Election 08

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

Honestly, I could care less for offshore drilling. I was just pointing out that Obama was contradicting himself with an issue that some people think is important. If I were to be president, I would just push for hydrogen, since that is the greatest energy of the future we are seeing so far. Cost efficient, absolutely clean (so clean, it gives back to the environment), and easy to make. Half of the dangers people worry about with hydrogen don't even happen too, such as explosions in gas stations where it would be provided. Under proper conditions, hydrogen is just as stable as current gas, and in a situation of combustion, is less destructive because while gas burns along the ground, hydrogen dissipates upwards into the air, leaving minimal damage.

As for Iraq, problem or not, America is there, and so far we've already helped establish a democratic government. When we leave, all participating members of that government will be executed when the terrorists organizations return to retake control of the government. That's more people dead, and that nation is thrown even further into chaos with another government change and the terrorist government that would be created after would continue to terrorize the people of Iraq. Whether it was right or not to go into Iraq, I don't care and it doesn't really matter anymore. We're there and now we just need to face the consequences of whatever the decisions we make in the future will bring us.

And yes there are liberal cover ups. If you noticed anything about America, it's that the media is extremely liberal and does it's best to expose anything negative about the republican party and hide anything negative about the democrats. I see it all the time. If you hear about a republican politician with a prostitute, it's on the front page, but if it was a democrat politician, it would be tucked away further in the newspaper where people are less likely to read it. This happens all the time, and sometimes it just really bothers me. I suppose it's all just a matter of oppinion. Where someone might see a jobless person on welfare who isn't doing anything to change their current situation as a leech, others see them as just another needy person who needs our money. That would be the majority of jobless people in the surrounding areas around here. And I do understand that there are people who need the money to get by, I've said that a million times. But the system is being abused, and I'm tired of having the money that my family needs being handed away to leeches. I don't think that the entire system should be done away with, because that is unfair. It's like having a rowdy class of students, with 4 or 5 of them doing the work they're supposed to with the other 15 students messing around and being obnoxious, and so the teacher punishes them by giving the entire class detention. That's not fair to the kids who were doing the work they were supposed to. So those who actually need the financial aid should still be given what they need to get by, whereas those who are leeching off of the system should be cut off. I think it would be a good idea to actually have some people go through and determine who needs the money and who's just abusing it and work from there.

And no, it's a greater number of 2%-5% of American families who have incomes equal to or greater than my family. The 2%-5% probably covers the millionaires, because there are a substantial number of them out there. It costs a lot of money to live in the town I do, because this place isn't Springfield. And we'd like to keep living here, because in Springfield, you get shot. My house isn't big. I don't have everything in the world. I can't even afford to fix my computer that has been broken for months, and all it needs is a new motherboard. I don't know where Obama gets the idea that all people with incomes over $200,000 are all well off, because I'm not, as are many others out there. It all depends on how much the things you have cost. I'm sure if I moved to a different state like Florida, I could live a better life there because it's not as expensive. There's a curve. So, rather than tax those who have incomes above a certain point, why not scale it so that you see how much people earn every year, and how much it costs for them to keep their homes, and then tax from there. That is how you tke money from those who don't need it.

Another issue I've had is this outright hatred against big businesses. Everyone is completely against big business because they have too much money. That doesn't seem to be the case, because if you look around, these big businesses are absolutely tanking. Many of them are about to collapse, which will have a substantially negative impact on the economy and the people of America. I mean, just look at GM right now, it's in huge trouble right now, and if it collapses, millions will be left jobless and the industry will take a severe hit.

But it doesn't matter much anyways. I'm not 18 yet, so I don't get any say in politics. What will happen will happen, and we'll just need to make the best of whatever does.

[Alasdair]

Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
And yes there are liberal cover ups. If you noticed anything about America, it's that the media is extremely liberal and does it's best to expose anything negative about the republican party and hide anything negative about the democrats

You live in America, yet you have never seen Fox news - aka the mouthpiece of the Republican party?

Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
And no, it's a greater number of 2%-5% of American families who have incomes equal to or greater than my family.

