the only way and i mean the ONLY way a peaceful protest by way of civil disobedience will EVER get any traction is by clogging the machine ie:blocking business,traffic and everyday functioning of not only government but everyday business.
this is not my opinion but historical fact.
see:
martin luther king.
vietnam protests of UC.
civil rights protests.
the triangle shirtwaist factory and the consequent protests for labor and the fight for unionized labor.
and these are just a few examples off the top of my head.the list is massive and does not only pertain to america but in america we have the RIGHT to assemble and the RIGHT of redress.
these protestors want to be arrested.
they want the state (in the form of police) to overstep,brutalize and abuse their authority in order to get the message out by way of conflict made violent by the people sworn to protect and serve.
every time the police (be they individual or enmasse) perpetrate violence on peaceful protestors that protest swells in numbers in a matter of days.
this was evident in the 1920's and it is evident today.

the problems of understanding arise when people give their power over to the powerful.they acquiesce to the very powers seeking to disempower them.
so we get things like "free speech zones" which are far away from the very thing being protested and most certainly no where near any business or government functions.

this is not a lib/repub issue but an american issue.for decades the government has slowly chipped away at our civil liberties and given more power to itself.this is what governments do,this is what ANY powerful institution does=keep itself relevant and IN power and the ONLY thing power fears is?
the people.
again,not my opinion but historically accurate.

this is about challenging authority.
you say that when a policemen gives a "lawful" order to disperse that should be the end of it.
i say:i question your "lawful order" as it hinders my right to assemble and give my government a redress of my grievances.
that policemen is ordering me to give up my right of redress and that is a right i will not give up.the authority of that policemen has been bestowed "by the people".the very government in which hands down orders to that policemen has been elected "by the people",and they were elected to create laws and govern "for the people" and when that machine no longer "serves the people" it must be resisted in the only way that has been known to work:
shut down the machine,
because "the people" are not multinational corporations with deep pockets who can influence legislators by way of lobbyists.we cant purchase the kind of time that a corporation can to make our case to a senator or congressmen.we cannot influence public opinion by way of tv commercials or entire networks.
but we CAN sit and stop traffic,or slow the flow of business and THAT is when they take notice.
and the response is always the same:
ignore.
and if that doesnt work?
ridicule.
if that fails?
co-opt in any way possible (see:tea party)
cant co-opt?
oppress,bully and intimidate by authoritarian means.
(guess which stage we are in now?)
and if that fails?
success.

watched the whole thing.
grover was a smug douche and if i had to take a drink everytime he vomited a repub talking point i would be wasted.
he stuck to his propaganda..*cough i mean "public relations" creed:
deflect,defuse and obfuscate.

he did settle down some after being repeatedly called on his tactics.though those folks did it waaaay more nicely than i would have.

@NetRunner

I'm genuinely surprised you would think the left has "lost" over the decades, especially after petty tyrant FDR rewrote the US Constitution, distorting the commerce clause to mean government can do anything it wants.

Then again, Jefferson said, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground," and that's EXACTLY what's happened. If Democrats create all of this big government (e.g. like Nixon creating the EPA) and Repubs do nothing to dismantle it and in fact vote to fund it, then effectively both sides are Democrats.

Don't you see? You've WON!

We are a few beats away from becoming a socialist outhouse like Europe. It's nice to declare that everything is "free" by birthright (and great for the politicians that promise it) EXCEPT when there are no more productive souls to pay for the phantasy. GREECE is the word.

>> ^NetRunner:

>>.

To me the worst part about a lot of right-wing assumptions about the left is that they assume we're their mirror image, and project their hostility, dishonesty, ruthlessness, and groupthink onto us.
The truth is, as a group we're too nice, too honest, too forgiving, and too independent, which is why the right ends up eating our lunch so often.
Oh yeah, and they deny that they've ever eaten our lunch. They insist on pretending to be some sort of oppressed underdog, even though they've been effectively running the show for as long as I've been alive.

@NetRunner

How bout you just admit that "democrat" and "republican" are both bullshit titles that don't convey any real meaning.

Obama ordered the assassination of a U.S. Citizen WITHOUT A TRIAL OR CHARGES, even.

Doesn't that strike at the very core of all your democratic rule of law, Dems are marginally, if not unequivocally, better than Repubs malarkey?

You've already lost this disagreement.
When Obama failed to close Gitmo and expanded rendition, you lost.
When Obama continued and expanded warrant-less wiretapping, you lost.
When Obama extended the Trillion Bush Tax Cuts for the 1%, you lost.

