"...and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them." Margaret Thatcher

Can't wait to get rid of this Administration....

CQB

I was under the impression it was common knowledge that if this administration were Socialists they've been doing it wrong. Oh well...on the other hand, "if you built it we will outsource it" is a decent headline for the opposition.

Dad, you already sent me this in an email last week! Took so long to scroll down through the forwarded email addresses to get to the actual message too.

Obama sucks. I can't say if Romney is any better. I'll vote 3rd party again.

I'll most likely vote 4th party again.

That's not a bad idea. Rather than writing in a name, I'm going to print out a small picture of trollface on a sticky label and just slap it on. Also, Dolan as VP.

doesnt matter who wins, just a puppet figure, the shadow goverment and more importantly the federal reserve runs the country. And on a wider scale the world banks have vast control over this planet, and you can thank the House of the Rothschild for that.

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it" —Woodrow Wilson, Signed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” — President Woodrow Wilson, 1916

"I am concerned for the security of our great nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within." — General MacArthur

"We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.'s founders." — President George Bush, 1991

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." — David Rockefeller speaking at the United Nations Ambassadors' dinner. Sept. 23, 1994

Nigga needs to read a dictionary if he thinks a center-right administration is socialist.

Biden = Dolan

the people who use the word "socialist" the most have the hardest time defining it.

Good point, ark. I'd say that's pretty much the same for anyone whose best technique in debate is name-calling.

do not vote. those who do not vote are not part of the problem.

no worries, you only have to wait another 5 years.

[YOUTUBE=type=addvideo&url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded]

bennyhillifier

Haha Margaret Thatcher...

Iron cunt.

Other pearls of wisdom from that paragon of freedom, economic insight, and rationality:

"A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us."

"I owe nothing to Women's Lib. "

"Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists' morale or their cause while the hijack lasted."

"My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police."

"Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation."

“The West as a whole in the early 1990s become obsessed with a ‘peace dividend’ that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and sometimes soft-headed causes. Politicians forget that the only real peace dividend is peace.”

“Whether manufactured by black, white, brown or yellow hands, a widget remains a widget – and it will be bought anywhere if the price and quality are right. The market is a more powerful and more reliable liberating force than government can ever be.”

That was awesome, ancient_master. Enough so to convince me to check this show out.

I was always confused by the voter ID laws, not necessarily because of the lack of provable voter fraud cases, but aren't you required already to have identification when you're in public? I dunno, to me it's sort of like texting and driving. We didn't need to have another law for it, texting and driving falls under reckless driving. I get that some people don't drive and what not and I do feel that the Republicans push for these laws is most likely nefarious in nature but people are already supposed to have identification on them as I understand it.

It's pretty much about making sure people who are so poor they don't have licenses or picture IDs cannot vote. As of now, I think a utility bill or paycheck covers it most places for first-time voters but the laws are getting stricter.

I don't really know that it's defensible to have a system so wide open that all you have to do is walk up and state a registered voter's name to get a ballot, but clearly there's no big rush (at least since the decline of urban machine politics) of phony voters at the polls, and the new/incoming laws definitely have a discouraging effect on people exercising their rights. So technically there IS a gap in the law that could be abused, but the new laws are by their nature inclined to deter legal voting, not illegal voting.

So far there's no law requiring people to generally "have identification when you're in public" in the U.S., nor should we ever accept one, but unfortunately we are headed that way. There's no Constitutional basis for for allowing legal authorities to force people to present papers merely for existing in the public sphere, but of course the Constitution hasn't played much into these things in the past 30 or so years. It's especially getting bad as regards the basic freedom to travel without harassment.

Actually, there is a problem with phony votes, but it's from companies like Diebold whose machines simply flip votes to Republicans regardless of the voter input, not poor black folk.

I VOTED BUCHANAN!

Funny how Diebold (who is an ATM maker) can process a receipt during a transaction yet leave no paper trail for voting.

sitting on the fence with this, tired of corpses voting and being counted, tired of Diebold faking votes as well. voter Id sucks, I thought the electoral college was the one that decided who was president anyways. If I had a choice who would be president I would choose Mr T......I pity the fool who dont vote for me!!!

