I don't think so. You forget this is the most power country in the world. Push comes to shove the Pres will shut down the tree huggers and drill for what we need and kiss off the Arabs. By 2009 we will have lots of energy efficient autos. Lets not forget fuel from sugar cane is very powerful in the world. Especially in Brazil.
Blended fuel cars in Brazil are the norm. No oil based fuel needed. We can do it as well..no problem.
No one could ever unseat the peanut farmer as the worst president we ever had.
I bought 1000 shares of HYBT at $2.00 recently.
Do you remember when UPL was $2.38 not so many years ago?
They will inherit such a can of worms that he/she won’t be able to turn the country around in four years. The debacle in Iraq will drag on; the economy is headed towards a major correction/recession and since oil is expected to hit $100.00 a barrel by December it should be major crisis by the next election. The American voter has a very short memory and it really doesn’t matter how we got into this mess, because whoever is in office at election time will be blamed. It’s kind of like musical chairs. The next president might even unseat Jimmy Carter as the worst president in recent history.
-- Modified on 10/21/2007 11:22:57 PM
-- Modified on 10/21/2007 11:23:47 PM
I don't think so. You forget this is the most power country in the world. Push comes to shove the Pres will shut down the tree huggers and drill for what we need and kiss off the Arabs. By 2009 we will have lots of energy efficient autos. Lets not forget fuel from sugar cane is very powerful in the world. Especially in Brazil.
Blended fuel cars in Brazil are the norm. No oil based fuel needed. We can do it as well..no problem.
No one could ever unseat the peanut farmer as the worst president we ever had.
I bought 1000 shares of HYBT at $2.00 recently.
Do you remember when UPL was $2.38 not so many years ago?
You also forget, thanks to the media's hate of Bush, the next President will get to blame everything on Bush for the next four years and people will eat it up.
Gas is high, "well the former adminstration made deals for the rich oil companys and not for the general public, but I am working with congress to fix that."
We are still in Iraq, "Well the former adminstration lead us down the wrong path, however we can not pull out now do to the recent increase in oil prices."
You can do it for everything.
Let us not forget that these are the same people that voted Bush into office twice after we saw ourselves get attacked on American soil on 9/11, invaded Iraq based on false intelligence, etc. They don't vote with brains, they just do whatever Foxnews tells them to do.
The problem for liberal is that they think too much, and probably wouldn't vote the same idiot in twice if the country is doing poorly. Stupid liberals!
my dollars. Seven years ago I bought shares in railroads just before the dot-com bust. Choo! Choo! ride the money train, baby, Oil will hit $100.00 a barrel. Cover your ass though by buying futures in sugar cane.
I do though predict a recession. Every big spike in oil prices in this half-century has been followed by a recession. That is why, I am staying out of the stock market except railroads and food stuffs and cigarettes.
-- Modified on 10/22/2007 8:07:44 PM
Carter was so bad he solidified Republicans for the next thirty years right when the party looked like it was becoming marginal. Bush is that bad.
it was the accumulated reaction to the postWW2 changes - postwar prosperity & technological advancements were followed by civil rights campaigns, hippies and Vietnam. A lot of issues like the pill caused a lot of social revolutions and strains.
The first whiff of reaction was Goldwater. Following his loss, the religious right first began to conceive plans to organize for political power, and Reagan was the first national manifestation of the power of the religious right, which is essentially a reaction to the changes, particularly of the 60s.
(Goldwater of course had strong libertarian leanings - but a Libertarian in theory becomes a Bush once elected, because of the practical demands of the office. GW shortcircuited that step of course, because he has the principles of any drunken frat boy who has found Jesus sitting on his paycheck.)
Note that abortion is still a big issue with them. They have pretty much written off the race issue, finding that some of those folks aren't half bad and they can still lock up the rest - but of course the Messicans might be politically regarded as surrogate untermenschen.
Couldn't excite anybody? Nothing like 14 percent inflation, 21 percent interest rates, lines in the cold at gas stations, shame abroad with Iran and a perception that our armed forces had been undermined. That will get people to re-think their alignments.
The same thing might happen in the next term with plenty of calamities occurring, but demographics are not with Republicans now, and too many things will be remembered about who got us into Iraq. Once Bush is out of office and the glamor of the Presidency is no longer on him, he will be remembered as the buffoon Republicans voted for.