The individuals who assume the title "Democrat" might have more liberal leaning mindsets, might have flexible acceptance of different groups, might have a more progressive focus for the future of their communities.

That doesn't change the fact that the system in which they work.. is rigged.
The outcome is predetermined.

Chris Hedges said it best. "There's no way to vote against the banks."

Bankers, speculators and usurers rule the modern world.

Their fiat currency, derivative trading, two-party election rigging world will be the only with any relevance as long as pig-monkeys like @NetRunner and @quantumushroom buy into their wholesale bullshit and let it be.

Cut free. Establish your own voluntary hive-mind. Occupy the Universe.
[there's enough space for all of us. trust me]

>> ^garmachi:

Neil DeGrasse Tyson for President!


Made me think of http://videosift.com/video/Neil-deGrasse-Tyson-Who-s-More-Pro-Science-Repubs-or-Dems

Are you ever going to address the fact that the Great Depression was ended by massive record deficits, followed by taxing the richest by over 90%?

Your entire argument is deficits never work, and raising taxes on the rich hurts the economy. I just gave you an irrefutable example of that being dead wrong, and you go into FDR's New Deal. Dude, I'm not debating the New Deal with you.

Prove that the US economy got out of the Great Depression without massive deficits (regardless if it was New Deal spending or WWII spending, it's irrelevant), followed by massively taxing the rich over 90% in the 1950s, during which the US economy was extremely prosperous.

That's the thing, dude. You can try to dodge this all you want. I'm not letting you try to move to discussing the New Deal, or Social Security, or how apparently communist George W. Bush (SERIOUSLY?!?!? WTFBBQ?!?!?!?) is.

This example in US history proves your rigid, ideological economic philosophy is dead wrong. You can't argue honestly that deficits are always bad, and massive gov't spending is always bad, and the US gov't can't help aid in turning around the economy. It most certainly can. It indisputably did. There's no "some fact" to this. It absolutely is historical fact.

That's the thing. Once you admit that yes, deficits can and do help end recessions, and taxing the rich more heavily can be good for the economy, we might be able to actually have an honest, adult conversation about how to help the economy. Until that, you're just spewing idiotic and/or intentional misinformation.

And then you just completely glossed over the entire reason why the gov't is almost always the one who HAS to spark the economic turnaround. We NEED the gov't to stimulate the economy, just as we need the gov't to put the brakes on when the economy grows too quickly, which is when those deficits can get paid for incidentally.

Are you just gonna sit there and call everyone other than the Tea Party communists, or are you actually going to address any of this?

>> ^quantumushroom:

The rich pay a higher percentage, and more taxes overall than the poor. Why do you think anyone is saying otherwise?

And that's absolutely how it should be, for the good of everyone, rich included.
But why doth "the poor," who siphon the "free" money, have no civic responsibility at all? Shouldn't they be paying something into the system? Or maybe "dependency voters" are needed by a certain political party?

It's perfectly sensible to talk about why some people don't pay any taxes at all. I'm not even debating that. But the rich should still pay more, regardless. The US has been one of the strongest economies for most of the 20th and 21st centuries with a progressive income tax, and it's been a heck of a lot more progressive than it is now, and we were still very prosperous.
The rich already DO pay more. It will do NO GOOD to shakedown the rich for ever more $$$. The problem with tax addicts is they can never get enough. It's too easy to spend money. Destroy the incentive to invest and/or create (or deny there is incentive at all) and you get stagnation. GOVERNMENT CREATES NOTHING.
Showing fraud in some programs doesn't mean the program should be abolished. It can be reformed as well. There are plenty of ways to do that. We didn't abolish welfare in the 1990s. We reformed it. And no, it's not true that private businesses will always create the jobs when the economy is down. History has proven quite the opposite. Why would a business invest to make more goods and services if there's no market for it. A downturn in the economy breeds more economic decline. It's called a business cycle, and it's a natural occurrence. If you were a business owner, generally speaking, if you know less people out there have the money to buy your goods and services, would you increase production and hire more workers? Of course not. Does the average person put more money into the stock market or take money out when the market tanks? Takes money out, which drains money for investing. This is basic micro and macroeconomics.
But what about now, when our cherished federal mafia creates INstability? No sane businessperson will hire now with the Hawaiian Dunce in office. I've heard this claptrap about government spending as savior before.
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Some force has to run counter to the natural tendencies of the market to force demand to increase, and of course this virtually always requires running a deficit. This is why slogans like "the gov't should be run like a business" are simplistic and wrong. The gov't should in those situations create jobs through various programs, thereby increasing income for the lower classes, which creates spending and demand, which then causes businesses to increase production, hire more workers, and that gets the economy back on track. You can site case study after case study in our history we've done this, and it worked.
But it's not working now, is it. OOPS! I agree that govt should not be run like a business. It should instead by treated like the dangerous raw force it is, because that's ALL it is.