Hanging Chad or GTFO

"Hoser is a dumb redneck shithead and nobody gives a fuck about his opinion on anything." -Lao Tzu

Nothing says wave of the future like an old dead British lady. Didn't we fight a war so we didn't have to vote the way the British suggested, Hoser?

If Romney wins, a federal crackdown begins on pot including in states like MA and CT that have passed medicinal marijuana and decrim. The Obama executive order telling DEA to go easy gets axed by Romney out of the gate as quickly Obama signed it, and if you don't believe it, look at Romney's chief adviser on the subject, an anti-medical marijuana crusader who had his anti-drug camps for teenagers shut down based on allegations of torture and rape.

Not to mention that our taxes go up to cut the taxes of the rich further, and we start land wars in Iran and Syria. Also, Roe vs. Wade will flip.

So Romney is against individual freedom for adults who smoke pot, for women, and for anyone not making millions of dollars off investments.

Thanks Hoser and Margaret, not taking my voting advice from you. In four years, I will probably vote third party like I often have, but with Obama running, it's a no-brainer for me to vote for him this year again. No way that Romney guy should be President and bring back the Bush years.

The Obama order on medical marijuana dispensaries is a farce though. Tons of dispensaries are being shut down, regardless. I'm not saying I support Romeny's views on medical marijuana. And tax cuts to the rich? Meh, that's a little flimsy. We don't know what their tax plan is. Again, not supporting Romney (or Obama for that matter) but I don't think your assessment of Romney's policies is fair.

the party platform is pretty clear. smaller government, no economic or environmental regulations, more life and thought police. cut taxes on the rich, preach trickle-down economics to the poor.

marijuana is such a non-issue. the real issue is fixing where the money goes in law enforcement and prison regulation.

I haven't read the platform. I've heard no mention of tax cuts other than Ryan saying they planned to cut taxes to everyone and nixing certain deductions to pay for the lower tax rates (which deductions being cut is a pretty key quetion, though). I take any politicians words with a grain of salt. I'll have to read the platform.

Agreed that marijuana isn't an issue in this election.

And the whole women's rights issue regarding abortion always confused me. To me the question isn't about women having say over their bodies, but where is the line drawn where it is acceptable to infringe on the fetus's right to live. It matters not if you think the embryo constitutes "life," science tells us it is alive. I still struggle with the question and I'm not saying I support a ban. Obviously, getting an abortion isn't something women get pumped about doing and "use it as birth control" but the debate to me is more than about a woman's right.

lol @ anyone who thinks voting matters.

ryan wants to cut taxes on the rich, tax middle class and poor, cut EPA, dept of education, medicare, soc sec, etc and raise military spending by $300 billion. don't have time to source that but yeah.

economics is a science but when mixed with politics it becomes dogma: unregulated free-market social darwinism (rich people love that) with faux christian ideas and american mythology, versus government intervention in modern capitalism, and regulation toward a less exploitative economy. at least that's how i see the economic viewpoint of both parties. abortion is a religious argument - science-based policy versus belief system. women's rights take a back seat to creation.

the republican national convention was really keen on enforcing free-market ideology based on responding to a obama quote taken out of context, political theater obviously, and i thought it was hilarious that there was no mention of american troops or foreign policy as if they really wanted you to forget that the last 12 years happened.

and i'm an extreme political skeptic but i disagree that voting is useless, at the local and state level it really does matter.

the romneys and ryans of the world want you to believe that america rewards hard work and ambition, sure it can, but if you think it can get you something from nothing, or that your financial success directly correlates with your level of hard work and ambition, then i feel sorry for you.

my last political post - i'm not a fan of quite a few of obama's policies and actions either, but usually people say they don't like obama while not knowing ANYTHING about his presidential record.

I'll take your word for it on Ryan's plans. You don't have time to source, and I don't have time to look it up haha.

The picture you paint about the two parties' viewpoints on the economy is a bit skewed. Your words regarding the left's economic policies make it seem like somehow they're doing it correctly and I totally disagree with that.

Abortion may be a religious argument from the Republican party but I was addressing my own personal questions on it, which are devoid of religious influence.

