American Politics

[QUOTE=Spidy;2751534]Quite the long monologue of random stories and thoughts, meant to confuse the reader or inform the reader???

Anyway, I'll try to break down each paragraph, so as to address some of things that I think you tried to answer my quoted post.

[b]Followed by:[/b] [i]Confession of not being shocked oil companies lied, the world would be under water by now, arrogant phrasing such as "saving the planet", we are not stronger than mother earth, not wanting to breathe dirty air, energy production of coal being the worst, Autism rates skyrocket, coal worst then nuclear, solar/wind myth and nuclear is better. [/i]

So you're not shocked oil and gas companies lie, meaning you expected them to lie to Americans, about the harmful mining and production of their products on the environment, but you're okay with it? But you are shocked when climate scientists lie or get something incorrect? And you're NOT okay with? I see why you turn to Bill Maher advice....no not really.

One third of Pakistan, might disagree and have something to say about being under water by now. Breath clean air, no-brainer, hence cleaner energy sources.

Nuclear/Solar/Wind are good options, have their pro/cons and should be assessed for viability given application/location were being applied. All better than coal.

Subsidies for cleaner ideas/products, drinking at the gov't water trough, will promote cleaner energy tech/thinking and innovation.

[b]What subsidies do oil companies receive? [/b]
[URL]https://www.fuelfreedom.org/oil-company-subsidies/ [/URL]

[/QUOTE]About the issues you bring up above, first the only people who care about the alleged "lies" big oil companies made about global warming are two Democratic constituencies. The plaintiff's bar has run up our medical bills by suing doctors and hospitals and drug companies. They also ran companies out of business that made private propeller engine planes, silicone breast implants, and products that people depend on every day. Now they've set their sights on oil and gas companies for the biggest payday ever. And since they're sugardaddies for the Democratic Party, they're getting help from the politicians.

The second constituency is the environmentalists who want to see an end to oil and gas production in the USA.

This is not like tobacco. Could you imagine Joe Biden threatening to put a windfall profits tax on American tobacco companies if they don't lower the price of their product? Or threatening to strong arm some tobacco cartel or big tobacco producing country? Well, that's what Biden, Schumer, Newsome and others are doing to American oil producers and refiners. And OPEC and Saudi Arabia. They're doing their dead level best to get the price of gasoline down, which will INCREASE consumption of gasoline in the USA and INCREASE carbon dioxide emissions.

As to Pakistan, it's getting its incremental power supply from coal, and building coal fired power plants financed by China. So to some extent are China, India, Indonesia, and other developing countries. We account for only 14% of worldwide carbon emissions, and that number will go down with every passing year. In Bernie Sanders' wet dream, where we ban fracking immediately and otherwise immolate ourselves like Europe so that some of our people will die because they can't afford to heat their homes, we can't make a significant difference in worldwide emissions through restrictions on our fossil fuel producers.

And as to your link about oil company subsidies, the writer, Nathan Taft, is a dumb ass. Canada and I both know about 1000% more about taxation of energy companies than he does. Taft's apparently unaware that the intangible drilling cost deduction represents the same tax treatment as 100% bonus depreciation, received by all American companies in all industries. Or that the deduction for IDC doesn't reduce the amount of tax paid by an oil company, it only affects the timing of when the taxes are paid. Also he fails to note that oil and gas companies pay severance taxes, which other companies don't pay. The rate in Texas is 7.5% on gas and 4.6% on oil, and higher and lower in other states. This amount comes off of GROSS revenues, so it's significant. Oil companies pay much higher property taxes than many other companies, because most of their assets, outside of accounts receivable and cash, are subject to ad valorem taxes. Take these factors into account, and also take into account that the subsidies are negligible compared to income, and the oil and gas industry is more heavily taxed and receives less subsidies than average. And I'm not even counting gasoline taxes, you can arguably say are paid by the consumer instead of the industry.

Most bizarrely, Taft doesn't even note the one significant "unfair" tax break given to smaller American producers, the percentage depletion deduction. Taft doesn't know sh*t.

Ask me for links and sources. I dare you. I double dare you.

[QUOTE=PVMonger;2749422][B]"And the federal government doesn't have jack to do with that, except to take taxpayer money and inefficiently redistribute part of it to states and cities."[/B]

I am all for the Federal government not sending jack shit of what they collect back to the states. Since "red states" receive a disproportionate amount of those federal funds, they'll all wither and die. [URL]https://sipanews.fiu.edu/2021/03/24/2021s-most-least-federally-dependent-states/[/URL].[/QUOTE]The red state / blue state thing is a red herring.

