Watch last 15 seconds

[Beldaran]

Anderson Cooper tells it like it is. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I64Ed5iLu4M)

[The_Amaster]

Heh, nice. Pretty spot on.

Well, the problem I have with Republican opposition right now isn't that I think they're wrong to try and keep the budget in check. Far from it, I'm all for it. Which is why I want to know where all of this Republican outrage was for the last eight years, when there was pretty much no control over spending at all, and we were pouring our money into that desert sinkhole called Iraq. Seems they've only found their voices now that it's not their guy doing the spending.

[Beldaran]

I think there are more Ron Paul supporters protesting than Bush koolaid drinkers.

[rock_nog]

I know it's more of a traditional conservative/libertarian type thing, but it really does seem to have been kind of shanghai'd by Republicans who are just butthurt over the fact that they lost. At any rate, did they seriously have to go with such a suggestive name? Oh, the possibilities for innuendo are practically endless.

[jerome]

Heh, nice. Pretty spot on.

Well, the problem I have with Republican opposition right now isn't that I think they're wrong to try and keep the budget in check. Far from it, I'm all for it. Which is why I want to know where all of this Republican outrage was for the last eight years, when there was pretty much no control over spending at all, and we were pouring our money into that desert sinkhole called Iraq. Seems they've only found their voices now that it's not their guy doing the spending.
I don't think you could be anymore "dead on" on the subject than what you'd said in that last sentence. It's annoying to me how some wouldn't raise a complaint against the almighty Bush, but when it's someone of a different party doing something to help the country that he's in charge of running... "Oh God, no! We can't have spending that will actually HELP anyone! It can only be used to burn it all away to help us in office become even richer!" Here's the Iraq war in a short flow chart:

Iraq has oil ->
Bush/Cheney have either ownership and/or ties to oil companies ->
US is already in Afghanastan ->
US "finds" WMD in Iraq ->
US blows it to Hell ->
Oil goes up ->
"Oil Companies" get "tax breaks" to compensate for their "losses ->
Breaks end, oil companies said they never even needed them in the first place->
Iraq needs rebuilding ->
Bush and Co. have construction ties as well -(this is a hearsay, I'll admit) ->
Bush plans to stay in for the "long haul"... "of cash" more likely ->
Bush's 8 years are up ->
Blame the new guy, who ever gets to walk into this mess.


I think there are more Ron Paul supporters protesting than Bush koolaid drinkers.
I'm guessing this is more of a statement, than argument. Agreed though.

Not really caring even if they were RuPaul supporters. They should've brought their voice up against their own party if they didn't agree with all of the spending. Congress seems more to be just one pot calling the other kettle black. I think George Carlin was the one that said something about "PRO is the opposite of CON. So what's the opposite of PROGRESS?" If it wasn't him, it was one of those stupid emails spouting off some yahoo's opinion with a picture of GC in it. Those emails are stupid too... but I'm getting off subject.

[Beldaran]

They should've brought their voice up against their own party if they didn't agree with all of the spending.

Um, they did. That's why Ron Paul was kicked out of debates and his supporters barred from attending party conventions.

[Aegix Drakan]

Um, they did. That's why Ron Paul was kicked out of debates and his supporters barred from attending party conventions.

Figures, eh?

"oh noes! some of our own people are concerned aobut the welfare of the people we're supposed to be serving! Quick! Don't let them near you! It's contagious!!!11SHIFT!1"

This is the mentality of politicians these days. Just like:

"we'd LOVE to help the nurses get a better salary, but there's just no money!" ~ Politician who redid their entire office bathroom with marble, and silent flushing etc, while this was gong on.

[AtmaWeapon]

I bet if Ron Paul had been elected he'd have cleared up the economy in a day and gotten rid of the corruption in Congress. I mean, it's so easy.

[rock_nog]

I will honestly never get Republicans. They sound so rational on the surface. "We just want to cut wasteful spending and reduce taxes and OH MY GOD A GAY MARRIED COUPLE RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!" Not meaning to over-generalize, but it seems to be a case that with a lot of them, when they're not talking about fiscal policy they start going on about cultural warfare and the war on Christmas, the homosexual/atheist/whatever agenda, etc. And I can't for the life of me even understand the connection between their fiscal policy and their social policy.

