Such nonsense. Biden tried to remove the disastrous stay in Mexico policy, but was forced to keep Trump’s border rules until under three fucking weeks ago, dumbshit. He sent more back home to places like Hati than Trump did too. Derp.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-administration-ends-trump-era-remain-in-mexico-policy

Trump’s $40 billion fence hasn’t slowed immigration one percent, as expected. $40 billion more funding to border patrol would have been hundreds of times more effective….but not a monument to Trump.
Not using the border patrol to do useless, expensive political stunts instead of their job helps too.
Good BS blaming someone else. Republicans saying the borders are open is the number one reason people in South America believe it…that’s what THEY say, and why they’re coming now. This lies at least in part at their feet.

Funny how absolutely nothing was the president’s responsibility Jan 2017-21, but now everything in the country is his fault….except the things getting better like unemployment, wages, gdp, covid, the economy, gas prices recently, etc.

Bullshit. Trump never had any program to combat gang violence. Stop lying. His best plan was round up all Mexicans and you’ll get a lot of gang members too, but that’s a horrific and outrageous (and impossible) way to achieve that goal.

Calling them criminals invading is EXACTLY the point of this video, dummy. No one is barging into your house, most aren’t in the drug trade, for the vast majority crossing a line is the only crime they ever committed, and if our immigration/asylum policies were functional they wouldn’t have committed that crime. Just more nonsensical babbling from a ridiculous tool.

Funny how minor crime to save ones life is outrageous to you, but severe treasonous crimes for personal enrichment is a nothing burger. Stupid is as stupid does, and holy shit do you advocate for some stupid shit.

Denying asylum seekers entry was a crime when it started. Do it the right way or you are committing a crime every time you deny one. That’s Trump policy, no problem when he breaks the law, right? You don’t care a whit about law or crime, only about what you can pin on your rivals. Proven time and time and time and time and time and time again. You see no crime ever on the right, and fantasize about non existent crimes from the left, constantly.
Again, Barr lied and obstructed justice to protect Trump who lied and obstructed justice, court findings, but still not a crime because the statutes of limitations expired, right? No crime if they criminally slipped out of legal jeopardy….right?
And you also can’t see the hypocrisy. 🤦‍♂️

Answer this (I know you won’t, you are incapable of ever answering questions unless fed the far right answer, while I address every point you try to make every time)…how much has Abbot wasted on this stunt that hasn’t moved 1/2 days worth of immigrants out of state? Wouldn’t that money be better spent stopping crossings rather than with meaningless political stunts like this and the $10 billion waste of money with his border inspections that didn’t find a single stowaway or drug caches?

I think the worst part of these summits is their stated goals.
Paris intended to keep warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050 (no real plan beyond then)…but you might recall, 1.5 degrees of warming is considered the tipping point where feedback loops and natural processes outpace human inputs, meaning even if we hit zero emissions by 2050, and if everyone kept to their Paris agreement promises, and if other nations don’t continue to ramp up emissions, and if unforeseen feedback loops aren’t stronger or faster acting than predicted, we still lose control completely by 2050. That’s the best plan we have, runaway climate shifts in <30 years AT BEST….and no one seems to be living up to even that planned disaster of a plan. Emissions aren’t being cut, they’re increasing. Feedback loops are ramping up 40 years earlier than predicted. All the while, people are complaining that gas is over $3 (I haven’t seen it under $4 in decades where I live) and insisting we adopt some heavily polluting power generation instead of investing in green energy solutions. People assume, it seems, that some last minute fix will solve climate change, ignoring the fact that emissions from today are reactive in the atmosphere for between 25 and 150 years, so we needed to be at net zero 25 years ago to even start effecting the atmosphere today…and some emissions from the industrial revolution are still effecting us now. Net zero by 2050 (a pipe dream, and the best plan so far) is planning to fail completely…like turning off the blast furnace in your house when the thermometer hits 450.5 inside and thinking you can stop it from burning down.
If Covid taught us anything, it’s that there is 0% chance humans will be able to cooperate enough to tackle climate change. People were asked to simply wear a mask and distance a bit to save their lives, and enough refused to do it that the methods that worked beautifully elsewhere failed miserably to control a virus. If we can’t pull off such a simple, blatantly obvious plan against a virus, what chance is there of cooperation across the board to sacrifice enormous amounts of money and completely revamp our wasteful way of life in uncountable ways to stop something seen as a future problem by many? IMO, there so little chance of pulling it off that it’s statistically correct to say there’s absolutely no chance at all.

BURN IT!!! BURN IT WITH...

...actually, on second thought. Maybe not the best plan.

I can watch unedited footage of testimony....so can you, but Trump told you it's all lies, so good enough, right? When the godfather says he's not a criminal, of course you would believe him....why wouldn't you?

