TV and tell you everything they know! Or it would ruin their investigation. So basically, Obama has to stand up there and take the heat for all this because he CAN'T tell us what happened. So basically what you are saying is, they couldn't tell us the truth about what happened because it was classified (even though Obama called it terrorism publicly the day after the event, before switching to the policy of refusing to call it terrorism) so they deliberately told us something that wasn't true? That's what I call a lie, but maybe it's just me.

I'm no bigger of a fan of lying politicians than anyone else, but when was the last time a politician who was 100% honest was even remotely electable, much less elected to a higher government office?  The American people don't want honesty.  They want to be told what they want to hear.  And that goes for both sides of the political fence I fear.