Plus, the sex and greed scandals of Republicans are not going to stop. There are too many eyes watching now. So Republicans, conservatives specifically will never get the momentum back.
"So Republicans, conservatives specifically will never get the momentum back."
You underestimate what four years of Hillary can do get people longing for the good ole days. I'm not saying that these really are the good ole days, they'll just seem that way after a few years of the Hildabeast.
If she's elected, not only democrats but the whole country is still insane.
Where Democrats get stupid is when they try to estimate the "electibility" of their candidates. Any Democrat but her.
I want Obama or Edwards.
"So Republicans, conservatives specifically will never get the momentum back."
We can only hope that you and your friends continue to believe that. You would actually be more correct (although still wrong) to flip your two subjects. The U.S. has been, is, continues to be and will continue to be far more conservative than you are willing to see.
I see slim hope for this country under liberals, but no hope under conservatives. No hope as in no cohesion, no financial responsibility, no ability to cope with any disaster like Katrina or Iraq, and there's likely to be quite a few.
You can't direct effort in the country without government. You can't have a government like this unless someone believes government is effective. Ultimately, too much individuality for which conservatives identify themselves atomizes the nation.
In my lifetime, I remember a far better government here. A government in which a leader could declare we were going to the moon, and we'd be there within eight years. Now, purportedly with far more advanced technology a president declares we're going back to the moon-- by 2015, maybe.
I look at the Hoover Dam, a mighty government project if there ever was one. And now we can't maintain or build levies in New Orleans?
Conservatives since Reagan have been dismantling government, disorganizing it, letting it wither, corrupting it, diverting funds to the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, they've crippled the country with debt.
I'm beginning to think, though, that the last good president we had was a Republican: Eisenhower. We have not a good leader since then.
However, what ever conservatism was in the past, at Washington's time, you can't get back to it. How conservative is our standing army when the Constitution itself says we can only have one for two years at a time? You can't get nearer the ideal than Washington, who with all of his wisdom, owned slaves. A man with an unpaid labor force can give speeches about fiscal responsibility. A man who warns against entangling alliances (the closest ideal being isolationism) doesn't make sense when you can talk to people immediately anywhere in the world. Far faster than you could have reached New York from North Carolina at Washington's time.
The world is pulling the rug out from under us. I don't see conservatism being fleet footed. When frustrated, more than likely it will turn to fascism.
The Constitution doesn't say we can only have a standing army for two years at a time. It says that appropriations to support the army cannot be for longer than two years.
Oh yea! YOU!
I said the U.S. was (and is) more conservative than liberal. During your example of the space race of the 60's, the U.S. was more conservative than today. The hippies just had louder voices.
Republican government? Democrat Government? Sure it mattered and still matters but not nearly to the degree that you think. What matters far more than government "directing efforts" is the attitudes and individual efforts of people. The party in control matters much less as long as their power is mostly checked. The people have done a pretty good job at that over the years by handing the legislative and executive to separate parties most of the time.
We must have government directing efforts in order to be successful? I don't think so. Not even in a Communist country where the government has "free reign" is it successful. Our Federal government has very few enumerated powers, directing efforts is NOT one of them.
Mighty projects of the past, that can't be recreated? Do you know why? In large part, it’s due to liberalism gaining too much control. There was far in excess of 100 people that died constructing the Hoover Dam. Would that be allowed to happen today? Of course not. Our “Mommy” government wouldn’t allow it. Had OSHA been around in the 1930’s Hoover dam would have taken 50 years to build. Today, one guy dies on a construction site and the site is closed for days while it’s investigated. This mentality and the ambulance chasing society stemmed from liberalism not conservatism. Your specific example of maintenance of Louisiana levees is due in large part to corruption in their democrat controlled government. They just elected a Republican governor this week. He ran in part on battling corruption and won something like 60 of the 64 parishes. They are really going liberal, eh?
Neither the conservatives nor the liberals are going the continue to make the U.S. great, WE are. But I’m not surprised at all that you think the responsibility for most everything rests within the government.
Oh and by the way. . .
Hoover dam was NOT built by the government. It was built by PRIVATE corporations, the Bechtels and Halliburton's of the 30's I suspect.
-- Modified on 10/22/2007 11:32:27 PM
Did a little research. . .