Um....you mean like the lies about Flynn...proven not only true (but lied about by Flynn and Trump) but known before Trump hired him? Or Lewandowski, or Manafort......

We agree at least that the Fed has done a poor job in education...but probably for different reasons. We should get more for our money...and we should spend more money. If we paid teachers on par with what they can make in their profession, we'll get better teachers, and then better students.

Betsy is ignorant of most things education, she demonstrated that clearly at her farcical confirmation hearing, and is most likely to just take more funding out of public education (wanting to pay for religious education and other private schools with that money, for instance). Her druthers are to dismantle the education dept, not to make it work for poor children. Her best plan is to pay private institutions to teach instead...leaving out anyone who can't afford the tuition or doesn't have access to decent schools....and removing any regulations on what must be taught or nondiscrimination of students. She's horrid for education in America.

100% agree.
As I recall, something like 95% of incumbents win, but probably less than 5% actually represent their constituents. People like to vote for a winner, rather than a good representative. I try hard to not let who I think will win be part of my choice, only who I think will represent me better. My candidate usually loses.
Black Dynamite said : 'Even if it's a terrible plan [candidate], you always go with the best plan [candidate] you've got.'

I've heard Mr. T. Boone speak about this before. I think he is genuine and has offered the best plan he can work out with his expertise. It isn't perfect, but what is?

I do find it interesting how he uses the word "enemy" early on and ties in the U.S. world police/military mentality. (Made me think of Robert Newman's History of Oil.)

But I'm glad that the brief Q&A discussed the reality that Natural Gas = Fracking. I think a big problem lies in the fact that the wells being fracked now are in less and less remote areas, and populations are beginning to be affected.

I won't deny the other two examples. I said already Obama isn't a hardcore progressive. I wouldn't even label him on a scale as progressive. Those are examples of where he isn't. If that's the indictment, no one is disagreeing with you.

Dude, how are you not getting this. Obama hasn't justified a single policy with Christianity. This guy sited directly his warped Christian beliefs in his manifesto. It's pretty clear as day the difference. Obama refutes the notion of the US as a "Christian Nation", etc. He's ridiculed by the Religious Right in fact for this. Isn't this pretty obvious?

Yes, it is accepted as collateral damage. Thank you for making my point. Were the attacks launched with the purpose of killing these civilians? NO! Was it the intention of Osama bin Laden to kill as many civilians as possible in the 9/11 attacks on purpose? YES! THAT is the difference. If Obama could conduct these attacks without killing innocent civilians, he'd do it in a heartbeat. If bin Laden could have killed 1 million American civilians instead of the number he did, he'd do it in a heartbeat. That's the difference. You're assuming that because civilian deaths occur, that how many people are killed in collateral damage never influences decision making. That's simply not true. You'll rarely ever achieve objectives without accepting some collateral damage, unfortunately. This is unfortunately part of being the President.

So we're gonna terrorize the population of Libya why exactly?! What would that possibly achieve in and of itself? That's utterly ridiculous.

It's against international law how exactly to be intervening in Libya? It was approved by the UN Security Council. Are you speaking to military strategy? So you're saying we should just put ground troops in there and go door to door, which will cause even higher casualties and more terrorizing of the civilian population? I don't pretend to know all the difficulties the military is facing when coming up with the best plan to achieve objectives.

It's silly to believe part of why we're in Libya is to help establish a democratic gov't there? Look, I was a big critic of the second Iraq war, but I don't doubt for a second part of why the Bush administration wanted to go in was to establish democracy in the region. It was a stated goal. You can call it silly all you want, but it is even within the US's self interests to have as Libya be a democracy. Why wouldn't we want them to be democratic?!

It is progressive to intervene in a country to help protect human rights. Schools of geopolitical realism would have determined intervening in Libya to not benefit the US enough to justify involvement. Again, I'm not suggesting the entire reason we went in was to help the Libyan people. There are many reasons why. But one of them was to help the Libyan people. I fully accept there were geopolitical calculations as well. All of those things have to contribute to the decision making.

Was it progressive to partner with Stalin to defeat Hitler? If no, then FDR wasn't a progressive?! We did it because Hitler was a bigger threat than Stalin at the time. Once Hitler was out of the equation, we became enemies of Stalin. To think you can just make international policy based exclusively on progressive ideas is fantasy.

On this site, I've defended progressivism when under attack from people who think progressivism is Communist, doesn't work, blah blah blah. Progressivism, like other ideologies, provides a lot of answers and ideas to solving problems, but it is also imperfect, just like every other ideology.

So Obama isn't progressive in the slightest?

Are the following progressive in nature?