We ended the Great Depression via defense spending in the form of WWII in record levels as the most obvious exaggerated example. That historically was qm's worst nightmare - record deficits in raw amount at the time, and still to this day historic
record deficits as a percentage of GDP during WWII, followed by a tax raise on the richest Americans to over 90%. And what calamity befell the US because of those policies? We ended the Great Depression, became an economic Superpower, and Americans enjoyed record prosperity it and the world had never seen before.
This is historical fact that simply can't be denied.
There's some fact in there, but the cause and effect seems a little skewered.
FDR was a fascist, perhaps benevolent in his own mind, but a fascist in practice nonetheless, the sacred cow and Creator of the modern, unsustainable welfare state. He had no idea what he was doing and there is a growing body of work
suggesting his policies prolonged the Depression.

Here's what happened - Democrats deficit spent as they were supposed to (which is exactly what the GOP would have done had they been in power, because it was started by George W. Bush), which stopped the economic free fall.
This is all quite arguable. Yes, Bush the-liberal-with-a-few-conservative-tendencies ruined his legacy with scamulus spending, but nothing--NOTHING--close to 3 trillion in 3 years! Spending-wise, it's comparing a dragster to a regular hemi.

Moody's didn't downgrade the US debt. It was S&P. They sited math about the alarming deficits which contained a $2 trillion mistake on their part. They also sited political instability as the GOP was risking default to get their policies in place, which btw still include massive deficits.
Do you wonder why you can so neatly explain things while the Democrats in DC, with their arses on the line, cannot? The failed scamulus has forced the DC dunces to change boasts like "jobs saved" to "lives touched". Apparently there's a lot more to this tale than the Donkey Version.

The GOP couldn't stop the Democrats from spending all that money?! Laughable.
They didn't have the votes.

The GOP started the freakin' bailouts and stimulus! What did the GOP do the last time there was a recession after 9/11? Deficit spent, then continued to deficit spend when the economy was strong. Dude, seriously, you have no factual basis for
that kind of claim whatsoever.
Compare taxocrats' dragster-speed spending of the last three years versus Repub spending during the 8 years before it. The argument of "But they do it too!" has some merit, but as the rise of the Tea Party has shown, business-as-usual is no longer acceptable.
Oh, and taxocrats, remember this: the Hawaiian Dunce considers anyone making over 250K to be millionaires and billionaires.

The rich pay a higher percentage, and more taxes overall than the poor. Why do you think anyone is saying otherwise?

And that's absolutely how it should be, for the good of everyone, rich included.

But why doth "the poor," who siphon the "free" money, have no civic responsibility at all? Shouldn't they be paying something into the system? Or maybe "dependency voters" are needed by a certain political party?

It's perfectly sensible to talk about why some people don't pay any taxes at all. I'm not even debating that. But the rich should still pay more, regardless. The US has been one of the strongest economies for most of the 20th and 21st centuries with a progressive income tax, and it's been a heck of a lot more progressive than it is now, and we were still very prosperous.

The rich already DO pay more. It will do NO GOOD to shakedown the rich for ever more $$$. The problem with tax addicts is they can never get enough. It's too easy to spend money. Destroy the incentive to invest and/or create (or deny there is incentive at all) and you get stagnation. GOVERNMENT CREATES NOTHING.

Showing fraud in some programs doesn't mean the program should be abolished. It can be reformed as well. There are plenty of ways to do that. We didn't abolish welfare in the 1990s. We reformed it. And no, it's not true that private businesses will always create the jobs when the economy is down. History has proven quite the opposite. Why would a business invest to make more goods and services if there's no market for it. A downturn in the economy breeds more economic decline. It's called a business cycle, and it's a natural occurrence. If you were a business owner, generally speaking, if you know less people out there have the money to buy your goods and services, would you increase production and hire more workers? Of course not. Does the average person put more money into the stock market or take money out when the market tanks? Takes money out, which drains money for investing. This is basic micro and macroeconomics.

But what about now, when our cherished federal mafia creates INstability? No sane businessperson will hire now with the Hawaiian Dunce in office. I've heard this claptrap about government spending as savior before.

