Politics

This is more of an interesting observation than a big topic, but when thinking of the realities libertarians see and that progressives see it strikes me that both really are complaining about the same thing: the indisputable erosive force of human nature: When a libertarian goes into a private business to conduct their affairs, they are generally met with attentive helpful staff who you can tell just by talking to them are alert and well aware their job exists because they maintain a level of service able to complete with their competitors. They are to the point and don't waste time, and try to offer what will meet your needs while ensuring their own are met as well…

I've kinda asked similar questions before, but I think I can clearly define the real thing that bugs me with how we politically deal with debt, the economy and our budgets. 1) Republicans condemn out of control federal spending, saying how we are borrowing money to pay for programs we can't afford - Democrats defend programs because the money creates jobs and provides useful services. 2) Democrats try to cut anything Republicans like (say DoD) or raise taxes - Republicans defend how DoD creates jobs, provides useful services, and how rich people "don't sit on their wealth" but create jobs, provide useful services. Honestly, I can't see how the benefits and …

BP (BRITISH Petroleum) is a publicly traded equity on many exchanges including the NYSE (BP). In the past few weeks the Companies value (market cap) has dropped from around 200BUS$ to under 100B$. As both a foreign Company and one in the Oil/Gas Business, they are highly regulated by Congress and need permits to do much of anything, in addition to stages of any operation. Think about 2008, they did get out of the Retail Business in the US and any holdings along this area are to supply retailers. They do however employ around 30,000 people in the US. http://moneycentral.msn.com/companyreport?Symbol=BP To further advance a coming opinions, Royal Dutch Shell, also op…

so I cam here and tried to post in politics and it's NOT WORKING. do you have some liberal elite who can post in politics? that is WRONG just tonight I found out obama has not even met the CEO of BP and THE LAW says he is responsible for cleaning up the oil spill, not BP and there is a $75 mil limit on the money BP should spend at which point it's OBAMA whould should clean up the oil and OBAMA is not doing anything and this is a huge problem. but I guess there are a bunch of liberal elites here who do not want to talk about these topics

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/08/01291.html I hope the 3 out of 4 of you that are due to die in the next 18 months enjoy the time you have left. And for speaking out against this sort of utter bullsh*t we get called deniers.

How long will it be before a parent telling a bedtime story to their children will be shocked to hear one of them ask: Mommy, what are holidays? The Mom replies: Where did you hear such a dirty word? But yes, there was a time when Holidays were a fun thing to do. Let me see!! There was, Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and even more, but I cant remember their names at the moment. Some years back the government thought we were taking too much time off from work and decided we really didn't need Holidays, so "bingo" they're gone. Does anyone honestly believe this could happen?

On Friday Arizona's governor signed a new bill into law for that state which requires police to check an individual's citizenship status if they suspect that the individual is in the country illegally. Couple articles pulled at random from Google News: a liberal source a conservative source The state doesn't allow racial profiling, but some see this as a slippery slope to that very thing. The state already allows for checking when it has a suspect in custody, and it's not the only state that allows that (see second source above). From the LA Times article: The problem is numbers -- Federal enforcement is insufficient to deal with the problem. …

It's hard to find really good news sources on the Internet -- CNN's website usually makes me want to hit someone, for example ("do I really care about Tiger Woods?!??!"). I subscribe to the Times (of London, not New York) on my Kindle, but I think I could be getting more. What sites/devices/formats do you use to get your world news? Newspaper, web site, RSS feed, electronic gizmo...? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedI might add that I'm specifically looking for global news, not just one country's politics and celebrity gossip. The Times is nice, but I think I could be getting more. I can get online access to the Economist through my parents, which…

According to Scott Sumner, Reganomics did produce the desired growth. http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=5164&utm Seems to suggest that Chicagoan reforms of the 80s did indeed promote growth in Regan and Thatcher administrations. I think, however, it depends on what metric you're using. Yes, GDP growth was up, but were the results destablized markets & income inequality? I've seen arguments both for and against, and I'm not sufficiently convinced either way. However, Sumner's point is that neoliberal convictions that classical liberal policies would not produce growth were dead wrong. I'm glad when economists are willing to make prediction…

I stumbled over this article at factcheck: http://factcheck.org/2010/05/does-immigration-cost-jobs/ In short, they provide evidence that immigration (legal or illegal) do not cost jobs and provide economic benefits. See also http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp255/ Using this as basis I would like to ask the question whether anyone has more data on costs of immigration, ideally separating illegal with legal ones. Anyone found peer-reviewed publications on this matter? Just by skimming some articles I got the impression that most articles that argue the inverse tend to be from activist groups rather than economists. But I may be rather wrong on this one. M…

I don't know how to do a poll, but in your honest opinion; how is President Obama doing in running our country? I'm a "Hill Billy" 'tweener, so there's no offense taken one way or another. And if my question is inappropriate, would a moderator please kick it to the curb!!

Since I don't know how to do a poll, I was just wondering; in your honest opinion, how is President Obama doing in running our country? I'm a "Hill Billy" tweener, so there's no offense taken one way or another. If my question is too provocative, I hope an administrator will kick it to the curb before anyone can reply. Otherwise, can we turn it into a poll?