Um, no there isn't. You are in the top two percent, that's a fact, you can't really argue against it. For comparison, more than 20%in America live on less than $20,000 a year. I suppose they are all those dirty liberal leechers. I would just like you to consider how well-off you are compared to many other families in your town who are living with vastly lower wages, some of these families are probably struggling to buy food, let alone motherboards. They may have recently lost their job, and have little hope for a replacement in the near-term. Now consider what a large demographic group people in this situation are, compared to people like you. It's fairly obvious that a lot of them are going to need financial aid from the government, especially if they need something like medical care, which they could probably never pay for on their own. Claiming that a majority of this group are just lazy and leeching of the system is at best naive and at worst downright insulting. Very few people want to live on measly government handouts with no hope for a better life. Most people born poor die poor, there is often very little opportunity for the bottom segment of society to improve their situation especially in America. With a growing gap between rich and poor, cutting back on welfare seems like a silly thing to do right now.

Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
Another issue I've had is this outright hatred against big businesses. Everyone is completely against big business because they have too much money. That doesn't seem to be the case, because if you look around, these big businesses are absolutely tanking. Many of them are about to collapse, which will have a substantially negative impact on the economy and the people of America. I mean, just look at GM right now, it's in huge trouble right now, and if it collapses, millions will be left jobless and the industry will take a severe hit.

It's not so much the businesses as the greedy bosses running them. They have no incentive to keep their companies alive because they have such vast golden parachutes that they will be able to happily retire to their private Caribbean island chain while everyone else suffers because their short-term money-grabbing business models ran the global economy into the ground. Again, this is a symptom of a lack of government oversight and regulation. Capitalism is all well and good, but if you let it run amok, greed takes control.

[MarcusAurelio]

Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
As for Iraq, problem or not, America is there, and so far we've already helped establish a democratic government.

I can't agree with this.

Quoting Wikipedia: Saddam saw himself as a social revolutionary and a modernizer, following the Nasser model. To the consternation of Islamic conservatives, his government gave women added freedoms and offered them high-level government and industry jobs. Saddam also created a Western-style legal system, making Iraq the only country in the Persian Gulf region not ruled according to traditional Islamic law (Sharia). Saddam abolished the Sharia law courts, except for personal injury claims.

He might have been a dictator and have conducted genocide, but Iraq itself was far more liberal and advanced in some aspects before the invasion. I'd say it's more-less a crater now culture wise.

[Ibsen's Ghost]

And don't forget that Saddam was one of the West's greatest allies against the Ayatollah (Khomeini) and did various deals with Britain and the US. As a strategy, the second Gulf war (especially) was totally wacko Jacko from the start. It could only ever have been motivated by oil....human rights is a blatant cover...you just have to look at the contrast of the apathy surrounding the likes of Robert Mugabe to see that.

[blackbird]

If I would earn 250.000 EUR a year, I would pay 120.000 EUR (almost 50%) taxes on it. Every employee has to pay on his monthly loan about 13.07% social securtiy tax. That money is given to retired people, unemployed people, sick people, child benefit,...
My country is divided in 3 regions, Flanders, Wallonia and the region of Brussels. The Flemisch region has an unemployment degree of about 7%, the wallonia region has an unemployment degree of of about 16% and the Brussels region about 21%. The result is that the Flemisch people have to pay for the Wallonian region. Some (flemisch nationalists) say more then 1500 EUR a year for each flemisch person. It's not about some cities, but about of a region which consists 3 million habitants.

Hydrogen is better then oil, due almost none or no environment pollution, but some republicans have much interests in oil, because they are part of those oil companies. The more oil they sell, the more rich they become.

[Zurke]

I am not a great fan of either candidate. But I am conservative fiscally and somewhat socially.

I could deal with McCain middle of the road policies. Obama's history (short it may be) in the senate is consistantly far left. That alone makes me ill. I had a dream lastnight liberal media funded a spot on Mt. Rushmore for a new head. I shouldn't have eaten before bed.

If the "new" congress is any indication democrats have taken the idea of lying to get elected to new hieghts. I am sure Obama will not break that trend.

My predictions are that we stay in Irag and everyones taxes are increased(not that I believe in redistribution). The "new chimp" will have his own reasons to do as he pleases while the gulliable will believe it. Atleast I knew what I was getting with GWB.

My Stars and Stripes will hang at half mast for the duration of this presidency.

[Zurke]

I want to add to what I said previously about Democratic lies that get them into office.

Before democrats took control of the US Congress they campaigned on oil prices(gasoline). They went on tirades about coorporate welfare and greed. They spoke until it was silly about how the other side was in the pockets of Big Business.

Since the election of those who would bring this so called change I have seen no profits tax on oil companies. I guess I was one of the few that realized it was speculators and not the oil companies raising prices.