Ending "don't ask, don't tell."
Advocating raising taxes on the rich
Increasing availability of Medicaid
Preventing health insurance companies denying based on pre-existing conditions

He's a moderate. Yes, I fully accept you could give a big long list of things that aren't progressive he's done, too. He's a moderate, who leans left. That's why I get really irritated when QM and WP call him a socialist or communist because it's simply not true.

Best plan would be to hide in a shelter for a few weeks and wait for the zombies to run out of food and die of starvation.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'onion, all hail octavia, octavius, best plan' to 'onion, all hail octavia, octavius, best plan, pretend to be canada' - edited by calvados

>> ^gtjwkq:
Setting working conditions and minimum wages is the art of benefiting the hired at the expense of the employers and the unemployed. Pretty soon a black market for illegal hiring will grow as businesses and people try to survive in tough times despite such ill-considered regulations. So you actually end up with 3rd world salaries that way.

Minimum wage is a whole other topic, but my read of what you're saying here is that 3rd world salaries in the US are unavoidable, and we should just accept it. Suffice to say, I disagree.

Just FYI, almost 70% of America's GDP accounts for consumer spending, its not reliable as an indicator of a nation's productivity. Over the years, a lot of that spending is just people borrowing with their home equity extractions and mostly credit card debt. Now that we're in a credit crunch, GDP will probably fall (unless statisticians come up with a more hedonistic interpretation for it).
In a recession like we're having, in the private sector you need more productivity and you need to flush out the malinvestments and money wasting businesses.

I agree with this, though I'd replace the Austrian-defined "malinvestment" with just plain "bad investments." Why did the market go for an asset bubble, rather than go after investments with a real long-term prospect?

In the public sector, you need less govt so it can be less of a burden on the private sector.
How can that possibly happen if govt borrows/taxes/prints a stimulus into existence (adding to the burden of debt), then proceeds to use all that taxpayer money to expand govt programs and spending (more burden),

How does laying off schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, closing VA hospitals, etc. Help recovery? It seems like a highly ideological statement to say that no one the government gives money to should be employed.

Being worried about the debt seems natural, but why you would say the spending itself adds burden? That seems to presuppose that money spent by government is automatically, intrinsically going to purchase nothing of value to anyone.

[It] bails out the inefficient businesses that should've failed otherwise (more burden)

For what it's worth, the left (myself included) isn't pleased about the bailouts. We're mollified slightly when the CEOs of several of these institutions is asked to resign. I'm not so worried about the auto bailouts (since they're all loans, and I suspect they'll be repaid), but the bank bailouts should involve more pain from people who aren't taxpayers.

and poorly hands that money out to businesses via govt contracts instead of letting consumers make better choices with their money themselves (burden burden burden)?

As a general proposition, I would agree with this, though we're "fortunate" in that successive rounds of conservative politicians have let our infrastructure crumble, so we have a very convenient, worthwhile target for stimulus. That's in contrast to Japan, whose stimulus mostly went towards things of little long-term economic benefit, like increasing their level of hurricane and earthquake resistance.

Blaming mostly investment banks for this recession is like force-feeding alcohol to a bus driver and blaming him for killing all the passengers in the resulting crash. Don't you have any idea of the Fed and other federal institutions' role in causing the market distortions that led to this recession? How can you give them a free pass as the major culprits?

I've seen Peter Schiff use this metaphor (and others like it) several times. It makes no sense.

You say government force-fed them alcohol, when really what it did is give them money. Why is government solely or primarily at fault for the investment bank using that money to make bad investments?

To me, this seems like trying to jail the CEO of Smith & Wesson for a murder committed with one of their guns, while holding the person pulling the trigger blameless.

It is a kind of selection, just not as brutal as you described, because its not the end of the world: people get fired, businesses go bankrupt, the assets of incompetent people are transfered to the competent people, people are hired again somewhere else and eventually the economy resumes growth.

Yes, people get fired, lose their health insurance, lose their savings (what's left of them), go even more deeply into debt, potentially lose their home...yep, nothing at all brutal in that!

The market is not an omnipotent unstoppable force, its complexity just eludes the narrow-mindedness of the fools that try to plan it, specially when they're the same fools that screwed it up in the first place. A market is already planned by those in it, and they have the best incentives in place to make the best plans, because they are usually the first ones to pay for their mistakes. Politicians and bureaucrats, on the other hand, are exempt from responsability and are seldom punished when they waste huge amounts of money. They are the ones who commited the worst sins.

Why are politicians exempt from accountability? Don't we have elections?

Which CEO of these companies is now on welfare or in jail? Seems to me, other people wind up paying for their mistakes, government bailout or no.

The terrible mistake in your criticism of the market is that you constantly blame its "emergent" irrationality as an excuse for thinking on its behalf. What you correlate to auto-immunity on an otherwise healthy body I would compare to a heavily medicated pacient that undergoes daily surgeries after years of treatment for what started out as a sore throat.