They may have taken Obama's quote out of context but Obama's campaign has done the same shit. I believe it's called politics haha.

The assessment of Romney's tax plan is from a non-partisan study: http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/...-raise-taxes-on-95-of-americans.php

There's always a certain amount of tax burden for the country, but the rich pay a certain share and the middle class a certain share; as a matter of basic arithmetic, when you cut rates on the rich way more and consequently the rich pay less of the tax burden than they had before, the middle class pay more of the tax burden than they had before. Worse yet, the rich get richer while everyone else stagnates, creating a hidden inflation tax on all the rest of us (items cost more but our wages stay the same). We already saw this under Bush for eight years, and we're still feeling a lot of the after-effects to this day.

On pot, the difference in parties is huge; people used to get arrested, convicted, and thrown in jail by the federal government for possession, including cancer patients who died in jail. Check out the NORML website to see how extensive this was; for comparison, the number of people arrested, convicted, and thrown in jail by the feds over the last four years is 1 - that's 1 guy (and he's the guy in Colorado who went on a local news anti-pot hit piece to show the reporter how he had a huge growery twenty yards from a school - fucking idiot). The only dispensaries targeted are major dispensaries that by their own admission can't track their own supply to the extent they're not sure it isn't crossing state lines into states with different laws. Patients aren't targeted, users in decrim states aren't targeted, small groweries aren't targeted; not only does this change under Romney, but we go back to people with cancer dying in prison. If you smoke weed, voting SO makes a difference; I don't understand how anyone who smokes can live in states that have passed decrim over the last four years and think otherwise, because those votes and laws actually have matter in our lives. As soon as Obama was elected, my entire attitude towards pot relaxed, because the attitude of law enforcement relaxed; I would personally be VERY nervous under a Mitt Romney Presidency, and I hope everyone else who feels this issue has any relevance to their life does some more research on his views on drugs and particularly those of his advisers. Scary shit.

yeah i'm skewed, i'm not an anti-capitalist but i'm always quick to remind what "free-market solder" deregulation of econonic channels does to countries...great depression, recent US, london, greece, portugal, ireland, italy, brazil, chile, ETC especially in the last 30 years. banks have more power over more people than any other institution and they need public oversight because their private decisions affect demographics. this guy has a great mostly apolitical course on capitalism reform, lecture videos online somewhere

http://oyc.yale.edu/political-science/plsc-270

unregulated markets profit off of being exploitative to workers, unions, laborers. sorry to drop marxist crap but it fucking happens.

also let's be clear here, the current administration is not left, it is moderate right.

burnsy i know you're a fiscal conservative, you at least gotta agree that neither party is AT ALL fiscally conservative.

That's not what I meant by skewed, ark. They way you framed it seemed to be republicans are this, democrats are that and democrats are correct, my bad for misinterpreting. I fully acknowledge that neither party is fiscally conservative. Complete deregulation is an obvious recipe for disaster. I'm an auditor and I know the importance of due diligence. Without oversight, fraud and exploitation become even more rampant. Over-regulation is just as scary of a concept to me though. I feel shit like Sarbanes-Oxley while good in spirit, are overly burdensome.

Shadow, there have been more prosecutions of dispensaries under Obama than under Bush, although I guess Bush was probably too busy spending hundreds of billions in Iraq in Afghanistan to focus on pot. Obama has not been forthright on something he campaigned on, total shocker coming from a politician, I know.

The notion that the rich pay less of the total tax burden is misguided. It's simply not true. Taxes need to increase regardless. How else is the US going to reduce the deficit? If you're blaming current inflation totally on Bush, I have nothing further to say. Bush was abominable in terms of adding to the debt but Obama has been no champion of deficit slashing. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the debt will be at $16 trillion by September 30.

tl;dr

None of this jibjab matters. ALL OWNED BY THE SAME.

Obama's War on Pot

i love weed, but my weed doesn't vote, i do. any weed issue for me goes back to things like state's rights, law enforcement, prison industry. it's one of the things i was disappointed about obama with - not that he appeared to reverse his position (ha), but it was telling of certain state's rights and economic policy double standards. i don't know much about why he flipped on this or what his interest in the "war on drugs" is, but it illustrates some executive branch overextensions he's taken - with the DEA and the more ominous JSOC. his campaign is full of grassroots dem, labor union, woman, minority, small business, green, and gay money, but also full of banker money. either way, i'd like to think that weed doesn't control my politics.

and yeah, the budget deficit is a joke, i'm with aril's post there.

