Man first of all, I do not align myself wirh any party, I stand on my own two feet and don't need to be told what to think.
Certainly, but at the same time I think I could take your ideologies and they would be typical Republican. Nothing wrong with that, they have been the better party thru history, just not now. I’m still registered Republican. It doesn’t matter which party you are with or relate to, I’m not here to impeach you, just critique people’s arguments or accept them - it’s not about you, just your args.
I did say I wouldn't look things up, but I guess what I should have said is for the sake of the arguments we are making I will take your word for it.
OK, when you say look them up, does that mean to click on the sites I provide or look them up independently? Or both? If it’s clicking my link, just do it, it’s right there. In some exchanges people will just post a 100-page link and tell you it’s in there somewhere, that’s crap, my info is always right there.
I don't understand what you mean when you say the right wing controled the senate during the eightys. Is that part of congress, don't they vote with the house to make up congress? Didn't democrats have an overall majority during these years? If I am wrong then I apoligize for my ignorance.
No problem at all, if you don’t know, I’ll tell ya and provide a site, if I don’t know, I’ll look it up and provide a website. Seriously, just click this and you’ll see the composition from 1945:
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovern ... sion_2.htm
The Dems owned all of congress from 1955 to 1995 but for the senate from 81 to 87.
Congress is comprised of 2 parts, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
- Thee are 100 (2 per state) Senators run for 6 years terms, they stagger the election cycles every 2 years: 33, 33,and 34, with the exception for deviations like retirements, removals, etc. The various states govern how they handle those issues.
- The House of Representatives currently has 435 members apportioned by state’s population. Arizona gained 2 a couple years back to go from 6 to 8, meaning another state lost some. They run for 2-year terms, so they are always under the gun. States can have as few as 1 Rep.
An interesting element of the number of Reps (435) and number of senators (100) is that it ties in with the electoral college. The are 535 total congress members but 3 more total electors. The answer to this is found that the District of Columbia has 3 electoral votes, no other representation, as they are not a state. So with 538 electors, half of that is 269, which is why it takes 270 to win the presidency.
As for congress and bills, generally both houses have to pass these measures, sometimes the senate has to have 60 votes. To impeach they have to have a supermajority, or 2/3 (67 of 100). To pass a const amendment they have to have 75. The process can be different for different things passed thru congress, but they vote independently and pass to the other chamber of congress after it passes the first. Generally it goes House to senate, but I’m not an expert on bill passage. I imagine a quick net search would yield that, but I think you were under the impression that both bodies voted at once, it is a 1 chamber to the other process. An interesting process is that of filibuster where in the senate minority members of an issue can stand at the podium and babble on stall an issue, house members are timed. If a party has 60 votes this cannot happen, the Dems now have 57 seats.
I will tell you now that I am on a blackberry phone doing all this and I have trouble looking back at what has been said while I am posting. That's why I am "all over the place and I don't answer everything you ask. Ever thought of changing your name to Longwinded. I know, I have the same problem.
LOL. No doubt, typical of libs, they are over-comprehensive. I don’t think you can have too much data, that’s just me.
I think I will just answer a few questions per post, if I don't get finished I am not avoiding the questions but my wife may want her phone back.
So you don’t have a laptop or desktop? You own your house, yet no desktop?
You asked me to clarify some of my stances. Abortion: its amazing you said what you did about the womens health being threatened. I agree that in that case an abortion should be an option. Does a woman get to make decisions about her body, yes and she did when she had sex with some guy without any protection, (I know accidents happen but I am talking about the way I feel I'm not trying to make everyone conform to it) if abortion wasn't an option(or at least harder to get) imagine the decrease in the spread of disease alone. I don't have a problem with a NEEDED abortion, I have a problem with COSMETIC abortions (please don't act like you don't know what I mean by that)
Abortion is a horrible thing, that’s moot, but so is government control over a person’s body. And what about people responsibly using contraception? You still didn’t address my point about how a fetus conceived based upon rape or incest is less of a human, that is, if you subscribe to life beginning at conception. That is a fallacy of the fundamental right; how is a rape-conceived fetus less of a human than a love-conceived fetus? They’re not, it’s a pseudo moral phenomenon from the fundie right.