[Beldaran]

I bet if Ron Paul had been elected he'd have cleared up the economy in a day and gotten rid of the corruption in Congress. I mean, it's so easy.

I can tell you've never read anything he's written or watched more than one or two interviews.

[jerome]

Damn, I guess I should've paid more attention to it all. But like everyone's already said "It figures". From what I was told about that guy, he'd either have given Obama a run for his money, and/or won the election. Well, who needs an honest man in politics anyways?

[Daarkseid]

Damn, I guess I should've paid more attention to it all. But like everyone's already said "It figures". From what I was told about that guy, he'd either have given Obama a run for his money, and/or won the election. Well, who needs an honest man in politics anyways?

Yeah, thats a online myth spread by libertarians who felt their internet presence, which is noticeable, was proof that Ron Paul had a significant amount of support in the public.

Which isn't true, his economic policies would be a recipe for disaster if he was president and congress was retarded enough to send him his ideas for the budget for him to sign.

The only success he would have had as president would be the same sort of success Herbert Hoover had.

That is, he'd help run our economy further into the ground and the result would've been a much more complete and total victory by Democrats.

[Beldaran]

lol @ daarkseid.

The only thing stupider than keynesian economics is scientology.

[jerome]

I don't think you could be anymore "dead on" on


I think there are more Ron Paul supporters protesting than Bush koolaid drinkers.
I'm guessing this is more of a statement, than argument. Agreed though.

Not really caring even if they were RuPaul supporters. They should've brought their voice up against their own party if they didn't agree with all of the spending. Congress seems more to be just one pot calling the other kettle black. I think George Carlin was the one that said something about "PRO is the opposite of CON. So what's the opposite of PROGRESS?" If it wasn't him, it was one of those stupid emails spouting off some yahoo's opinion with a picture of GC in it. Those emails are stupid too... but I'm getting off subject.

From a negative reputation from:


His name is RON, dickhead.


First off, if you would've read my ENTIRE previous post, you would've seen that I had AGREED with you. Second, the whole "RuPaul" comment was meant as a joke, but NOT towards Ron Paul. Bad wording on my part, I'll admit to that. If I offended you personally because I attacked someone that you support and/or look up to, I apologize. I'll repeat this again: If I offended you personally because I attacked someone that you support and/or look up to, I apologize. It wasn't in any of my intentions at all. My point was more saying that I don't care who it is that you support, if it goes against what you believe, speak up for yourself. I just thought the name was close, so I thought I'd throw in a joke to lighten things up. "Excuse me Princess" for having a sense of humor. You corrected me on the fact that RON Paul DID speak up for himself, and he got ousted for it. That sucks, I truly mean that. It's too bad others won't have the balls to follow in his footsteps of standing up for what they believe in instead of what others pay them to support.

Beldaran ~
You know jokes, right? You make them at other peoples expense all of the time. It seems you can dish it out, but you can't take it. I wasn't even making fun of YOU anyways, but YOU called me a DICKHEAD. Way to dip into the platitudes there little boy. That's just the "big kid" version of calling someone a "big poopy head". Maybe if you could take some time from looking for faults in everyone else, you'd see just how flawed you really are. Try looking at things in more than one way than just "everyone's against me... waaaah." If you'd have read it more than just to look for something to attack me with, you might have seen. And if you did, but didn't see the joke that I had meant it to be, I already apologized twice for it. And I'm sure that when you pressed the negative reputation button on me, you gave yourself a pat on the back with a smug sense of superiority while telling yourself "I'll show him."

[Beldaran]

Actually, I was just in a bad mood from lack of sleep and forgot I did that until you just mentioned it.

Without 8 hours per night, I'm a pretty mean person. You aren't the first person at AGN to benefit from my impotent wrath. Consider yourself welcomed into a non-exclusive club. ;)

[jerome]

Great. I'm in a new club. Do I get a patch or something? A new parking space? Or just the swift kick in the nuts? :laughing:

OK- slightly back on topic.

Please excuse my ignorance on the "political" meaning of the term "teabagging", but what does it mean in the political sense? I doubt a bunch of congressmen mean that others are mashing their nuts on others' foreheads.

Also, is this Anderson Cooper guy only on CNN or something? I don't have cable or anything, so from a few youtube clips, I gather that he seems to be pretty much straight forward to what he thinks on stuff.