According to this link from 2021, only 36% of people making over $200,000 per year supported Democrats, compared to 63% making less than $15,000 per year.

[URL]https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-...ics-democrats/[/URL]

And from this link, people making over $221,572 paid 59.4% of the income tax.

[URL]https://taxfoundation.org/publicatio...come-tax-data/[/URL]

Tie the two together. Republicans on average undoubtedly pay more to the federal government than they get out of it in benefits. As to Democrats, I'm not sure. But our system at the federal level is so wasteful and inefficient I suspect they get a bum deal too.

Two (2) hours after the Herschel Walker scandal drops, Walker is on Foxy news, as they try to get ahead of the scandalous story and push this pathetic dead horse, named Hershel Walker, across the Georgia senate finishing line.

Round #1 on Foxy News, the anti-abortion political hot mess of hypocrisy that is Herschel Walker, gets "Hannitized" on the Sean Hannity show, where he's spoon fed a bunch of lame soft questions, which he can barely answer (one to many football blows to the head), in a blatant attempt to try to rehabilitate their senate candidate for Georgia.

So pandering to their base, they trot out the right-wing Repub playbook and enact [B]rule #1, Deny it and "blame the libs"[/B] But this does not work and goes badly and no one is buying his BS story, about "blaming the Dems / Libs".

So Round #2, a day later, Foxy News props him back up and he gets "Hannitized" again and this time, they enact [B]rule #2, Use the right-wing Christian [u]Religious card[/u],[/B] to redeem yourself.

So naturally, Walker, all of a sudden has "religion" and hey "I'm born again, I'm repentant, I've seen the errors of my way....blah, blah, blah".

[B]The GOPs Herschel Walker dilemma is Sean Hannitys fault[/B]
[URL]https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/gops-herschel-walker-dilemma-sean-hannitys-fault[/URL]

[B]Herschel Walker went on 'Hannity' to deny that he paid a woman to get an abortion [/B]
[URL]https://news.yahoo.com/herschel-walker-went-hannity-deny-035449591.html[/URL]

[u]Meanwhile the never asking the hard questions:[/u]

1. About the Repub party / red state beliefs / laws around abortion baby killers going to jail?
2. How do you, justify not going to jail for baby killing yourself, when your campaigning hard against a raped 10 yr old and millions of others seeking an abortion.
3. Isn't your "Pro-Life" campaign really just hypocrisy and by extension, the Repub anit-abortion policies?
4. And does he think he should be in jail? If not why not? If no one is above the law, then why are you the exception?

What a spectacle and pathetic display of pseudo reporting and all-a-round embarrassment, trying to prop up this "born-again" hypocrite as contrite and penitent.

[QUOTE=Spidy;2751919]Two (2) hours after the Herschel Walker scandal drops, Walker is on Foxy news, as they try to get ahead of the scandalous story and push this pathetic dead horse, named Hershel Walker, across the Georgia senate finishing line.[/QUOTE]You fail to mention the other suck ass candidates, in addition to Walker, who are only got the Republican nomination because of support from Trump. And yet the punters are giving Republicans a 47% probability of controlling the Senate and an 82% probability of controlling the House. Apparently the electorate isn't happy with the status quo, where Democrats control the presidency, House and Senate.

[URL]https://www.predictit.org/markets/2/Congress[/URL]

[QUOTE=Paulie97;2751353]Sadly evil exists thus we need cops with guns and even armies and bombs and alliances....[/QUOTE]OK Paulie, I'm intuitively inclined to agree with about 1/3rd of what you posted in your two messages and disagree with the rest. I promised I'd get back with you on the Mideast.

I believe we went way overboard in waging the war on terror. The second Iraq war in particular. I see in Wikipedia that one group estimated the war resulted in 151,000 violent deaths and another estimated there were about 1 million excess deaths. Business Insider is notoriously untrustworthy, but they provide estimates of $2 trillion spent in Iraq and $6. 4 trillion spent on the War on Terror in total. From 1995 to 2014, the total number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks was 3503, worldwide, according to this.

[URL]https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths_FactSheet_Oct2015.pdf[/URL]

Our reaction was way, way disproportionate to the damage we suffered on 9/11. We spent too much money, and too many people, mostly foreigners have died. I'd bet that the number of American servicemen and contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan outnumber the American civilians (excluding the contractors) who died in terrorist attacks.

