Author Topic: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt  (Read 28290 times)

Halfnuts

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #15 on: March 18, 2006, 05:46:17 PM »
Yes, dubya's been a disappointment.  He talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.  That's the problem many folks have with government.  It has grown too powerful and intrusive.  There probably needs to be a housecleaning every so often to redefine what the people's priorities are and what they expect from their government.  Merely throwing the current horsethief out just opens the door for another one to saunter in.

GuyFawkes

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #16 on: March 18, 2006, 07:29:57 PM »

Just like that Guy Fawkes to throw this flaming bomb and then disappear into the mists of the internet.


sorry, it was just the vision of 28 solid gold eiffel towers....

(if an alien) put them on mars and we'd be there by summer.
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Halfnuts

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #17 on: March 18, 2006, 09:07:23 PM »
Awful towers, or Offal towers?

SHIPCHIEF

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #18 on: March 23, 2006, 12:54:39 AM »
How do you give an income tax cut to the 40% of Americans that don't pay any?
Why are there any people who don't pay any income tax?
Everyone should pay something. No one should pay nothing.
Everyone wants to ride, but very few want to push the cart.
What turns one person's need into an entitlement to someone else's life energy? Maybe someone else has enough problems already, but still has enough self respect to not make demands. Who decides the turning point?
What makes it your buisness to decide how much someone else should pay?
What happens if that rich slob living on inherited wealth removes it from the investment pool? How many people lose jobs? How many start up ventures don't start? Does that mean it's not really un-earned income?
Why don't conservatives act conservative? Why do liberals tell you what you can't say or do?
why do politicians crave power so much they will destroy thier own country to get back into power? Why do we put up with it?
Why do fighters for the religeon of peace kill thier own kind?
What will the world be like in another generation?
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Doug

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #19 on: March 23, 2006, 02:43:59 AM »
Thats a lot of questions with no good answeres....

I pay my taxes, I pay a lot and I don't like it but I pay....
I vote for the party that offends me least, and torture the guy who shows up at my begging for my vote with tough questions.
I pay my taxes, I vote, I work and then I play with my son and love my wife.
Thats all I can do and its all that realy matters.

Doug

Oh ya and when I die I want my ashes loaded in 12G shot gun shells so all my friends and family can send me off with a bang....

Procrustes

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #20 on: July 08, 2006, 09:53:37 PM »
[Democrats, unionists, liberals, etc] are alike in that they advocate (in fact they demand) that the individual must rely on the collective to achieve some goal, whereas the conservative approach stresses more individual responsibility and self-determinism.

Yes, dubya's been a disappointment.  He talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.

This takes the blue ribbon for hypocrisy.  Bush was a drunk, playboy, drug abuser for half his life, he never learned a trade, never took responsibility for his actions, poor student, poor serviceman, failed oil executive.  You lecture about responsibility and self-determination, then say you're disappointed with Bush.  It's precisely because I do know something about responsibility and self-determination that I and many like me knew from square one that he is no leader.

You all didn't elect him for his resume, you elected him because of his 'moral compass' or 'faith' or some shite like that.  What you want is called a king.

Doug

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #21 on: July 09, 2006, 03:32:38 AM »
Got a Queen, nice lady and wish she would vissit more but....
I prefer my politicians to be poorly enough gaurded that I can hit them with a pot Kraft dinner.
My MP better be ready to show up on my door step and suck up to me in person for a vote.
A politician personal life and past are generaly his/her own buisness provided no laws were broken.
If your queer and can stand on my door step and tell me what I don't want to hear, thats still better than strait liar.
Religion is a fine thing in moderation.
My memory is long, a term in the house is short.

Doug

sid

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #22 on: July 09, 2006, 04:50:44 AM »
sometimes you vote for a person just because he is the lesser of two evil// i usually do not vote for someone as much as I vote against someone//anyway, it not a permanent position/they can be voted out just as easy//sid
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Doug

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #23 on: July 09, 2006, 05:09:22 AM »
I voted for the comie who knocked at my door and looked me in the eye and said he didn't have an answere to all my questions. What's sadder still Sid is what answere he did have I liked....

Doug

sid

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #24 on: July 09, 2006, 12:36:14 PM »
doug/ one good thing is that we can vote.. so many people in this world can not.sid
15 hp fairbanks morris1932/1923 meadows mill
8 hp stover 1923
8 hp lg lister
1932 c.s bell hammer mill
4 hp witte 1917
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1 1/2 briggs.etc

Joe

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #25 on: July 09, 2006, 01:43:17 PM »
Procrustes,
You really need to get your facts straight before you spout off like that…it makes you sound like some idiot goofball..which I'm sure you are not.  Start with a few details… check the facts then get back with us on what you find.
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GuyFawkes

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #26 on: July 09, 2006, 03:13:43 PM »
Procrustes,
You really need to get your facts straight before you spout off like that…it makes you sound like some idiot goofball..which I'm sure you are not.  Start with a few details… check the facts then get back with us on what you find.
Joe


if procrustes is wrong, then most of the rest of the world is wrong too, all those things are common knowledge here, anyone who can read a newspaper knows it.

anyone of shall we say higher intelligence who goes out and looks to information finds a lot more, for example in any other democratic country I can think of diebold would cost lots of civil servants and elected politicians their jobs.

