The Political Hodgepodge Thread!

[Truth]

When I was 19 and in college working 40 hours/wk at min. wage, my rent was 27.5%. It was a two room camper in one of the worst trailer (not mobile home) parks in the city. Could only keep food in the refrig or the insects would get there first. I wondered how the married couples made it.

When I was in college and in NYC after I graduated, I had a roommate. Pretty easy way to cut costs in half. :)

[hueytaxi]

When I was in college and in NYC after I graduated, I had a roommate. Pretty easy way to cut costs in half. :)

I tried the same, but her Dad was a cop who disagreed with my offer. And he became my FIL 2 years later.

[screwball]

Not all to many years ago, these people were buying 200,000 homes. What happened?

[pfife]

Conservative Media Its Own Worst Enemy

[Deleterious]

Sneaker tax? Illinois considers a 25-cent charge : Stltoday

SPRINGFIELD— The cost of a new pair of basketball shoes could jump by 25 cents under a proposal floated this week by an Illinois lawmaker.

State Rep. Will Davis, D-Hazel Crest, wants to create a new tax that would generate an estimated $3 million annually for a youth job preparation program. He said the added cost would likely go unnoticed by most consumers, while helping finance a program for kids during tight budget times.

“Everywhere, funding is challenged,”Davis said. “I see it as a uniquely creative way of helping youth.”

Under the proposal, consumers buying any kind of athletic shoe would pay an extra 25 cents. Proceeds from the new tax would be earmarked for the state’s YouthBuild programs

More at the link

[Deleterious]

Obama to ask for sequester delay - The Hill's On The Money

[pfife]

Lie After Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew Ten Years Ago Today and What He Said | MichaelMoore.com

[Deleterious]

Exile the Obama way - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Imagine leaving the country on vacation/business and then not being allowed back in.

[chasfh]

[Deleterious]

Big-time sports tax breaks: 'How much does it bother you?' :: WRAL.com

[Deleterious]

USPS to announce Saturday service cuts in effort to slash costs - CBS News

[Gehringer_2]

Exile the Obama way - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Imagine leaving the country on vacation/business and then not being allowed back in.

I don't know what they think they gain by not having at least a limited appeals process, where a Federal judge could review whether the info and sources were actually sensitive or the gov was just being abusive.

On the other hand, this statement is patently false.

As articulated by ACLU attorney Nusrat Choudhury, "It doesn't make anyone safer for innocent people not to be allowed to fly.

If you keep one bomber off a plane at the cost of hundred innocent people having their rights abused, we are still safer. That might be a trade-off we don't want to make, but to pretend it might not be an effective one is nonsense.

[shabba4detroit]

If you keep one bomber off a plane at the cost of hundred innocent people having their rights abused, we are still safer. That might be a trade-off we don't want to make, but to pretend it might not be an effective one is nonsense.

By your logic, we can end all plane crashes by grounding all planes.

[ballmich]

By your logic, we can end all plane crashes by grounding all planes.

That certainly makes air travel safer, to eliminate all of it. But that's okay, everyone would be happy to do that, it's just a mutual social obligation that everyone should subscribe to.

[pfife]

Let's just keep pretending G2 is advocating that even though he actually said this:

That might be a trade-off we don't want to make, but to pretend it might not be an effective one is nonsense.

weak

[ballmich]

If you keep one bomber off a plane at the cost of hundred innocent people having their rights abused, we are still safer. That might be a trade-off we don't want to make, but to pretend it might not be an effective one is nonsense.

It's not safer if by violating the rights of a hundred innocent people, it makes some of them disgruntled or malcontents who may or may not take action of their own. Let's not pretend that the police state doesn't create blowback and a negative feedback loop which perpetuates the problem.

[pfife]

It's not safer if by violating the rights of a hundred innocent people, it makes some of them disgruntled or malcontents who may or may not take action of their own. Let's not pretend that the police state doesn't create blowback and a negative feedback loop which perpetuates the problem.

Right, because such an action would CAUSE that.

Personal responsibility for the action they take evaporates when convenient.

[Gehringer_2]

By your logic, we can end all plane crashes by grounding all planes.

Well the logic of that is pretty solid isn't it? I don't think logic is in question. Logic just is what it is. Just like we can stop all gun homicides by eliminating guns, end all auto deaths by eliminating cars, and end cardiovascular disease by only letting people eat nothing but 1200 calories of rice a day. Life is choice......