A better use of money and manpower would be to aggressively prepare ourselves from threats from outside, be they attacks like 9/11, bioweapons, cyberattacks, or whatever. Similar to protecting ourselves from COVID or a future pandemic, which you alluded to in one of your posts, we could dump a lot of money into preventative measures like these and and it would be a fraction of what we'd spend on another effort like Afghanistan or Iraq.

And while I don't follow the pronouncements of Noam Chomsky, who you mentioned, I suspect he has said if we'd keep our nose out of other peoples' business, we wouldn't have the threat we do now from terrorists. I agree with that.

Back on Ukraine, kind of, there was a good episode on Taiwan this evening on 60 minutes. The ex chief of the Taiwanese armed forces said it's not a matter of if the Chinese will invade, but rather when. And he complained that Taiwan couldn't get the smaller arms like hand held missiles that could be used to arm the citizenry and make China think twice about invading. Why? Taiwan's willing to pay for them. Well, unfortunately, all that we can manage to produce is going to Ukraine.

On the other hand, what's happening in Ukraine, and what Biden's said about what the U.S. would and wouldn't do in the event of a Chinese attack, would have to give the Chinese pause to invading Taiwan.

Another kind of unrelated thought, TSMC, the company that makes the majority of the worlds' high end chips, is located in Taiwan. Our politicians are moving to cut China off from supplies of chips from TSMC. This could backfire. Right now, according to the 60 minutes piece, the thinking goes that China wouldn't pursue an all out war in Taiwan because the risk to TSMC's plants. But if China develops its own plants to replace what they're buying from TSMC, then they can scorch Taiwan. The rest of the world will suffer and the Chinese will be in the cat bird's seat. This is all above my paygrade though.

Finally, a Swiss acquaintance of mine who lives in Singapore asked me what would the USA have done years ago if Mexico or Canada had been looking to join the Warsaw Pact. I didn't have an answer.

I think its going to be a bloodbath.

[URL]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/08/useless-nasty-joe-biden-has-revealed/[/URL]

[URL]https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/09/report-illegal-alien-criminal-record-charged-murdering-two-americans-las-vegas-stabbing-spree/[/URL]

[URL]https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/09/french-rail-company-quit-california-for-less-dysfunctional-north-africa/[/URL]

[QUOTE=Tiny12;2751901]We get it. Your social security checks will be up 9% over last year after the next COLA. You're making maybe 15% more on your California rental properties. Meanwhile the Thai Baht has plunged to 37 or 38 to the dollar. So in THB terms, your income is up maybe 30%. Instead of getting blowjobs from skanky wh*s at Star of Light, now you're probably doing sideliners at La Belle. Several a day. Well, that doesn't do much good for the workingman who's struggling to pay more for food, gasoline, electricity, hookers and rent. He's not going to vote for the Biden crowd. Why else would Republicans be favored to win the House, after the Supreme Court abortion decision. And when over half the Republican representatives voted not to certify the 2020 election. People are mad as hell at their decline in purchasing power. And they're not going to take it any more.[/QUOTE]I've never been to Star of Light.

Was that one of your favorite haunts during the Great Recessions and Massive Job Losses under Reagan, Bush2 and Trump when the American working man was doing fabulously well?

The non presidential Party has won seats in Congress in all but 2-3 of these first midterms since the Civil War.

This time around that would be your beloved Republican Party.

It turns out lack of interest by the Party that most recently won the Presidency is a primary culprit. Nothing to do with high inflation or no inflation, mythical CRT that is not taught in public schools, transgender toilets, wokeness, immigration or any other sucker social issues.

The voters whose Party just won the presidency are simply satisfied that they "did their part" already and don't show up to vote in large numbers in the next midterm.

[URL]https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/10/09/historically-the-presidents-party-performs-poorly-in-the-midterms-infographic/[/URL]

That ought to be doubly beneficial to your beloved Great Recession / Massive Jobs Destruction Repubs this time around for a couple of additional reasons aside from mere overwhelming historical tradition:

1. According to your beloved Repub Party's most iconic and beloved leader of all time, former and defeated so-called president Trump, Biden's 2020 win was a "landslide."

2. Biden and his Dems accomplished so much historically positive legislation and results in these first two years it almost doesn't matter which Party controls Congress for the next two years. Legislatively, I mean. It's not like Biden needs the House to approve budgetary support for more economic recovery, stimulus, expansion and growth for the time being. Nobody expects another SCOTUS vacancy anytime soon. And Biden will be there to veto any idiotic nonsense a Repub-controlled Senate tries to pull anyway.