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Some force has to run counter to the natural tendencies of the market to force demand to increase, and of course this virtually always requires running a deficit. This is why slogans like "the gov't should be run like a business" are simplistic and wrong. The gov't should in those situations create jobs through various programs, thereby increasing income for the lower classes, which creates spending and demand, which then causes businesses to increase production, hire more workers, and that gets the economy back on track. You can site case study after case study in our history we've done this, and it worked.
But it's not working now, is it. OOPS! I agree that govt should not be run like a business. It should instead by treated like the dangerous raw force it is, because that's ALL it is.

We ended the Great Depression via defense spending in the form of WWII in record levels as the most obvious exaggerated example. That historically was qm's worst nightmare - record deficits in raw amount at the time, and still to this day historic
record deficits as a percentage of GDP during WWII, followed by a tax raise on the richest Americans to over 90%. And what calamity befell the US because of those policies? We ended the Great Depression, became an economic Superpower, and Americans enjoyed record prosperity it and the world had never seen before.

This is historical fact that simply can't be denied.

There's some fact in there, but the cause and effect seems a little skewered.

FDR was a fascist, perhaps benevolent in his own mind, but a fascist in practice nonetheless, the sacred cow and Creator of the modern, unsustainable welfare state. He had no idea what he was doing and there is a growing body of work
suggesting his policies prolonged the Depression.


Here's what happened - Democrats deficit spent as they were supposed to (which is exactly what the GOP would have done had they been in power, because it was started by George W. Bush), which stopped the economic free fall.

This is all quite arguable. Yes, Bush the-liberal-with-a-few-conservative-tendencies ruined his legacy with scamulus spending, but nothing--NOTHING--close to 3 trillion in 3 years! Spending-wise, it's comparing a dragster to a regular hemi.

Moody's didn't downgrade the US debt. It was S&P. They sited math about the alarming deficits which contained a $2 trillion mistake on their part. They also sited political instability as the GOP was risking default to get their policies in place, which btw still include massive deficits.

Do you wonder why you can so neatly explain things while the Democrats in DC, with their arses on the line, cannot? The failed scamulus has forced the DC dunces to change boasts like "jobs saved" to "lives touched". Apparently there's a lot more to this tale than the Donkey Version.

The GOP couldn't stop the Democrats from spending all that money?! Laughable.

They didn't have the votes.

The GOP started the freakin' bailouts and stimulus! What did the GOP do the last time there was a recession after 9/11? Deficit spent, then continued to deficit spend when the economy was strong. Dude, seriously, you have no factual basis for
that kind of claim whatsoever.

Compare taxocrats' dragster-speed spending of the last three years versus Repub spending during the 8 years before it. The argument of "But they do it too!" has some merit, but as the rise of the Tea Party has shown, business-as-usual is no longer acceptable.

Oh, and taxocrats, remember this: the Hawaiian Dunce considers anyone making over 250K to be millionaires and billionaires.

Bush 43 ran up the debt by 5 trillion in 8 years. He was criticized for it. Obama has run up 3 trillion in 3 years, with nothing to show for it. Bush 43 started ths scamulus nonsense and Obama expanded it.

As for Slick Willie, read about The Myth of the Clinton Surplus here.



>> ^longde:

>> ^quantumushroom:
BR>
Out-of-control spending is wrecking this country, and calling Tea Partiers "crazy" and espousing 'tax increases' will not stop this in any way, because the left always spends more than it takes in, more so than the right.
Obama & Friends are already spending printed trillions, to no effect.

The facts belie this point. Republicans love to spend. In fact, half the debt we have created since Reagan was done in eight years; care to guess which eight years? If you guessed Bush---ding, ding, ding! How he did it: Iraq War, Stupid unfunded Medicare extension, Insanely Stupid tax cuts---these 3 items make up nearly half the increase in the debt since Reagan. These were all republican initiatives.
Bush, Reagan, and Bush Sr. ran up gobs of debt, with the full support of the repubs. Clinton actually reduced the debt. Republicans fought him tooth and nail, but he handed bush jr a surplus. Obama spent money to head off a depression.

longde, as much as I'd love to stick it to QM over this, you're oversimplifying it.

Reagan ran up the deficit with a Democratic controlled Congress. Clinton balanced the budget with a Republican controlled Congress. Bush Sr. is getting a bit of a bad rap in your analysis. He was in wartime, so you're gonna run up the debt during war, and we absolutely should have gone into Iraq the first time.

Bush Jr. on the other hand did run up the debt with a Republican controlled Congress. Granted, with 9/11, etc. it was going to be difficult to not run a deficit, but Bush Sr. + the GOP Congress unnecessarily exacerbated the problem with the Bush Tax Cuts and Senior Prescription Benefit. And by 2004 or 2005, we should have been running a surplus.