[pfife]

Bill requires all Idaho kids to read 'Atlas Shrugged' - Spokesman.com - Feb. 5, 2013

[Truth]

Bill requires all Idaho kids to read 'Atlas Shrugged' - Spokesman.com - Feb. 5, 2013

Too bad he doesn't appear serious. Given the requirements (in some schools) to read Zinn and others it seems fair :)

[pfife]

LOLGOP ‏@LOLGOP
Republicans seem to love making the argument "Obama is just like Bush -- except he didn't invade the wrong country and got bin Laden."

[monkeynuts]

Dick Morris is on Piers Morgan right now. He is unreal...completely full of himself and making excuses for how completely wrong he was. Heck, his eyes are wet...maybe he's emotional.

I'm actually sad he got canned from Fox News since he theoretically could show up on a network I actually watch....though I hope his career is dead.

[monkeynuts]

Does he have a medical issue? I've never seen somebody's lips/jaw move the way his does when they speak.

[sinister porpoise]

Financial Times interviewed Lord Jonathan Turner, outgoing head of the Financial Services Authority which is the UK's financial services regulatory agency. Google News got me past the paywall.

FT: If you accept that overt monetary finance does have a larger effect, then the standard argument would be, but Mr Turner, you’re being extremely dangerous. There’s a reason for this taboo, and the reason is that it’s desperately inflationary; every pound you print and spend is going to be £1 or more of inflation.

LT: No. I think you’ve got to distinguish two things. Is it desperately dangerous because every pound of money financed turns into inflation? Absolutely definitively not. There is no coherent rigorous bit of economics that takes you in that direction. [...]

The arguments for not letting this taboo out of the bag are political economy, and they’re very serious arguments. They basically say, we have very carefully constructed a veil of ignorance on the part of the populous in general, many commentators, politicians seeking election, when we have created a belief that even to mention money, finance, deficits is to take us down an inflationary path, and that is, as it were, a taboo created veil of ignorance, but you can argue and to be honest, this is what some central bankers argue in private.

This is a very useful taboo, even though it has no absolute technical base, and the fundamental argument is, and it’s in the Friedman that I quote, that even though there are technical arguments for doing what Friedman proposes, once I’ve admitted that it’s possible, will politicians want to do it in the run-up to an election?

Will they want to do it in the 99 years out of 100, where it’s a thoroughly bad idea, as well as the one year out of 100, where it’s a good idea? Will they want to do it on excessive amounts, rather than adequate amounts?

[Mr.TaterSalad]

[Deleterious]

SNEED EXCLUSIVE: Pending Jesse Jackson Jr. plea deal includes ‘significant jail time,’ source says

[ballmich]

Japan is going to be at war with somebody, sooner than later.

Japan Scrambles Jets in Island Dispute With Russia - ABC News

[sinister porpoise]

Interesting article: 6 Insane Conspiracy Theories (That Actually Happened) | Cracked.com

Car companies conspiring to kill mass transit

According to a Senate report, in the 1930s, GM, Goodyear, Firestone Tire and a bunch of oil companies joined together to form a number of fake rail companies. They would buy up all the small companies that operated America's small town railway systems, then destroy the systems, and soon enough America would run on gasoline-powered tires. By the mid-1950s, the fake rail companies had replaced 900 of the 1,200 public railway systems with gas-powered buses and cars and were ready to take on the biggest electric railway system in the world: Los Angeles. Yes, the city that's famous for bumper-to-bumper traffic once hummed along on 1,500 miles of electric railways. GM bought out the local railway companies, and a few years later there wasn't a single electric streetcar operating in Los Angeles.

Nixon's treason

The 1968 presidential election featured Nixon in the Republican corner, squaring off against sitting vice president Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey was running on what was known as the "peace plank" -- his assurance that the Johnson-Humphrey administration was in the process of negotiating an end to the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. For Humphrey, everything hinged on the Paris Peace Talks, where the Johnson administration had brought Vietnamese leaders from the North and South together, and claimed to be making progress. Most Americans weren't buying it, and Nixon was leading Humphrey by a large margin for most of the campaign.

But everything changed in the weeks before the election when Humphrey called for a bombing halt in Vietnam, and both the North Vietnamese and the Johnson administration agreed to it. Just three days before the election, peace seemed imminent in Vietnam, and Humphrey was starting to look like a total boss. He surged in the polls, making up an insane amount of ground just a week before the election. As October turned to November, the election was a tie, and Humphrey had all the momentum.