Economic reform : as I said before, I don't know whose ideas are better. But here is one for you: bush and obama are giving money to banks who gave home loans that are now at risk of foreclosure right? Well instead of giving that money to the banks, why not pay off the loans of the people who were honest when they purchased their homes. That would help out the little guy and get the banks their money, I heard somthing on the news a couple of months ago about the first bailout being enough money to pay off every mortgage under 75000 in the US. I don't know if that is true but wouldn't that be somthing.
And we are in total agreement here, I say buy the mortgages from the banks at their overpriced values, the gov become the lien holder and the people pay their loans to the gov. It would have been perfect. Then let the banks figure it out for themselves; if they fail - bye bye. Bad thing is that then there would be a run on the banks. I think it was a necessary evil. Bush just wrote the check for the 1st 350B, he didn’t give a shit, he was just so done.
Social security : in galveston tx I am told that teachers can actually opt out of social security. I know that if we were all aloud to do that there would be a lot of homeless elderly in the future because not everyone can handle that responsibility. But I think that people who have been proven to be responsible should have that right. My grandfather could not draw social security and his retirement, why the hell is that, he paid both. He had to choose between the two and I think there was a nine dollar diffrence.
He could choose between SS and his retirement? Was his retirement huge? Must have been. That’s a good thing to me, if a senior is piss rich, even tho he paid, leave it for other elderlies who are broke. I agree that allowing anyone to opt out is a bad idea, society will end up paying for them in the future. It’s not a fair system, there is no way you will draw what you pay, no possible way. Some people die right before they draw, so they paid and didn’t gain a thing. Others pay very little and draw until over 100. Life isn’t fair, but I think we should all pay in due to us not being able to predict the future.
I don't know what was so bad about the eightys, I was born in 1978 and we were poor all my life until about 90 when my stepdad got a job offshore. I have been told most of my life that the vietnam era was pretty rough. I personnally don't know. My dad said he volunteered for the army during vietnam because he would rather be shot than starve to death. And he is democrat. I'm not saying the eightys were good I'm just saying I don't know. I do know that there were US hostages being held while reagan was running for president, during his campaign he stated that as soon as he was elected he would get them home. The day he was innaugurated(if I remember correctly)the hostages landed in the US. Is that true? If so its hard for me to hate some one like that. Why didn't the previous president get them home? They were held for over three hundred days I THINK.
When you say, bad about the 80’s, not sure what you mean. In regard to Reagan, or fascist Ronnie as I call him. I look at a president’s performance in 3 ways:
- Foreign policy
- Domestic policy
- Fiscal policy
I think Reagan was pretty good with foreign policy, fascist with domestic and fiscal policy. There was that Iran-Contra debacle, but he was senile and diaper-wearing by then, he was just clueless.
Let’s go back to Nixon to understand the latter years. Nixon promised to get us out of VN in his 1968 campaign. Truth is, he did, but after turning up the heat big time in the 4 latter years. Then his VP Agnew retired due to tax evasion, Watergate occurred right before the 72 election, but Nixon wasn’t implicated until after the election. After that, Nixon was looking for patsy to guarantee a pardon. He had to go thru a few people before he found Ford to go along with it, so he named him his VP and then resigned. Of course after that the country was sick over the pardon and a felon could have run for and been elected president in 76. Instead it was a guy never ready for the office of president, Carter. Carter would have been a great Secretary of State or foreign diplomat, never a president. So Ford was the accidental president and Carter was the do-nothing president and Iran took advantage of that.
Now, let’s look at external goings on from the early 70’s. OEC was putting the squeeze on us since the early 70’s, leading to the 76-77 oil embargo, making the $4 oil look like a bargain. It was bad, I was a teenager then. Then we had the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre Islamic terrorists killed people:
By the end of the ordeal, the terrorist group had killed eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and one German police officer. Five of the eight members of Black September were killed by police officers during an abortive rescue attempt. The three surviving terrorists were captured, and were later released by West Germany following the hijacking by Black September of a Lufthansa airliner, a release that led to speculation that West Germany helped stage the hijacking.