Not the new one (yet). This is a recent but older Arizona law in which the state imposed more stringent penalties against employers of illegal aliens than what federal law does. The Obama administration's position is that it usurps their authority to enforce immigration law. The Court was originally asked to hear the case last fall, but it has not replied to the petition yet. This new filing today, and the particular way of phrasing their position, suggests that they wish the court to consider the case in light of the new law as well. If the court agreed with them then the new law could also be struck down, perhaps even by the same ruling. I think this is an in…

ABC News ran an interesting piece today about how "emergency" spending has exceeded $230 billion since February. Why is this date range significant? Because in February Congress and the President passed PAYGO, which was designed to stop deficit spending. Ah, but it's emergency spending, right? Or is it? Even many of the items that seem urgent (like highway construction in light of our declining infrastructure) don't sound like "emergencies", at least in the sense of not having to pay for them. Just charge it to the credit card, right? It's not as if we really need that credit line for anything, and it doesn't hurt, so just rack up some more debt. …

Interesting article in the Washington Post today about how Bill Clinton's continued popularity and Senator Blanche Lincoln's struggle to get re-elected in Arkansas put a spotlight on the ongoing struggle between centrists (edit: meant to say "moderates") and progressives in the Democratic party. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/29/AR2010052902329.html Not particularly profound, but interesting stuff, and I think worth a read.

I wonder sometimes how these stories make it up the chain to appear on Google News, but hey, their algorithm has sure produced some juicy material for SFN Politics over the years. At any rate, this story is about a bar in (if I read this right) Hamilton, Ontaria, Canada. The bar has the amusing name "The Honest Lawyer", and inside the men's bathroom were some mouth-shaped urinals, with big, red, glossy lips. The urinals were there for about three years, according to the owner, but for about the last year an activist group called the "Woman Abuse Working Group" began protesting the urinals, saying that they were linked to violence against women, that it's "no joke t…

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Politics/national-debt-soars-past-13-trillion/story?id=10748382 The National Debt has just surpassed $13,000,000,000,000, up from $10.7 trillion when Bush left office, increasing some $2.3 trillion under Obama. For comparison, the debt increased $4.97 trillion under Bush's 8 years in office. The national debt is simply out of control and I really have no suggestions at this point. It seems at this point America will have an incomprehensibly large national debt for quite some time. Personally I think the government should sue Wall Street financials who defrauded the entire country in order to recoup the TARP money the financials…

first George Galloway, and now this? i mean wtf? and btw, it's been quite some time since i was planning to post this, it's not something that just turned up;)

It just boggles the mind the reasoning people will stoop to sometimes in an effort to uphold a single, narrowly-defined ideological principle. In this case, the allegation is that the ACLU is involved in a concerted and deliberate effort to photograph CIA agents and provide those images to terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Defenders say it's to protect their "right" to know who their potential torturers are so that they can avoid them. No, really. And yet the left went bonkers over the outing of Valerie Plame, the worst-kept secret in DC. Do you guys really wonder why conservatives get frustrated with liberals? Seriously? Some articles for ba…

Bascule asked recently why I haven't posted more examples of liberal commentators doing what Glenn Beck does. The answer isn't because they aren't doing it, it's because I'm not obsessed with finding such examples. But I did happen to catch a few minutes of AC360 tonight while puttering around the house, and I was rather shocked at what I saw. Anderson Cooper 360 is touted as "CNN's premiere nightly news program", not commentary! (you can see this on the page immediately below the video linked below) (Does Fox News do this too, now -- calling their commentary/entertainment programs "news"? Yeesh!) I found a video on the CNN web site that contained most of t…

Fox News has been all over this for days if not weeks (I don't really know, but I noticed it the other night when I tuned in for the first time in years), but I think it's pretty clear that no laws were broken. Unfortunately the White House has now acknowledged that Rahm Emanuel asked President Clinton to offer Sestak a job on a Presidential advisory board or some similar role, and they also confirm that this was done in order to get Sestak to withdraw from the race against Alan Specter. (Sestak declined the offer and won the primary.) President Obama did not take part in the offer, but the offer was made and it does involve access to the President. In sh…

So, Rand Paul's is cut in the image of his father, where he favors small government in a big way... So big, in fact, that he thinks the Civil Rights Act did more to restrict liberty than to make liberty universal. He's taking heat from Republican and Democrat leaders alike. I'd like to make clear my own feelings. I am abundantly confident that Rand Paul is NOT a racist. I am, however, not so confident that he's capable of seeing the negative impact the implementation of some of his ideology would have... I am not confident that he's willing to adjust his philosophy due to that negative impact. He has canceled his appearance this Sunday on Meet the Press …

In my opinion, the Democrats are significantly more Internet-savvy than the Republicans. The 2008 election saw massive leveraging of social networks like Facebook and Twitter for campaign purposes. Millions followed Barack Obama on Twitter when McCain could barely drum up tens of thousands. Recently the Republicans tried to launch a site called AmericaSpeakingOut, largely reminiscent of Obama's Open for Questions site, which allowed users to submit questions that the community can vote on in order to weight their importance. Unfortunately, in doing so, the Republicans seem to have forgotten the comparative imbalance of Internet savvy between themselves and Democ…

http://consumerist.com/2010/05/poor-people-spend-9-of-income-on-lottery-tickets.html So... why do we exempt them from paying taxes, exactly?

Not really sure where would be the most appropriate for this thread, but I wanted to open up discussion about it as it something that will affect every single one of us in some way regardless on which country you are from. The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organiza…