Just a couple of months ago Democrats overwhelmingly pushed nearly 1 trillionionionion dollars in corporate welfare soon to go into the pockets of those they ran against.

Today I am watching them push for billions more in corporate welfare for the Big Three auto makers.

Democrats are no different than Republicans in feeding greed. They only say they are against it so they can control their socialist social policies after gaining control.

The latest is the open balloting in deciding whether employees want to be Union or not. That to me is a privacy issue. Voting is private and should stay as is in any decision made by idividuals or groups. Democrats want to remove that privacy and obama has said he will sign it into law.
Democrats don't like the government listening to thier phone calls but don't mind removing someones privacy in voting.

I am a Union welder by trade so I really don't have a bias on the issue.

I do not believe in most liberal ideals. But it makes me sick how democrats will bullsh*! thier way into office and the gullable believe it.

As I said before GWB might have faults but he did what he said he would do, nothing less and nothing more. We can defend against what we know. It is much more difficult when you have a party of liars in control.

God Bless Alito and Roberts. US Supreme Court.

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

I might believe more towards conservatism, but I am not against good reform at all. I really do think we should make an initiative to switch to new types of clean energy breakthroughs like Hydrogen, or at least to green energies that we have now. If we actually made use of all of these energies in more places, we could make more than enough energy to keep us going for who knows how long. I really do think that killing the world's addiction to oil could help the economy in so many ways, considering everything runs on oil.

As for the economy, I don't understand how things work, because everything is messed up right now. My friends have some stay at home parents, are not on welfare, and those parents who work all have modest jobs, and yet these kids get everything they want. They get new things all the time, and I get to sit and be jealous. A guy on welfare gets almost everything for free, and yet still has enough money to buy new cars. But I get just about nothing. I guess I just have bad luck, life slaps me in the face all the time (Like just the other day, my driving school went out of business, took everyone's money, and left with it, leaving me without having done any onroads and now I have to pay a second school a ton of money just to do it all again, on an extended payment plan because we can't afford it right now), we have old cars, I've been wearing the same clothes for about 3 years, and I'd be lucky to get maybe 2 good things for Christmas this year. And forget motherboards, yes we are struggling with even food (We keep stocks of bread in the freezer during sales so we don't pay too much for it) To try to pay for this motherboard I've gone without eating lunch at school for the past several months and have been keeping the money in a little box. That's about $2 a day, I can earn enough to buy a motherboard before the end of the school year. But the economy in this state sucks anyways, worse than the country as a whole. I mainly blame the governor because he doesn't know how to manage spending at all, and has been driving up taxes to no end, and often abuses his position for his own benefit (he buys himself some pretty expensive things with state money). I also can't begin to imagine how the money is abused from the state income tax. We had the chance to vote it down in the election, but it didn't pass thanks to a successful advertising campaign that says schools, hospitals, and police stations would all die without it (even though money earned from the tax is only 10% of their total funding), but half the time the money doesn't even go to where they say it is. Too much of it goes into senseless projects, like road repairs. For one thing, the roads around here are awful. But not before the repairs, they are just as bad after. They have all these people working all over the place tearing up the roads and repaving them, only to have them fall apart 2 months later because they did a bad job. Then the state pays them to do it all over again. Why? They're cheaper, and the state wants to keep giving money to these jobs for people, which is all fine and good, but it's our money that they keep giving away. I think it would probably be better if we moved someplace down south, everything is much cheaper there and the economy doesn't suck so much (I don't know if that has anything to do with the fact that the state governments are liberal up here and conservative down there, but whatever, results don't always show relation, like pirates and global warming) Anyways, upper 2% or not, it sure doesn't feel like it, and everyone seems so much richer than we are right now, maybe it's just benefits they get from the economy for having lower incomes or something. But we might move down south anyways, because things are not getting better, they're just getting worse every day. Well, actually my mother was thinking of moving to Australia instead because that place is great (we've seriously been looking at properties). Or maybe the world just needs to get really really bad before it gets better, something like World War 3 (worked great for World Wars 1 and 2) but hoping for a war is just stupid, because you should be able to solve things through peace.