[rock_nog]

Politically, it's a reference to the Boston Tea Party. I personally think that's a fairly weak analogy though because that was a protest of taxation w/o representation. Plus, there's the obvious non-political meaning that makes the whole thing so hard to take seriously.

[Beldaran]

I personally think that's a fairly weak analogy though because that was a protest of taxation w/o representation.

Some humans are able to make abstractions and see metaphors. The Tea Parties are extrapolated from the metaphor of protesting the expansion of a powerful, tax hungry government.

No one on the right has ever, ever claimed that the Tea Parties are an exact recreation of the meaning and intent of the Boston Tea Party. That idea was created by the leftist pundits at MSNBC to try denigrate the growing discontent with His Majesty Barack Obama's Holy Government.

[AtmaWeapon]

I can tell you've never read anything he's written or watched more than one or two interviews.And you accuse me of magical thinking?

What makes this man so special that, when he goes against the interests hundreds of other men who have the power to silence him and thousands of other men with a combined wealth that could pay the national debt, he'll come out on top? The corruption in our government is a tumor the size of Alaska and the President is a toothpick. It would take the combined efforts of the President, both houses of Congress, and the sudden death of some prominent businessmen to effect a 4-year revolution.

Martin Luther King Jr. gave some of the finest speeches ever given, and 40 years later his dream is still not realized. Ghandi wrote volumes, and though many shower him with praise we're possibly farther from peace than when he walked the Earth. Evil doesn't always win, either; Hitler turned Germany from a whiny emo country into a powerful empire that nearly conquered Europe, but in the end he was stopped by the rest of the world. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the pen has decades of corruption to cross out and centuries of culture to unravel; it takes a really big pen to turn the world upside down.

Ron Paul is a politician in a party that practically cannot be elected. I've read his speeches and, like Obama's, they have a great big smattering of exactly what I want to hear. My opinion of Paul, Obama, McCain was "sounds suspicious", "sounds suspicious", and "only if the Angel of the Lord strikes me mute until I vote", respectively. Is it any surprise that he says things that other politicians won't, since no one's ever going to get to see if he's lying or if it's even possible to do what he claims he will do? When you know you'll never be held accountable for a promise, does it matter how much you promise?

[Beldaran]

Ron Paul has a lifetime track record of doing exactly what he says he will do. Obama has a track record of taking money under the table and doing exactly what shady characters tell him to do. McCain has a track record of not knowing how anything works at all.

[jerome]

McCain has a track record of not knowing how anything works at all.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that could see that.

One of his first campaign commercials was talking about "We've got problems in this country that need to be taken care of. Like closing the borders to Mexico, welfare, and the war on drugs." My response was "Dude, those aren't even in the top fucking ten! Are you stuck in the 80s or something? What an idiot."

I really was trying to be open minded about all candidates running this past election, but he had just hung himself as far as my vote was concerned.

Before automatically thinking that I voted for Obama, think again. I didn't vote for him either. I actually just voted for Nader since he was neither of the 2 "prime" candidates, and I think he was listed as Independent.
To me:
McCain=idiot- we've already had 8 years of one of those just in office, don't need another.
Obama=unsure in a slightly more negative than positive way. Heard he was for small businesses (seems to have changed hasn't it). Heard about his "present" voting habits, and wasn't very impressed.

So no "one over the other" for me.

[The_Amaster]

Read an editorial in the paper today. Found it online, but you gotta register, so I'll just post it here:



