The Grand New Party

[saden1]

Originally Posted by CRedskinsRule

So we should applaud having an unqualified electorate? Were you so high on this thought when the Republicans swept in with the Contract For America? (I am willing to bet you had at least once called it the Contract ON America).

There is a reason the Senate was originally a body politic, and why they were given the authorities and responsibilities they were. It is not a good thing to have the full legislative and executive branch driven directly by the vote of the people. Sadly, some think our government is the same that brought us success in the first 150 years, but it is not, and gradually we have sold our Nation's birthright for the sake of "the people". (note I am not speaking in any way shape or form about the racial/sexist attitudes that were prevalent during those 150 years, I applaud our country's growth past those blind prejudices).

Some other examples of leaving the path that brought us growth as a country:

Washington advised us to "avoid foreign entanglements" .
The Constitution, when written, didn't allow for an income tax.
The 10th amendment says
Yet we have a Department of Education which tries to tell Alaskans, Nebraskans, and Floridians, that they all should meet Federal guidelines.

Look, it is what it is, but it is not a pendulum it is more like the big thing you drop a quarter in and it rolls in an ever tighter circle until it falls into the dead center. Yes we may cycle to more or less government but it gradually decays into a place where more and more rights are restricted until the government engulfs us.

No, no one said stupid voters should be applauded their right to vote without having them qualify should be respect. If you bet me you will lose that bet. My beef is always centered around reason and policy.

We have to deal with lots of issues but lets not pretend America is getting worse. It isn't. Politics used to be much dirtier than it currently is. There's more money than use to be but money was always at play in Washington.

I leave you with this article I found interesting. You may not like what it has to say...click it at your own risk.

[Trample the Elderly]

Originally Posted by saden1

No, no one said stupid voters should be applauded their right to vote without having them qualify should be respect. If you bet me you will lose that bet. My beef is always centered around reason and policy.
We have to deal with lots of issues but lets not pretend America is getting worse. It isn't. Politics used to be much dirtier than it currently is. There's more money than use to be but money was always at play in Washington.

I leave you with this article I found interesting. You may not like what it has to say...click it at your own risk.

I would like to know what the wager is?

Your beef is yours alone.

[Beemnseven]

Originally Posted by Trample the Elderly

I wouldn't say that all Libertarians are liberal on social issues. They're just so far to the right that they seem strange. Ron Paul and Bobb Barr are so far to the right that things like, let the States decide for themselves when it comes to drugs, abortion, and homosexual special interest seem almost foreign to the average person. Auditing the Federal Reserve is a libertarian / conservative Ron Paul idea that is gaining strength in the House right now. If you have to take the good and the bad, well . . . . there's a lot more good to that idea than bad.

I wouldn't say that no one notices either. You and I have. I'll go out on a limb and say that a lot of people on this thread have too. Capitalism isn't under attack because we're not really practicing it. Our government already had it's hand in the socialist cookie jar to begin with. Capitalism is the answer. The liberal media doesn't like capitalism so they smear it every chance they get.

Perhaps the majority of Americans don't do their homework. Many of the ones I know don't. A lot of them are just ignorant. Even they read the news papers and get fed up. No one that I know truly likes these bailouts.

The problem for many of the voters that I know is that they're to lazy to get involved in the process. I vote in the primary, or I used to. One thing that should be done IMO is to stop having the Northern wing of the Republican Party decide who the nominee is. Everyone knows that the Republican's bread and butter is in the South and Midwest. Yeah, there are conservatives up North and on the Left Coast, but they're out numbered five to one.

I liked Romney and Giuliani but I wouldn't have voted for them. Giuliani would've made a great addition to the State Department and Romney would've been nice to have in a public office with this economy. I might have voted for Romney. I dunno . . . .

On the first bolded point, you're correct. In fact, the word 'liberal' has been twisted and morphed into something that it never meant originally. If you go by the current use of the word, being 'liberal' on social issues would actually mean one would favor more gun control, being against the death penalty, that sort of thing. I should have said that libertarians are for freedom and individual rights when it comes to social issues.

On the second bolded point, you're correct there too. A system of public education, a progressive income tax, the creation of the federal reserve and moving more towards central planning on economics are all indicators of socialistic tendencies and they've been around for a long, long time.

So it is absolutely true that we are a mixed economy of some socialism and capitalism, and we haven't had a pure free market system for quite awhile.

[CRedskinsRule]

Originally Posted by saden1

No, no one said stupid voters should be applauded their right to vote without having them qualify should be respect. If you bet me you will lose that bet. My beef is always centered around reason and policy.