What I find absolutely appalling about QM's argument is there's no context in why the debt was run up by Obama. It's really simple - the economy was in free fall. That's exactly what the gov't must do in that situation. Everybody knew it. Bush Jr. knew it, too, which is why the stimulus and bailouts started under him, and continued by Obama. It's painfully obvious to anyone who is willing to have an honest conversation about this topic.

>> ^longde:
>> ^quantumushroom:
BR>
Out-of-control spending is wrecking this country, and calling Tea Partiers "crazy" and espousing 'tax increases' will not stop this in any way, because the left always spends more than it takes in, more so than the right.
Obama & Friends are already spending printed trillions, to no effect.

The facts belie this point. Republicans love to spend. In fact, half the debt we have created since Reagan was done in eight years; care to guess which eight years? If you guessed Bush---ding, ding, ding! How he did it: Iraq War, Stupid unfunded Medicare extension, Insanely Stupid tax cuts---these 3 items make up nearly half the increase in the debt since Reagan. These were all republican initiatives.
Bush, Reagan, and Bush Sr. ran up gobs of debt, with the full support of the repubs. Clinton actually reduced the debt. Republicans fought him tooth and nail, but he handed bush jr a surplus. Obama spent money to head off a depression.

>> ^quantumushroom:

BR>
Out-of-control spending is wrecking this country, and calling Tea Partiers "crazy" and espousing 'tax increases' will not stop this in any way, because the left always spends more than it takes in, more so than the right.
Obama & Friends are already spending printed trillions, to no effect.


The facts belie this point. Republicans love to spend. In fact, half the debt we have created since Reagan was done in eight years; care to guess which eight years? If you guessed Bush---ding, ding, ding! How he did it: Iraq War, Stupid unfunded Medicare extension, Insanely Stupid tax cuts---these 3 items make up nearly half the increase in the debt since Reagan. These were all republican initiatives.

Bush, Reagan, and Bush Sr. ran up gobs of debt, with the full support of the repubs. Clinton actually reduced the debt. Republicans fought him tooth and nail, but he handed bush jr a surplus. Obama spent money to head off a depression.

>> ^longde:

I was answering your question in general. My point is that despite the validity of what he says in one video or another, his propensity to make outlandish statements cost him credibility in the long run.
I agree with alot of what this guy says. In the last repub primary, I thought he was a voice of reason in the debates. But I would hope he would never get elected or appointed to high office. His fringe views in many areas are unacceptable to me. Like my recent statement about the teabaggers, I think Mr. Paul is of the stripe who would kill our country to save it.>> ^blankfist:
>> ^longde:
I'm sure they do....long enough to hear enough nutty shit. Then they stop listening. >> ^blankfist:
Why won't people listen to this man?


I'm curious, because I hear comments like this a lot. What exactly is nutty about what he's saying here?



Specifics?

I was answering your question in general. My point is that despite the validity of what he says in one video or another, his propensity to make outlandish statements cost him credibility in the long run.

I agree with alot of what this guy says. In the last repub primary, I thought he was a voice of reason in the debates. But I would hope he would never get elected or appointed to high office. His fringe views in many areas are unacceptable to me. Like my recent statement about the teabaggers, I think Mr. Paul is of the stripe who would kill our country to save it.>> ^blankfist:
>> ^longde:
I'm sure they do....long enough to hear enough nutty shit. Then they stop listening. >> ^blankfist:
Why won't people listen to this man?


I'm curious, because I hear comments like this a lot. What exactly is nutty about what he's saying here?

>> ^blankfist:

Nary a one of the status quo candidates from either party (Dem or Repub) are serious about cutting military spending. Nary a one. Obama promised ending the wars, but expanded the military efforts. Food for thought.


The only expansion Obama really made was into Libya.

A few questions come to mind from that:
1.Do you agree that without Obama's intervention, the rebels would have been long ago wiped out and Libya would again be firmly and completely under Gadhafi's control?
2.As a vehement anti-statist, why do you so strongly oppose aiding in the removal of one of the worlds most repressive and brutal dictators?

Nary a one of the status quo candidates from either party (Dem or Repub) are serious about cutting military spending. Nary a one. Obama promised ending the wars, but expanded the military efforts. Food for thought.

Nary a one of the status quo candidates from either party (Dem or Repub) are serious about cutting military spending. Nary a one. Obama promised ending the wars, but expanded the military efforts. Food for thought.