The cool, cerebral White House might logically conclude that Wednesday's decidedly uncool, uncerebral "tea bag" protests were intellectually and politically incoherent, and therefore not worth a second thought. That would be a dangerous mistake.
The made-for-television demonstrations in cities across the country were generally small, and the only thing they proved conclusively is that -- you might want to sit down -- some Americans don't much enjoy paying taxes. What the rallies suggested, however, is that opposition to the Obama administration is coalescing into what I would call a Howard Beale Faction, in honor of the choleric anchorman in the movie "Network" whose signature line now seems to have been elevated into philosophy: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Not going to take what anymore? Well, whatever. The occasion was Tax Day, April 15, and clearly there was a lot of anger about taxes. That can't have been the only source of ire, however, since President Obama's policies mean that the vast majority of Americans will be paying less in income taxes, not more. In terms of logical self-interest, only the wealthy should have come out to dump their tea bags and wave their pitchforks.
There was anger at hemorrhagic government spending, and this plotline in the mad-as-hell narrative at least made sense. A neutral observer might point out that the president who should have to answer for this year's astronomical $1.7 trillion deficit is George W. Bush, since this is his budget -- and since he's the one who hid the costs of our two faraway wars and demanded a king's ransom to bail out the banks. But it's not as if Obama is some kind of tightwad, given his decision to push ahead with new spending on health care, education and energy. And anyway, in the worldview of the Howard Beale Faction, the important distinction isn't between one president and the next. It's between "us" and "them."
Some protesters were mad about measures they feared Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress might take to strengthen gun control laws. Some were mad about illegal immigration, some about abortion, some about gay marriage. At times, the protests ventured into fantasyland. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, caught up in the excitement of the day, prattled nonsensically about Texas's onetime status as an independent country and how, purportedly, the state had reserved the right to secede.
The protests were all over the map and thus hard to take seriously. A reality check would show that Obama's approval rating is running higher than 60 percent in most recent polls. Surveys indicate that Americans blame Wall Street and the Bush administration for the woeful state of the economy. Generally speaking, the polls show that most Americans are willing to go along with the president's agenda, at least for now, and realize that it will take time to begin seeing results.
But the polls also point to what looks like a reservoir of simmering discontent. For example, according to a CBS News-New York Times survey released last week, 47 percent of respondents were willing to believe that the Obama administration's bailout assistance to the banks would ultimately benefit all Americans, as opposed to 40 percent who believed the money would just benefit the banks. But in that same poll, 58 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the administration's plans to provide financial aid to the banks. In other words: Maybe this is necessary, but we don't like it. Among self-described independent voters, 68 percent disapproved of how the administration was bailing out the banks.
I dwell on this one question buried deep inside one poll because I think it contains a quiet warning -- the same message that could be discerned amid the random noise of the Howard Beale shoutfests. When the economy begins to rebound, Wall Street will come back first -- already, we're seeing some big banks, still bloated with taxpayer funds, reporting healthy profits. After recovery begins, unemployment will almost certainly continue to rise for months until it hits its peak. The mad-as-hell faction may thrive and multiply.
A growing sense of us vs. them, of the little guy vs. the big guy, is out there waiting to be exploited by anyone clever enough to fashion a sophisticated populist critique of the Obama administration's policies. I know it seems crazy to use words like "clever" and "sophisticated" in connection with today's Republican Party, but stranger things have happened.

[AtmaWeapon]

I still don't buy that Ron Paul is the Invisible Pink Unicorn (bless her hooves) that would come down Capitol Hill on a white horse and save us all. I do appreciate his efforts, and think that some issues would not have been paid any attention if it weren't for people like him. However, look what happened: he might be dangerous to the machine, so the machine didn't let him have a chance. We get to pick between two candidates that the political engine feel best represent their opposing stances, not candidates that represent our best interests. That's all I have to say about it: good man, impossible goal.

I think a big part of the problem (referencing Amaster's post) is the bulk of the country is severely undereducated when it comes to economics. This is kind of sad. I only had to take one economics course in college, and none of the material was anything I think high school students would choke on.

In fields like biology and chemistry the general public has enough knowledge that you have to try pretty hard to fool people; if someone says they found a practical way to turn lead into gold I know they're lying. For more far-fetched things, it's easier for the scientific community to explain to laymen why it's impossible because they can work off of high-school vocabularies that most people are expected to understand.

There's a few problems science has a hard time translating to the layman; global warming is one of them. Climate is a large, complicated, chaotic system and even the experts in the field disagree on the issue. Pretty much everything in economics is a global warming problem. It's a scientific model of the interactions between millions of entities, predictions of the behaviors of the masses, and a century of empirical data. I can speak from limited authority that I feel like empirical data has done very little for the field of software development effort estimation (there's a few maxims that were discovered but the question "How long will this take?" still has no answer) and I feel like economics is the same kind of field.