I think anyone familiar with the history of the Great Depression, and the 1920's generally would view things my way. This is why I decry Austrians with such venom -- they engage in revisionist history rather than adapt to the revelation that government isn't Satan, and that the market can indeed do the wrong thing all by itself.

Setting working conditions and minimum wages is the art of benefiting the hired at the expense of the employers and the unemployed. Pretty soon a black market for illegal hiring will grow as businesses and people try to survive in tough times despite such ill-considered regulations. So you actually end up with 3rd world salaries that way.

Just FYI, almost 70% of America's GDP accounts for consumer spending, its not reliable as an indicator of a nation's productivity. Over the years, a lot of that spending is just people borrowing with their home equity extractions and mostly credit card debt. Now that we're in a credit crunch, GDP will probably fall (unless statisticians come up with a more hedonistic interpretation for it).

In a recession like we're having, in the private sector you need more productivity and you need to flush out the malinvestments and money wasting businesses. In the public sector, you need less govt so it can be less of a burden on the private sector.

How can that possibly happen if govt borrows/taxes/prints a stimulus into existence (adding to the burden of debt), then proceeds to use all that taxpayer money to expand govt programs and spending (more burden), bails out the inefficient businesses that should've failed otherwise (more burden) and poorly hands that money out to businesses via govt contracts instead of letting consumers make better choices with their money themselves (burden burden burden)?

Seriously, if you're counting on govt to do anything productively, you probably got the wrong person for the job. People are far better at making choices with their own money than the govt is with money that they effortlessly take from others.

Blaming mostly investment banks for this recession is like force-feeding alcohol to a bus driver and blaming him for killing all the passengers in the resulting crash. Don't you have any idea of the Fed and other federal institutions' role in causing the market distortions that led to this recession? How can you give them a free pass as the major culprits?

AFAIK, creative destruction in economics is an often misunderstood sophism that doesn't apply to what I'm advocating. If an economy is moving towards a recession, the recession is not the problem, the artificial *boom* was the problem that the market is trying to correct with a recession. It is a kind of selection, just not as brutal as you described, because its not the end of the world: people get fired, businesses go bankrupt, the assets of incompetent people are transfered to the competent people, people are hired again somewhere else and eventually the economy resumes growth.

The market is not an omnipotent unstoppable force, its complexity just eludes the narrow-mindedness of the fools that try to plan it, specially when they're the same fools that screwed it up in the first place. A market is already planned by those in it, and they have the best incentives in place to make the best plans, because they are usually the first ones to pay for their mistakes. Politicians and bureaucrats, on the other hand, are exempt from responsability and are seldom punished when they waste huge amounts of money. They are the ones who commited the worst sins.

The terrible mistake in your criticism of the market is that you constantly blame its "emergent" irrationality as an excuse for thinking on its behalf. What you correlate to auto-immunity on an otherwise healthy body I would compare to a heavily medicated pacient that undergoes daily surgeries after years of treatment for what started out as a sore throat.

It doesn't apply to Black people in other countries? Do you believe that America is the only country that took slaves from Africa? For centuries they were forcibly removed from their homeland and shipped off to locations all around the globe and provided the same inhuman treatment. Are you completely unaware of that fact?

Of course those programs aren't planned to end. You must have missed the point of my entire dissertation up there. Black people did not decide to become slaves and thought of simply as animals by all White people. They did not decide to have no means to live a normal life after slavery. They did not decide to not be able to vote. They did not decide to be segregated from the White communities in schools, buses, public, and everywhere. Since even before the founding of this nation, Black people have always been looked down on as creatures that are not human beings, but some kind of evolved apes. When essentially the entire White society and even the government treat you accordingly, you have not the liberty of making any decisions about what happens to you or people like you. So, now the government is finally trying to help advance the Black communities that were spawned from centuries of hate, persecution (both of which still exist), and segregation. Maybe it's not the best plan and maybe it won't work, but the government must do something, even though nothing they ever do will be able to just erase the history. That just isn't possible.

The reason Black people are not held liable when they speak/demonstrate/etc against White people is that it isn't a black and white issue, pardon the pun. If it were, you could just conclude that anyone who says something negative about other racial groups must be stopped. I don't think it's a good thing and it doesn't help advance Black communities in any way, but it's acceptable by the public because they have been the victims of hatred and shunned by society for centuries. While our founders were fighting the Revolutionary War and building our country, Black people were always enslaved. The government and White people are solely responsible for the creation of the Black communities and culture that exist today, so now it is their responsibility to improve them in any way possible.

My point about genocide was that you and your kind would never be satisfied with anything regarding Black people except for all of them to be gone from this planet.

I think we're good and done discussing this. There is no point to further exacerbate the issue. Your kind will never allow the consideration that your bigoted points of view might be a bit off base and the discussion will simply continue in circles.