We have to deal with lots of issues but lets not pretend America is getting worse. It isn't. Politics used to be much dirtier than it currently is. There's more money than use to be but money was always at play in Washington.

I leave you with this article I found interesting. You may not like what it has to say...click it at your own risk.

Ok, I clicked it. And surprisingly, it didn't bother me at all. My response may be jumbled, so read and respond at your own risk.
First, if you look at my list of reductions which you asked about, you would see I reduce our military to a self defense posture. The fact that we pay 22BILLION dollars for 1 fighter is insane, and guess what, those people who are so happy in Denmark Holland Norway and Sweden, they don't do that. It is no myth that northern Europe lives under the shield of America, and has had the peace derived from that. I am glad they are happy, now let them pay their taxes to build defenses from the natural predators in other countries that have lain fallow for the past 30 years.
While we spend hundreds of billions to support a tremendous military and the rest of the world, even those nations that hate us, benefit from the general peace that we have created. It is not surprising that you would find some who are happy to pay outrageous taxes. I can tell you also, that Germans, who basically get gouged are not so happy that others are living off of the German national wealth. My German aunt visited last month and while I didn't go to deep into politics with her, it is clear that the EU has taken deep cuts into the German nation.

There is a point for taxes. But not every solution requires a Federal answer, you say we should not pretend America is getting worse. I am not pretending, I am saying it that that is my belief. And I am not speaking about just under President Obama, he has only been in office 100+ days, the systemic problems that I believe are making it worse speak to the growing dependence on a large federal government.

Let me ask a question:
If you have a large problem, any large complex problem, what is the first step to solving it?

[Beemnseven]

Originally Posted by saden1

I leave you with this article I found interesting. You may not like what it has to say...click it at your own risk.

Here's another way you can look at that poll which indicates people in northern Europe are so "happy" even when their taxes are so high: If they have a progressive tax structure like we do, meaning that a very small portion of their society pays the bulk of the taxes, then it's no wonder the majority say they're happy since they weren't taxed too much in the first place.

Ask ten people independently if they are happy with their financial situation -- if one of them had a gun pointed at their head by a government official forcing them to hand over 80% of their paycheck, while the other nine could keep most of theirs, the poll's results would say that 90% of respondents say their financial situation is just fine.

[JoeRedskin]

Originally Posted by saden1

No, no one said stupid voters should be applauded their right to vote without having them qualify should be respect. If you bet me you will lose that bet. My beef is always centered around reason and policy.

We have to deal with lots of issues but lets not pretend America is getting worse. It isn't. Politics used to be much dirtier than it currently is. There's more money than use to be but money was always at play in Washington.

I leave you with this article I found interesting. You may not like what it has to say...click it at your own risk.

In addition to the arguments by CRedskin, another point to be considered is the basic homogenous populations of these countries. The populations have similar cultural and economic goals with small populations and land mass that simply don't require the same complex solutions presented by our larger much more diverse population.

[70Chip]

Originally Posted by tryfuhl

Well without global cooling we really don't have that leg to stand on. The Kyoto treaty was not brought up in a time like now, the economy was much better, but I do agree that it could have a major economic impact. It's not so much that we need to ratify a treaty, just we need to take better steps towards preserving the environment.

People call talk about skewered facts or whatever they'd like, but the huge emission of pollutants teamed with deforestation can certainly not be helping or neutral.

It could be well be neutral. We have evolved in an environment that contained a certain amount of CO2. More CO2 might be bad, or it might be good for humans. Who knows. We're on our own, hurtling through spacetime on a big unfriendly rock. The pretense of control displayed by the political Left reminds me of my fundamentalist Christian grandmother. The Liberals will fix everything. Bullshit. Don't sell me a cup of bullshit and call it progress.

If you eliminate God from the equation, I can argue freely for the Chomskyite anarchist position which is really easy intelectually. "We're all alone so **** you". My opinion is just as valuable as yours and don't talk to me about your bloody science because that's just religion by another name. Fairy stories made up by crotchety old men trying to get a leg up. You see where this leads.

[Beemnseven]

[firstdown]

Originally Posted by tryfuhl

Those scientists can usually be put into a list, the ones supporting man's impact is too long of a list to generate. It seems that quite a number of those who don't agree either say that it's too inconclusive or that man isn't the MAIN cause of it, which I didn't say that we were. In addition, a number of these professionals are geologists (many petroleum geologists) and many others are meteorologists, which may seem surprising, but they're more familiar with short term changes.

It is still of advantage of us to look into more efficient and responsible practices.

Are you so sure about that?
.: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works :: Minority Page :.