When an economist speaks, the average Joe is completely helpless. I don't even remember what Keynes had to say, and if you start talking about the demand curve all I remember is some graphs (but not the labels.) I remember a few very basic concepts, but with my current training have no capacity to tell if the guy on CNN is trying to sell me a snake oil plan. The bulk of the country is in this state too; no one likes giving the banks money but some big economists seem to believe it's a good idea. We're going along with it because we're too ignorant to understand if it's a good plan or not.

I'd study it and learn more, but right now it's a lot more important to my life that I'm studying geometry, trigonometry, Silverlight, C#, and software architecture than it is for me to learn economics. Those subjects keep me employed right now, and if that blade dulls then I'm going to learn some lessons in economics the hard way. If I'd had 3 or 4 classes in high school/elementary school on the topic I'd have no choice but to remember it (I only know some biology topics because I had to read about them for 6 years of schooling; funny how repetition hammers it in right?)

If we'd fix education, a lot of these "government ruining things for the little guy" actions wouldn't happen because people would understand what's going on. I wonder if that's part of the reason education has been slipping?

[The_Amaster]

Hmm, Atma, I agree, but I don't honestly believe we can train every person who cares about money in economics.
If you hired a plumber to fix your pipes you don't spend the whole time looking over his shoulder saying
"What're you doing now? Are you sure that's the right thing to do? I don't like the look of that pipe. Aren't you going to look at that pipe? Is that the right wrench to do? I don't think you're working fast enough. Man, why did I hire you? You obviously don't know anything about about plumbing. God! You're going to burst all the pipes in my house!"
You have to trust that he knows a lot more about plumbing than you do.


The people deciding what to do in the economy should be the people trained in economics. I know, I know, "the economists are the ones who got us into this mess"
All that says is that human greed and stupidity can affect anyone. It doesn't mean that the idea of having people educated in the subject do the work is a bad one. No matter wha I think of Obama's policies, I still trust him to do a better job than, say, the music teacher next door, no matter how many great "ideas" my neighbor might have on how to fix everything.

[rock_nog]

Well, another thing that separates economics from science is that science is a lot easier to verify. I mean, if someone makes a scientific claim, you can ask that they provide their data, and also their methods so you can replicate and verify that the claim is valid. You can't really do that with economics. The essence of economics is basically that you're trying to model the behavior of hundreds of millions of people, all of whom can and do act irrationally at times. Heck, it's tricky enough just trying to model the behavior of one person.

[jerome]

If we'd fix education, a lot of these "government ruining things for the little guy" actions wouldn't happen because people would understand what's going on. I wonder if that's part of the reason education has been slipping?
This reminds me of a joke for an analogy, and it pertains to what you are saying, but not making any kind of joke towards you. So here it goes:

A psychologist asks "How many people does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but the light bulb really has to want to change."

What I mean by this analogy is that just because someone is forced upon information, doesn't mean that they remember it, or care anything about it. They really have to WANT the information. It's kind of like how we are forced by the news to follow the never-ending saga of the stupid woman with the even dumber media given nickname of Octomom. I still don't give a crap about her, and try my best to avoid any of it sinking in. Some, maybe even a lot of, people would probably feel the same way about economics. Then again, some info of that dumb woman's saga is still stuck in my head.

It could have the CSI effect going for it as well. It used to be that lawyers in courtrooms pretty much just said "what happened" in a crime and people made their decisions/judgements based on that. They are saying that now more people are demanding DNA, fingerprints, video, etc. or the defendant goes free. Maybe we need Jerry Bruckheimer ENT to come up with an interesting economics television show so people will learn something. What we need is drama, action, and Grissom telling us how to do it!

Maybe, like you said, if the people actually had the information already given to them, they'd be more in tune with what's going on. There'd also probably be a huge change in how people actually vote for other people as well. Maybe they wouldn't be looking so blindly at Republican this, or Democrat that, they'd be looking at who actually seems to have his/her shit together and can do the best job. He/She having their shit together would have nothing to do with political party. Political parties are just another way to divide the people anyways.

I don't think that the education is slipping so people won't notice. I think that it's more to do with everyone's getting overcrammed with information at all times, and people as a whole are getting lazier and lazier. Which one's more important than the other? Which one should I be more pissed about? That and too many people care more about why the crappy singer on American Idol is still on the show than they are of what's actually going on with the government.