[QUOTE=Tiny12;2751950]OK Paulie, I'm intuitively inclined to agree with about 1/3rd of what you posted in your two messages and disagree with the rest. I promised I'd get back with you on the Mideast.

I believe we went way overboard in waging the war on terror. The second Iraq war in particular. I see in Wikipedia that one group estimated the war resulted in 151,000 violent deaths and another estimated there were about 1 million excess deaths. Business Insider is notoriously untrustworthy, but they provide estimates of $2 trillion spent in Iraq and $6. 4 trillion spent on the War on Terror in total. From 1995 to 2014, the total number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks was 3503, worldwide, according to this.

[URL]https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths_FactSheet_Oct2015.pdf[/URL]

Our reaction was way, way disproportionate to the damage we suffered on 9/11. We spent too much money, and too many people, mostly foreigners have died. I'd bet that the number of American servicemen and contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan outnumber the American civilians (excluding the contractors) who died in terrorist attacks.

A better use of money and manpower would be to aggressively prepare ourselves from threats from outside, be they attacks like 9/11, bioweapons, cyberattacks, or whatever. Similar to protecting ourselves from COVID or a future pandemic, which you alluded to in one of your posts, we could dump a lot of money into preventative measures like these and and it would be a fraction of what we'd spend on another effort like Afghanistan or Iraq.

And while I don't follow the pronouncements of Noam Chomsky, who you mentioned, I suspect he has said if we'd keep our nose out of other peoples' business, we wouldn't have the threat we do now from terrorists. I agree with that.[/QUOTE]Made in China specs you got to love them LMAO.

[URL]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/t...echnology.html[/URL]

[URL]https://www.businessinsider.com/chin...llapses-2012-8[/URL]

[URL]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDEXLp5VbjM[/URL]

[URL]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35262802[/URL]#text=A%20 hospital%20 in%20 China%20 has%20 been%20 bulldozed%20 while, amid%20 a%20 land%20 dispute%2 see%20 Xinhua%20 news%20 agency%20 said.

[URL]https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/china...pse/index.html[/URL]

[URL]https://www.newsweek.com/china-suffe...rescue-1609067[/URL]

[URL]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrjLsn30Xzs[/URL]

A gentle reminder that the initially Repub-appointed Fed Chairman who was there for all of it, Ben Bernanke, was among many who understood and pointed out that the [B]repeal of Glass-Steagall [/B]was irrelevant to the Bush2 Financial Crisis:

[B]Bernanke: I'm 'puzzled' by the focus on Glass-Steagall.
Oct. 21, 2015[/B]

[URL]https://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/ben-bernanke-puzzled-by-democrats-glass-steagall-214996[/URL]

[QUOTE]"Im actually a little puzzled by the focus on that particular provision, Bernanke said during a discussion with POLITICOs Ben White at an Americas Fiscal Future event in Manhattan. I think that if you look at the actual, what happened a few years ago in the crisis, that Glass-Steagall was pretty irrelevant to it because you had banks like Wachovia or Washington Mutual that went bad because they made bad loans, and you had investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman that went bad because of their investment banking activities.

Even if Glass-Steagall were still in place at the time of the financial crisis, it would have had no effect on most of these firms, he said, including AIG, which required massive and repeated bailouts.[/QUOTE]Uh. The Federal agency charged with conducting oversight on savings bank loans and savings and loans institutions is the Office of Thrift Supervision in the Treasury Department of a president's Cabinet. That is the where the ball was dropped on protecting the USA economy from that particular Great Repub Crash and Recession.

Nope, it wasn't about Clinton or his Treasury Department not doing its job. And, nope, it was not about Obama or his Treasury Department not doing its job.

It was about a different president from a different political Party and his Treasury Department not doing its job. In gigantic fashion producing horrific domestic and global results.

They always find a way.

[QUOTE=PVMonger;2751494]The only people who believe that President Biden is "the worst president ever" are members of the Moron Brigade. These are the same fools who believe that Donnie the Dumbass ranks somewhere in the top 5 of all presidential rankings. Presidential historians, who actually have functional brains, believe differently. [URL]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123920/us-presidents-historian-ranking/[/URL] and [URL]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/who-was-worst-president-everand-how-do-historians-decide-180978105/[/URL] and [URL]https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/08/13/nation/chart-how-do-historians-rank-us-presidents/[/URL] and [URL]https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?page=overall[/URL] among others.[/QUOTE]Republicans and all intelligent people know Biden is the dumbest president ever because Biden is proving it every day. Democrats obviously are too stupid to see the facts and the democrats are counting on the dumbest people in America to continue to vote democrat. History has proven that if you are are stupid, a criminal, an illegal or on government assistance then you are a democrat.