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by tryfuhl

Those scientists can usually be put into a list, the ones supporting man's impact is too long of a list to generate. It seems that quite a number of those who don't agree either say that it's too inconclusive or that man isn't the MAIN cause of it, which I didn't say that we were. In addition, a number of these professionals are geologists (many petroleum geologists) and many others are meteorologists, which may seem surprising, but they're more familiar with short term changes.

It is still of advantage of us to look into more efficient and responsible practices.

I didn't state my self well there. There exists a large contingent of uncrackpot scientists who would argue that Global Warming doesn't even exist. Forget who or what caused it. The main arguments that I have studied, and as far as I can tell don't have any real dog in the fight, go like this.

Warming data collected over the last 100 years is rather spotty. Think about it. A 100+ years ago there was widespread, accurate and scientifically relevant amounts of temperature data available that could be used in a definitive manner? Sounds dubious to me. Forget about using data from before that...it doesn't even really exist. Most of the global climate change data is built using human-derived models. Models are really a fancy way of saying...we drew a picture and this is what it looks like. They're human-made. Maybe they're accurate and maybe they're not. But from a scientific standpoint they aren't evidence of anything other than the model-builder's ability to use a computer and code. The large "consensus" who "believe" in global climate change are driven by contingents just as politically motivated as the ones driven by the oil companies. In fact there is probably more money in total at stake on the climate change side than the other. All of this isn't to say that global climate change is a crock. I have no idea...but I am not willing to go blindly down a path that will cost the human existence enormous time, effort and money just to fix a problem that may or may not exist.

Now your point about finding energy alternatives anyways, I can get on board with. From a political standpoint we need a strategy for extricating ourselves from the tyranny of oil. It puts us in harms way when we have to rely on others for our basic needs. We ought to really be pursuing energy independence in a serious way.

[firstdown]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

I didn't state my self well there. There exists a large contingent of uncrackpot scientists who would argue that Global Warming doesn't even exist. Forget who or what caused it. The main arguments that I have studied, and as far as I can tell don't have any real dog in the fight, go like this.

Warming data collected over the last 100 years is rather spotty. Think about it. A 100+ years ago there was widespread, accurate and scientifically relevant amounts of temperature data available that could be used in a definitive manner? Sounds dubious to me. Forget about using data from before that...it doesn't even really exist. Most of the global climate change data is built using human-derived models. Models are really a fancy way of saying...we drew a picture and this is what it looks like. They're human-made. Maybe they're accurate and maybe they're not. But from a scientific standpoint they aren't evidence of anything other than the model-builder's ability to use a computer and code. The large "consensus" who "believe" in global climate change are driven by contingents just as politically motivated as the ones driven by the oil companies. In fact there is probably more money in total at stake on the climate change side than the other. All of this isn't to say that global climate change is a crock. I have no idea...but I am not willing to go blindly down a path that will cost the human existence enormous time, effort and money just to fix a problem that may or may not exist.

Now your point about finding energy alternatives anyways, I can get on board with. From a political standpoint we need a strategy for extricating ourselves from the tyranny of oil. It puts us in harms way when we have to rely on others for our basic needs. We ought to really be pursuing energy independence in a serious way.

Me and you are pretty much on the same page. I find it funny that my weather man cannot get tomorrows weather right but can tell me wahts going to happen 10 to 25 years frm now.

[JoeRedskin]

FRPLG, nicely stated. I give your statement the "JoeRedskin Stamp Of Approval" (Recognized world-wide as the seal of quality posting).

My father, a retired airforce pilot who relied on accurate weather predictions for his safety, once said to me that weather prediction beyond the next three days is pretty much voodoo and tea leaves.

As I have studied the issues and opinions surrounding "global warming", I have become more and more convinced of the truth of my dad's statement.

[BringBackJoeT]

Originally Posted by firstdown

Are you so sure about that?
.: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works :: Minority Page :.

700? Is that the number of "international scientists" this report identifies as disputing a human connection to global warming? I'll bet you could find a greater number of "international scientists" who dispute a connection between smoking and cancer.

[Slingin Sammy 33]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

Now your point about finding energy alternatives anyways, I can get on board with. From a political standpoint we need a strategy for extricating ourselves from the tyranny of oil. It puts us in harms way when we have to rely on others for our basic needs. We ought to really be pursuing energy independence in a serious way.

Agree with your whole post. Very well stated.

[firstdown]

Well now this new party will have to take into account that the Pro-Life now has more supporters then Pro-Choice for the first time sensen they have been tracking this galup poll.More Americans “Pro-Life� Than “Pro-Choice� for First Time
I did not want to start an abortion thread but I found this pool really interesting.