And then something weird happened. The day before the election, America's South Vietnamese allies suddenly withdrew from the peace negotiations. It seemed suspicious that America's own ally would pull out, and doubly suspicious that it happened on the eve of the presidential election. In taped phone conversations that would only be revealed later, Lyndon Johnson explained how things had broken so conveniently for the Republican candidate: Nixon's campaign had been telling "the [South Vietnamese] allies that 'You're going to get sold out'" if they agreed to the offer on the table. In an effort to screw Humphrey's election, Nixon had intentionally sabotaged the peace talks. As Johnson would later point out, this is technically treason, since it means Nixon directly sabotaged the interests of the United States for his own personal gain.

[hueytaxi]

I haven't even thought about Cracked since the 70's. I'm not sure about the above article if it is serious or an Onion type editorial. Part of Nixon's '68 platform was his secret plan to end the war and it was public knowledge which contradicts the article.

[sinister porpoise]

I think they have re-made themselves in the Internet era. Here is another article about Nixon and Vietnam

Admissions on Nixon’s ‘Treason’ | Consortiumnews

In perhaps the most complete account from the South Vietnamese side – The Palace Fileby Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter – Hung recounts detailed interviews with his former boss, South Vietnam’s President Nguyen van Thieu, and with Nixon’s chief emissary to Thieu, China Lobby leader Anna Chennault.

Both Thieu and Chennault described messages from Nixon’s campaign urging the South Vietnamese to boycott Johnson’s peace talks in the crucial days before the Nov. 5, 1968, election, according to The Palace File, published in 1986. Chennault made similar admissions in her own memoir, The Education of Anna, in 1980.

Upset by LBJ’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war with North Vietnam, Thieu followed the Republican advice and – just days before the election – balked at the Paris peace talks, thus denying Democrat Hubert Humphrey a last-minute boost that might have cost Nixon his narrow victory. Nixon then continued the war for four more years.

Another key figure in the 1968 dramga was South Vietnam’s Ambassador to the United States Bui Diem, who addressed the sabotage allegations in his own memoir, In the Jaws of History, published in 1987.

Bui Diem acknowledged many of the facts about his meetings with Republicans and his infamous cable to Saigon conveying the desire of “many Republican friends” that Thieu “stand firm” against Johnson’s pressure. But Bui Diem insisted there was nothing wrong in these contacts and communications....

[hueytaxi]

Chennault's name gives credibility. she was the Chinese born wife of the founder of the Flying Tigers All volunteer Group in Burma and later on was instrumental in having South Vietnam not participate in the Paris Peace Talks. Of course the early history of Johnson and The Tonkin Incident is also interesting and worth exploration. Thanks for the articles.

[Gehringer_2]

Interesting article: 6 Insane Conspiracy Theories (That Actually Happened) | Cracked.com

Car companies conspiring to kill mass transit

Comically enough, IIRC, the screenwriter of "Roger Rabbit" made reference to this in the film.

[ballmich]

I see that none of the progressives are claiming their brethern, the fruitcake running around SoCal killing cops who put out his manifesto where he claims to love Obama, Biden and Piers Morgan.

And I see that no one is talking about the Police, who are supposedly here to protect us from these kind of people (which is why we have no reason to be armed ourselves), and how they are firing on innocent people. Yeah, I can see how they'd mistake two women deliving newspapers, for a 270 pound black man --- just because they were in a similar model truck (albeit it the wrong color) . That seems reasonable. How many random people do they plan to shoot at and possibly kill in their attempt to find this guy? What happened to firing when fired upon? They can now just shoot at anyone who might be driving a similar truck as to the one the suspect might be in?

[sinister porpoise]

I blame it on the Ice-T song "Cop Killer"
Guns don't kill people, music movies and videogames do

[Deleterious]

I owned a Body Count CD with that song on it. Before the recalled it and reissued it without the song on the CD. I lost it years ago but wonder if its worth anything.

[pfife]

I owned a Body Count CD with that song on it. Before the recalled it and reissued it without the song on the CD. I lost it years ago but wonder if its worth anything.

Yeha I had that too.

I bet it's horrible to listen to now.

[Deleterious]

DHS Civil Rights Office Authorizes Suspicionless Seizure of Electronics Near Border - Reason 24/7 : Reason.com

[Gehringer_2]

DHS Civil Rights Office Authorizes Suspicionless Seizure of Electronics Near Border - Reason 24/7 : Reason.com

Took them 4 years issue a finding and the best they could do was ratify the status quo. What a Country!

[Deleterious]

Full-scale invasion as the United States deploys troops in 35 African countries | Newstime Africa

[Deleterious]

LAUSD, other California school districts use cafeteria funds meant for poor to cover other expenses, report says - LA Daily News