A Kinder, Gentler Ron Paul Thread

Not if you don't have skin in the game.

 

Timely article from Benjy Sarlin...

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/09/rand...-why-black-voters-dont-vote-gop-heres-a-clue/

Jonathan Chait weighs in as well...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/racists-love-ron-and-rand-paul-for-some-reason.html

 

Crap. Now I'm sorry I offended Ignored Content anarchism_now2013. I'm actually curious to see what he'd make of these articles.

 

The reaction to it?

Dude, did he lie or stretch the facts? That's what I meant by "something to hide", not anything sinister. I'm telling you I've had this conversation with other people who are or claim to be libertarians and the only difference was that they were more articulate and sometimes better at refusing to address the one thing I asked them about. They just turn the topic to something else. And that's wrong.

Why must you have a guarantee of a shot at my support to answer a simple and specific question? I'm not attacking you, or, for that matter, your candidate. But I'm being called intransigent about not wanting to support a pro-states' rights candidate or party. I think that's unfair.

And a pro-states' rights position is as flat-out stupid as anything they've done recently. Let me ask you this: How much of the rest of your platform (either yours or that of the candidate of your choice- trying to focus here on the big pic) can be carried out without that plank? Given that the numbers regarding changes in segregation status are in my favor, why must you be so intransigent about this one thing?

 

You're better than this. It's partly because I know your neck of the woods is no better that I remain a Southerner. The rest is laziness.

I told him I didn't want citizens to be given the right to discriminate against me any more than they do now, and I posted several times afterward to give him a chance to explain that his and his party's execution of states' rights would not result in them having that right. But he never did. I'm not talking past or around anyone.

 

States' rights in the north is why you guys have cleaner air and gay marriage. States' rights in the south is why we have segregated school districts and 45 minute wait times.

 

Great, great and elegantly simple post.

 

I don't like single payer because right now health care is a market failure in this country and the government should take over. However, if markets are able to handle health insurance, health costs, etc., then single-payer makes it nearly-impossible to extract ourselves from it. That's only on a philosophical level - I'd take single-payer over Obamacare in a heartbeat. I think the bigger problem is all that fancy machinery doctors buy and the pharmaceutical patents, but that's another part of the puzzle that Obamacare can handle.

 

That's surprising to me. Obamacare is your team's signature move from the last 5 years.

 

Well, the school districts are segregated because of repeated White flight. Example: 30 years ago, there was a fair anount of racial balance in my hometown's five high schools (there are now 6, but one is less than a decade old), with only one being overwhelmingly White and none being predominantly Black. A graphic timetable of the migration since then would look like a keepaway soccer drill. Three of the schools now are predominantly Black, the White one is still White (and increasingly Asian), and most of them are much smaller. Whites started their journey by first going south to the Whitest school, and when that got crowded, they moved out to the county --and the county school system, which was and is largely rural-- and took over the schools in one specific suburb. Five or so years later, they decided they liked the rednecks they were sharing revenue with even less than they liked the Black folks they ran from to begin with and so they bought out of the county system and started their own, and tried to expand west landwise. Luckily, the city bought that land and surrounded them. It's been fascinating to watch.

But 45 minute wait times? I'm not getting that one...

 

Most liberals are definitely for Single Payer Systems, but given that that is not going to happen we are modestly happy with Obamacare as a way to control costs and maybe eventually move to Single Payer.

At this point in Obama's presidency, we are just happy not to have a Repugblican in the WH pushing Trickle Down economics and Wars of Choice, but not especially happy with what has been delivered.

Off course we KNOW that 90% or more of the failure belongs in Congress, since theywill not allow anything that modestly helps Obama to pass.

 

How long it took you to vote in Florida in 2012
.

 

How can there be a "market failure" when the market has never been remotely free?

 

But your happy with a Dem pushing Trickle Down economics and continuing said wars? It's not the product, it's the packaging that sells.

 

Politicians are great at not hurting those who feed them.

 

As far as I know, Obama is not pushing trickle down, he presented an stimulus package and asked for slightly higher taxes. He stopped most of the operations in Iraq which was a good thing. No, I'm not happy with the way things are going in Afghanistan. But I rather have a centrist corporatist than a right wing nut corporatist in the WH.

To put it in different words, while I'm not 100% happy with the Obama presidency (which has had its shortcomings, granted), I'm very happy to not have President McCain, President Rmoney, VP Palin or VP Ryan calling the shots. And furthermore, while Democrats have shown that they are a poor match for the Repug ideologist in the House (repeal the ACA anyone?), I'd rather have them trying to pass legislation and being shunned, than have the Repugs calling the shots and the Democrats bending over.

In a perfect world, I would have voted for Jill Stein, but that would be innocuous in the present arrangement of Politics.

 

The system is what it is. You go with the bully that will keep things from going even more to the right (or going slightly left, if you're conservative). Be nice if elections would cease until a non pro-states' rights third party could get the numbers going to help remove rightist thinkers from their place at the table, but no one with any sense is going to try to build support while the GOP twists the Constitution to destroy opportunities for equality for minorities or any stripe.

 

That's life.
Weak is nitpicking my post and not dealing with the reality of the rest of it.

 

I just got this joke. First time I bothered to read more than one of Persianfootball's posts, and I get it. I think he's on a four-post F&L streak in the Morsi thread.