Then there was the 1980 boycotting of the summer Olympics in Moscow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Summe ... cs_boycott That was Carter’s last mess, other than the Iranian crisis, which is found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_hostage_crisis You are right, the hostages were released Jan 20, 81, but that was in large part to the signing of the Algiers Accords in Algeria on January 19, 1981, the day before the inauguration. That mess had been brewing since 1953, it’s in the site. It gave the country the pseudo impression that these Arabs were afraid of Reagan because he’s a Republican. Truth is, the 1986 bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut yielded Reagan to do nothing, not a fucking thing, so we see Reagan wasn’t the tiger he had the reputation to be. 300 Marines were killed there, rest their souls.
Anyway, you were saying about the 80’s, the part that was a mess was the fiscal part and that was due to the stagflation that stemmed from the early-mid 70’s, most say spurred by OPEC. Stagflation is a stagnate economy with inflation, a phenomenon that usually doesn’t occur simultaneously. Anyway, it was really no fault of Nixon, Ford, Carter or Reagan, but Reagan inherited it. Between him and the Fed Res Chairman, they decided to retract currency and this led to 10.8% unemployment. At the same time, he helped bust labor unions and then went crazy overspending on the military, eventually more than tripling the national debt in 8 years. That was the, “Me generation” as we called it. It was about greed, class separation and disparity. He was able to write enough rubber checks to make it appear to bring things together, but he furthered Hoover’s failed trickle down / supply side economics, they called it, “VooDoo Economics, “ meaning making money appear from nowhere. That was the first time in history where we had a runaway debt and no war to rationalize it. Reagan was a disaster fiscally, but I like his foreign policy.
But about the Republican fiscal policy, the 80's were a disaster and that's when the Repubs owned the senate, Jan 81 to Jan 87 and those were the bad years. The best years of the span 1955 to 1995 were in the late 1950's under Eisenhower and then in 1969 when teh debt actually fell a bit. I think the late 50's was due to Eisenhower's policy and 1969 had more to do with surplus VN funds. The Reagan / Repub Senate 1980's were perhaps the worst recent fiscal times of this country that have gone unsung.
During clintons presidency osama bombed two US embassys and nothing happened about that until the day his impeachment hearing was supposed to be held. Is that a diversion tactic.
Don’t forget about the WTC basement bombing and the USS Cole. Yep, Clinton wasn’t a military leader, but he was what we needed at the time. Just like Reagan did nothing after the Beirut bombing, Clinton didn’t substantively retaliate either. It really does no good to do so. Look at Iraq, has spending almost 1 trillion dollars there done anything positive for us? If you want to be secure, get out of other countries and guard our ports, borders and coasts. If we don’t put targets out there, they won’t have targets to hit. If they come here to hit our targets, we will hit them hard. Home field advantage is nice, let’s make a habit of it.
Was it diversion, based upon Hoffman’s movie, “Wag the Dog.”
When I said that I think both partys are right about their scare tactics I meant that I think repubs would like to get rid of social security and democrats would like to take our guns. You don't have to post evidnce about that, I agree with you, as for as the court case, its about damn time.
Yea, I think the Dems operate off of compassion and the Repubs from fear. I don’t think the Dems can take our guns. Some want to, but if and until the fiscal problems get fixed, it won’t be an issue.
I will get some more in a little bit, I don't have evidence to give you, only the life I've lived and the things I've seen.
That’s cool, just that when people come out with absolutes against my position and they’re wrong, I’m in my zone then. Hell, teach me something, or if not, I learn every time I research for any augments, I just like to learn more correct history.
I don't think a house is an investment other than it should save you money in the long run versus renting, factor in maintenance and it might not do that. I payed cash for my house two years ago. I kinda got lucky because I didn't think I would be responsible enough to make notes for thirty years.
I think a house is a great purchase. Mine was a VA loan, so I’m pissed I didn’t let them help me save it. I was really down at that point in my life. A house is the best non-investment purchase you can make and it’s a necessary tax shelter for single people like me w/o kids. I need to get one, but it’s not an investment - I used to think so. Actually some say a paid off house is a bad thing too, depends upon your financial picture, but you may want to take out a loan on it and then buy an investment property so you can write it off. Many economists say a paid off house is not good if you need the write-off. Nothing wrong with living for the cost of food and utilities either.