Lets start with some respected newspapers, who would have had their asses sued off for libel..

Bush and alcoholism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1033904,00.html

Bush and military service
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/lechliter.pdf

Bush (family) and oil and haliburton
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,738196,00.html

Bush and the Saudi royal family
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1645527.stm

Bush and floridagate
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/24/wus24.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2000/12/14/wbush14.xml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3956129.stm

Bush and diebold
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/egovernment/comment/0,,1403546,00.html

Bush and enron
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2006/07/06/db0602.xml

If there is a more corrupt president anywhere it must be in some banana republic.

300 million people in the USA, what are the odds, in a D E M O C R A C Y of having both a father and a son elected as a president, especially when both father and son already defy the odds by being in effect a family dynasty in the senate for texas?

Longer odds than six stright lottery jackpot wins, that's for sure.

American citizens and the constitution and all that good stuff, no, I don't have a problem with any of that, but your government is more corrupt than vichy france in the forties, if you take that as a person insult on you as an individual voter, that's too bad, not the way it is intended, nor can I hold up _my_ government as any sort of shining example, but my government can't hold a candle to yours when it comes to dynastic internecine corruption.

USA abroad trying to drop leaflets on people telling them they need democracy has a real hard time of it, because these people know this stuff same as we do.... every language has a word for hypocricy.
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Joe

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #27 on: July 09, 2006, 03:25:48 PM »
Guy,
I said to research the facts…step back and look at the links you point to…NYT…BBC etc. …please...these are opinions with a decided agenda...

Joe
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GuyFawkes

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #28 on: July 09, 2006, 03:46:19 PM »
Guy,
I said to research the facts…step back and look at the links you point to…NYT…BBC etc. …please...these are opinions with a decided agenda...

Joe


Dude, I sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, they are facts, they are chock full of facts if you care to read them, they name names and places and specify what deals were done etcetera.

When everyone else, eg rest of the planet and not CBS or Fox news, says different than what you have been told is true, that isn't "just a different opinion"

The 2000 election was the first time in USA history since 1888 that the man with the least number of votes got into office.

As Gore Vidal said, "Democracy in the United States ended in Florida"

It is not "opinion" that bush got less votes than his rival, it is not "opinion" that his election was confirmed by five corrupt senior court judges, who'se two abstaining colleages openly spoken criticisms of the five were quite frankly astonishingly forthright, and yet basically totally unreported on in the US, it is not "opinion" that the Bush clan and Haliburton go back 50 years as far as business deals go, I could go on and on and on.

They are major articles in major newspapers, chock full of references and facts, you made ZERO attempt to provide any alternative explanations for those facts, just dismissed them as "having an agenda" and "opinion"

You say these are not facts, then by defintion you must know what you claim to be the true facts.

I have an open mind, if I have been misled by practically every non US media outlet on the planet then I want to know about it, so please tell me where I can find and discussion about these true facts of yours to counter this agenda and opinion of mine?
 
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GuyFawkes

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Re: OT - but sorta related - US national Debt
« Reply #29 on: July 09, 2006, 03:55:54 PM »
from the pasadena weekly, of all places


National amnesia

Novelist and political essayist Gore Vidal on Bush as a corporate puppet, the failure of the media and our loss of a collective memory

By Dean Kuipers

Illustration by Scott Gandell
 

Gore Vidal has been watching American political life for a long time and is liking less and less of what he sees. Born to deep political connections including the Gore and Kennedy clans, Vidal’s early series of eight novels, including his debut, “Williwaw” (1946), and “The City and the Pillar” (1948), established him as a major young post-World War II novelist alongside Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. He ran for both the House and the Senate, but it was his National Book Award-winning 1993 tome, “United States: Essays, 1952-1992,” that established him as one of this country’s most authoritative political commentators on subjects from American dynasties, homosexuality, artists and intelligentsia.

More recently, he has savaged George W. Bush as a transparent corporate shill and an accomplice in a grand betrayal of the polity in a barrage of essays including his 2004 collection, “Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.”

PW: Do you think that it’s possible the Bush Administration went into Iraq really believing that it was spreading democracy to the Middle East?

Gore Vidal: Of course not. Why should they do anything like that? They go in out of greed. There’s been very little altruism in all of our history. We go into things for profit, and now that we’ve ceased to be any form of democracy, the people are not consulted about what their rulers want them to do. No war has been declared by that part of the legislative branch which is most democratic, that is most responsive to the people.

So, it was just about oil and war profiteering?