Oh, and funny story, I found out just how much my liberal friends pay attention to politics. I was telling them a story about how my mother (who's an optician) was working one day and a Syrian immigrant came in with his son, because his son had a bad eye. The kid couldn't speak English but the father could speak a little, so there wasn't any need to hire a translator for them (which they have to do a lot). So the Syrian is on welfare and he needs to get his son to Boston so they can give him a prescription for his son's special eye condition, but he says he has no way to get to Boston (which you can if you have a car that can drive for a few hours down the highway) So they spent hours trying to call social services to get this guy to Boston, and they eventually did. So the guy comes back a few days later with the prescription for glasses and the state provides him with certain models free to people on Welfare. But he doesn't like the ones the state provides, he wants one of the others, for free. And my mother is trying to explain that it's not up to her, the state only provides certain ones for free and the others need to be bought, but he still does not want to accept that. So he finally settles with one of the welfare glasses and my mother tells him it would take about 6 weeks for the lenses to be developed in a special lab somewhere else in the country and then be shipped over. He comes back 2 weeks later looking for the glasses (this started late October, so it was 2 weeks) and my mother tells him they aren't in yet. He throws a fit asking why not, and tells her that she needs to call the lab making the lenses why they aren't there yet, and that if she doesn't, he would get his lawyer and file a case against the store she works at (which he pays a thousand or so dollars for). But my mother is trying to tell him that he ordered the welfare glasses and the lenses needed are a special kind and are difficult to make, and she can't just call up and tell them to send them the next day. Then he gets more angry and threatens to sue for bad service, then he walks out and drives away in his new Lexus SUV. There are so many things wrong with that. First, he's on Welfare, but feels the need to indulge in all of these things, like lawyers and cars. Second, he makes the other people working call up social security for him to get him a ride to Boston, yet he has his own car, a new SUV no less. Then, he pays money for a lawyer to sue people for not treating him right, but can't pay $60 to buy a pair of glasses for his son. That might not be how every person is, but that is definitely an example of a leech of society, and there are absolutely tons of others just like him in and around places like Springfield. I told my friends this story, and they said "Why should people have to go out of their way for people like that?" Then I laughed, told them that they just gave conservative opinions, then quickly changed their minds. These are the same people who just believe whatever people tell them to. All the time, they talk about how bad George Bush is and they don't even have a reason why, only because the news and their parents told them so. There are so many people who just hate conservatives simply because they're told they should, because of the president. I'm not saying that George Bush was the best president in the world, but if you're going to say things about people, at least have reasons.

You live in America, yet you have never seen Fox news - aka the mouthpiece of the Republican party?

I have seen Fox news. But fox news is not the newspaper, the internet, and every other news network out there. The liberal media is recognized as the most dominant media in the US, not the neutral or the conservative. (I really do think all news should be neutral)

He might have been a dictator and have conducted genocide, but Iraq itself was far more liberal and advanced in some aspects before the invasion. I'd say it's more-less a crater now culture wise.

Oh yes, genocide is definately not as important as economy, because everyone knows that the most known thing about Nazi Germany was the economy.

[MarcusAurelio]

Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
Oh yes, genocide is definately not as important as economy, because everyone knows that the most known thing about Nazi Germany was the economy.

I might be drifting off-topic, but wasn't your country built on genocide?
(The indians being slaughtered)
And does oil transit/production/usage not count as economy?

[Siegfried]

Originally posted by MarcusAurelio

Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
Oh yes, genocide is definately not as important as economy, because everyone knows that the most known thing about Nazi Germany was the economy.

I might be drifting off-topic, but wasn't your country built on genocide?
(The indians being slaughtered)

As you can recall IATE and I were both around to help kill off the indians (me being an American as well). I personally threw small-pox infected blankets on several indian children.

Of course killing off the indians is the most fundamental aspect of american cultural identity today, just as if you ask any young german today they will tell you the most definining aspect of their society is killing jews.

I'm super-duper-serial here.

He might have been a dictator and have conducted genocide, but Iraq itself was far more liberal and advanced in some aspects before the invasion. I'd say it's more-less a crater now culture wise.

before america came in the tigris river flowed with maple syrup, gum drops grew on the date palms, and children frolicked in the streets with their ak-47s. Everything was so wonderful when Saddam was around, he was such a progressive leader and so concerned about womens' rights that he organized gangs to stop by his political adversaries homes and rape their daughters if they refused to comply. Let us not forget what a great father he was as well, he taught his sons how to be proper young men and rewarded their good behavior by allowing them to go torture the prisoners.

Perhaps I am confused here, but it would seem that either Saddam was not terribly progressive, or else being progressive is not such a good thing? Who can tell though, I'm a pretty stupid guy.