[QUOTE=Tiny12;2751916]The red state / blue state thing is a red herring.

According to this link from 2021, only 36% of people making over $200,000 per year supported Democrats, compared to 63% making less than $15,000 per year.

[URL]https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-...ics-democrats/[/URL]

And from this link, people making over $221,572 paid 59.4% of the income tax.

[URL]https://taxfoundation.org/publicatio...come-tax-data/[/URL]

Tie the two together. Republicans on average undoubtedly pay more to the federal government than they get out of it in benefits. As to Democrats, I'm not sure. But our system at the federal level is so wasteful and inefficient I suspect they get a bum deal too.[/QUOTE]So, richer people support MAGAts and poorer people support Democrats. Gee, tell me something I didn't already know. In fact, everybody in the US already knew that.

But, more to the point, you call the red state vs blue state thing a "red herring". It isn't. It is a [B]fact[/B] that red states receive more federal money than they pay in taxes. There are numerous sources that support this. Like [URL]https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/[/URL] and [URL]https://smartasset.com/data-studies/states-most-dependent-on-the-federal-government-2022[/URL] among others.

[QUOTE=Tiny12;2751901]We get it. Your social security checks will be up 9% over last year after the next COLA. You're making maybe 15% more on your California rental properties. Meanwhile the Thai Baht has plunged to 37 or 38 to the dollar. So in THB terms, your income is up maybe 30%. Instead of getting blowjobs from skanky wh*s at Star of Light, now you're probably doing sideliners at La Belle. Several a day. Well, that doesn't do much good for the workingman who's struggling to pay more for food, gasoline, electricity, hookers and rent. He's not going to vote for the Biden crowd. Why else would Republicans be favored to win the House, after the Supreme Court abortion decision. And when over half the Republican representatives voted not to certify the 2020 election. People are mad as hell at their decline in purchasing power. And they're not going to take it any more.[/QUOTE]If inflation only affected the USA, you'd have a point. If you can prove to me that no other country in the world suffers from inflation, I will accept your conclusion that inflation is President Biden's fault.

Like Mitch McConell Sen Cornyn Romney et al.

Like Reagan and both Bush dirtbags.

[URL]https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/10/10/mark-levin-the-democrats-hate-america/[/URL]

It really kicked in high gear with Bubba, Bush 43 and Barry Hussein, those 24 yrs just about destroyed the United States.

They completely gutted the middle class and left the country a microcosm of the dystopian hellhole known as California.

Now we have hunger games for all, Biden style 2022.

Our Lord and Savior can't return soon enough.

The second coming is coming!

[QUOTE=Canada;2752127]Republicans and all intelligent people know Biden is the dumbest president ever because Biden is proving it every day. Democrats obviously are too stupid to see the facts and the democrats are counting on the dumbest people in America to continue to vote democrat. History has proven that if you are are stupid, a criminal, an illegal or on government assistance then you are a democrat.[/QUOTE]What history has proven is that Donnie the Dumbass was one of the worst presidents of all time. The links I posted show that. Those links are from scholarly publications with real historians. Of course, Repubs don't believe that Donnie the Dumbass was bad because Repubs got what they wanted. They got a crook who was worse than Slippery Dick Nixon. They got a liar with 30,000 documented falsehoods. They got authoritarianism. They got the normalization of white supremacy. They got the Christian Taliban.

And they'll get more of the same if us dummies don't wake up.

What history has also proven is that there are 74+ million American voters who don't have enough IQ points to decorate a domino and they all voted for Donnie the Dumbass.

[QUOTE=Canada;2752127]Republicans and all intelligent people know Biden is the dumbest president ever because Biden is proving it every day. Democrats obviously are too stupid to see the facts and the democrats are counting on the dumbest people in America to continue to vote democrat. History has proven that if you are are stupid, a criminal, an illegal or on government assistance then you are a democrat.[/QUOTE]Voters with a functioning frontal cortex and a working moral compass did not and would not ever support the chaos, confusion and cruelty of this former president who attempted to overthrow our government to keep himself in power, against the will of the American people. Defending this man on any level speaks volumes about one's character.

And yet the Moron Brigade defends Donnie the Dumbass with every fiber of their being. Character counts and they don't have it.