Hoover Dam was built by a joint venture of six construction companies (called simply SIX COMPANIES). Look who’s on the list. The Evil Bechtel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Companies
-- Modified on 10/23/2007 10:23:29 AM
The data don't support your argument. The more liberal candidate has won the popular vote in three the of the last four Presidential elections and realistically won the electoral vote in all four.
Sure it does. If the popular vote had "won out", then the executive and legislative would have been "separate" again in 2000. In 1994, an all liberal government was "fixed".
I didn't claim it was sucessful EVERYTIME now did I? But then again, you've never let what was actually said influence you.
-- Modified on 10/23/2007 12:39:01 PM
Giving the government a "free reign?" That's not what I'm saying. There are some things the government is good at and some things better left to private industry and many industries that require regulation to keep the system democratic enough. The important thing is making those decisions rationally and without malicious intent. In other words, a mixed economy.
I have to comment that "I don't think so" isn't a good counter-argument, though it does state your a priori view on the matter. Isn't this war in Iraq a government-led project? That's just an example. Is "the war on terror" a government-led effort? How about the "war on drugs?"
I'm thinking you agree with these, so you're more amiable to government-led efforts than "I don't think so" would imply. (I know, it's restricted to war and policing.) A funny thing happens between war and policing without some social programs: the people become atomized and stop supporting the government in its war and policing efforts.
"The party in control matters much less as long as their power is mostly checked." I agree with this. But putting in people who have an aversion to government is a disaster.
The deaths building the Hoover Dam make a different point, but I was referring to government-directed projects that worked. The decay since then is due not to regulations, per se, but to irrational and stupid regulations. To make the point: I think you'll agree that deaths on the job are a bad thing that should be minimized. I think liberals have to agree that deaths and injuries on certain jobs are inevitable. Rather than simply saying this, conservatives disown the the reason for the regulations, while liberals overreach. A rational way to regulate for accidents is to have actuaries estimate the number of injuries and deaths on a project, and then tell the workers when they start.
As for ambulance chasers, I believe they neither be presumed liberal nor conservative. John Edward's aside, they might encourage a "victim mentality" identified (unfairly) as liberal. However, they're entrepreneurs, usually small businesses. They usually want lower taxes I think. IMHO, it's having business regulation outsourced to entrepreneurs-- I think it's a good thing.
As for the courts allowing "ambulance chasing" being liberal, the law is put together mostly by precedent, from judges who are both conservative and liberal.
You could control ambulance chasing very easily: limit the punitive damages collected by the plaintiff, any damages above a ceiling amount go to a third party, whether the courts or something else. That will limit it right there to people who feel seriously wronged.
Bechtel: you know things can change greatly in 70 years.
You said “You can't direct effort in the country without government”. That is a FLAT ASSERTION that you now may realize was a huge over simplification or over reach. I hope so, but I was merely responding. Of course government serves other purposes that allow for success, fairness and safety of many things social and economic in nature. Republicans are no libertarians, although I sometimes wish they were more so.
The "free reign” example was of course something I said, not you. It was to point out that government directed efforts almost always need to be controlled not let loose. I’m all in favor of the government acting according to its enumerated constitutional powers. Protecting my life and liberty (by use of force, military or otherwise, if required) is key among them. The most recent real life “military” example (Iraq), I am sure is one where you think that MORE control and oversight of government efforts was called for. (And it wasn’t just the nasty Republicans that started it, so let’s not go there in this thread.)
The government that Reagan tried to reduce was no where near the government “of and by” FDR, Eisenhower etal. The government in absolute numbers and as a percentage of "the rest of us" had become (and continues to be) huge no matter how you look at it.
My fundamental point I wanted to make is that far far far greater successes and accomplishments that have moved civilization (or at least me and my circumstances) forward, came from the efforts (directed and undirected) located almost anywhere except the government.
BTW (about ambulance chasers), who is it that has been and still are trying implement tort reform? Sounds like you agree with us. Yikes.
-- Modified on 10/23/2007 4:46:08 PM
Further complicating the situation is that the concept of democracy has lost favor among the poilitical elites in many nations. In Russia and China their national elites have seen that socialism is a failed concept, but democracy is not necessary to have a vibrant capitalist economy.
Those ideas are increasingly accepted by many in the business community in Europe, Asia and the USA. There are continued efforts to make voting in elections seen as a waste of time, to reduce the democratic process to another form of entertainment, and to ridicule all politicians from left to right as buffons and corrupt.
When no one votes, democracy is dead.