Yes. Meanwhile, we do not have a media that enlightens anybody about anything, and our public school system for the average person is pretty bad. We are quite uninformed about things. Therefore we are not in any position to make up our minds if they’re making good policy or a bad policy. First of all, no one will ask us what we think. And then if they say, “Oh, go to the polls,” we go to the polls and the election is stolen as in Florida 2000 and 2004 in Ohio.

Do you think that the media is failing in this capacity?

Get the tense right: It has failed.

Has this president made this worse, by being so antagonistic to the media?

Oh, who cares? He doesn’t run the country, a handful of corporations run it. No, this is not conspiracy theory, this is conspiracy analysis. The country is very tightly led with corporate goals which push out anything of a national nature. We’re out of it. It’s like being in a bubble. I’ve spent a great deal of my life living across the water, and someone said, “How can you follow American politics when you’ve had your house in Italy for all those years?” And I said, “Well, that’s the only way I can find out what’s going on in America, because the foreign press, at least in Western Europe, is quite good.”

Corporate influence in politics seems more raw and apparent now than ever before.

Of course it is. And it was all due to the “good luck” — those two words I have just used ironically — of 9/11. “I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!” Well, he fucking well isn’t. He’s an accidental president. He happens to be put in by the oil and gas people to cut their taxes and then go in for preemptive wars against countries that are weak and that have done us no harm, like Afghanistan and Iraq. This was a godsend for those who would like to get rid of Congress and the courts and the Constitution. And they’re doing very well at it — very, very well. “Mission accomplished,” I believe, is what he said on the aircraft carrier.

Do you think that those effects are lasting, or can they be reversed?

Well, is the glass half full or half empty? I think the damage done to our system by the last 20 years — of which he’s just the most ludicrous example — is probably irreparable. We may not have time enough to restore the republic. We just lost it. I mean, when the attorney general of the United States goes before Congress and just says the president can pick and choose what he wants to do, and that his wartime powers are inherent – well, if that dumb-dumb Gonzales has ever read the Constitution, he knows that there are no inherent presidential rights, they are enumerated in the Constitution; they’re named. And there’s a great many things he cannot do. For one, he can’t go eavesdropping without getting a court order — that’s the law.

Has our foreign policy stance also been permanently damaged?

I would say nothing is ultimately irreparable, but the Constitution, as we have enjoyed it over the years and as it has sustained us, has been given some death blows. Now everyone is in the habit of seeing people shoot each other, police shoot children, children kill each other, I mean, this is a mess. And how do you start to repair it? That’s a real problem for a real political party. Unfortunately, we don’t have them at the moment.

Do you have a prescription for achieving that?

It’s a tall order, but we have to undertake it, like it or not. A presidential election costs some money, but there’re a lot of rich people on the left, or on the side of the Constitution, to hold a true election. Skip the states and just set up balloting machinery around the country. I’d go back to the old-fashioned written ballots, which leave a paper trail, and just go all-out to try and do an honest one. You might have very, very different names at the end of the day. This would cause hysteria and, God knows, bloodshed and whatever by those who don’t really want an honest election, but at least we might know what was out there.

[Former UN weapons inspector] Scott Ritter’s information seems like vitally important stuff. Is the country too polarized to listen?

They’re not used to hearing anything. The only art form that the United States ever developed is the TV commercial. That’s our Sistine Chapel. That’s our masterpiece. That’s a very rare art form, but it’s not very informative. Now you’ve got to get away from advertising. Just through sheer repetition, which is the secret of advertising, these two fools in office have convinced the American people, these 60, 70 percent, that [Saddam Hussein] was responsible for 9/11. He didn’t have anything to do with 9/11. No, I don’t think he was a nice man and I don’t care – he’s an Iraqi and I’m an American. We Americans should not worry about Iraqi leaders.

Now Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war. Is it a good idea to pull the troops out?

I would pull them out before they’re killed, yes. We have nothing to gain by being there. We have no plans to develop the country, repair the country, or even to give them their oil back. We’re gonna plunder and go, so plunder and get out before our people get killed.

That’s a pretty grim picture. Do you still enjoy bringing this news to the people?

I don’t think enjoy is the correct verb, but I feel one has to do it. You know I was brought up in the ’30s; I remember Hitler, I remember American fascism, which was fairly lively. If you don’t speak out, things just die and shut down. We’re going to have no national memory of anything, and if you are not informed about your past, you have no present. And God help you in the future.

Lurking in there somewhere is a message of hope.

I think there is. There’s a moment when things get so bad that people do act. But one certainly doesn’t want to wait for a revolution. I’m all for evolution, and we’re ready for some.
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Original Lister CS 6/1 Start-o-matic 2.5 Kw (radiator conversion)
3Kw 130 VDC Dynamo to be added. (compressor + hyd pump)
Original Lister D, megasquirt multifuel project, compressor and truck alternator.
Current status - project / standby, Fuel, good old pump diesel.