You misunderstood me. I didn't say the rich pay less than everyone else. That would be untrue. I said the less of the tax overall tax burden the rich pay, the more everyone else pays. That is true.

Yes, the debt is too much. Deficits are too much.

Problem is that the deficit and a big slice of the debt comes from three policies: the Bush tax cuts in 2002, Medicare D, and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Take those out, and Obama's actually running yearly surpluses, not deficits. There's also the $4 Trillion deficit reduction deal he negotiated with the Speaker of the House until Congress shit the bed on the deal; $3 Trillion Dollars were spending cuts and only $1 Trillion tax hikes on the rich, and the Republicans still wouldn't go for it. I honestly don't see what Obama could do to get people who are committed to not working with him to suddenly start doing it. The problem is getting those people out of Congress.

I know there have been more dispensaries prosecuted under Obama, but that's not because Bush didn't crack down, that's because there were exponentially fewer dispensaries under Bush, because the federal government's position under Bush was to obstruct states from passing or enforcing lax marijuana laws at every turn; the executive order by Obama is WHY dispensaries in Colorado increased by 100x in his first couple years of office. The dispensaries became so numerous and huge that some in certain states have lost track of their supply going across state lines to states without medical marijuana and decrim - so in the end was Bush better because he allowed so few dispensaries to begin with that cracking down on all of them AND THE USERS was less crackdowns than a small fraction of the countless dispensaries that were allowed to pop up under Obama? Really?

It's like the hyperbolic quote from that article from the med marijuana guy just above. Really? We were better off when users were targeted and lived in fear? When people literally died in prison from cancer for seeking cancer treatments? When 100% of the few dispensaries out there were targeted instead of a small fraction of the countless that exist today? I'm a progressive/moderate type for the most part, but that guy's quote is an example for me of when activists on the left occasionally jump the shark, and exaggerate themselves right out of common sense in the effort to make a powerful point for a good cause.

And I don't think weed is the issue or close to it, but for those who do smoke, there's a real difference in how much we have to look over our shoulder after this election depending on who wins. Sadly.

"Hoser is a weakling, mentally and physically, and he sucks big fat elephant cocks." -Thomas Jefferson

More brilliant predictions from Hoser in this thread. What a disgrace to the Corps and Uncle Sam.

Ya got me Norman, I'm all broke up inside.

E-Z definitions

SOCIALISM = We're all in it together.
CAPITALISM = Every man for himself.

Both have their pros and cons I guess.

All else I can say is that if the day ever comes when the United States Government starts to ASSIGN people jobs, then we will truly be living in a socialist nation.

As far as me personally, I would probably benefit from a socialist government, since I technically live in "poverty" to "lower-middle-class"
even though I do not consider myself to be in poverty since I have a roof, clothes, food, and internet to make useless posts like this one. I live on my own, and provide for myself with no handout, always have since I turned 18 and my father kicked my ass out onto the streets.

I know people who ask me, "Kevin, dude, why don't you get a food card? and a free govt. cell phone? and heat assistance? and all this other shit that I am DEFINITELY eligible for."

I can only reply "Because I can survive without them."

The only "food assistance" I've ever used were the old-school food stamps that the crackheads would sell out front of Central Haverhill Market Basket back in the 90's before the gov't started issuing the EBT cards. I miss the old ones, the junkies used to sell $40 of food stamps for $20-$30. I didn't feel bad about it either, because the junkies gonna get their shit one way or another, so I "CAPITALIZED" and got double the food, AND the junkies got what they wanted too. Everyone was a winner!

Yeah dude, try telling any independent roofing or masonry contractor that his/her own financial success does not relate to how hard they have worked, and they will laugh in your face.

Perhaps in other jobs what you said may be true, but in the trades, the independent contractors who work hard, and do quality work, survive. The ones who do shitty hack work die off.