Free Republic

Three alternatives you can look into to cut cable (from least to most expensive):
1) XBMC [Cost: Free]
2) Roku [Cost: $50]
3) Boxee [Cost: $99]

1)XBMC
Download XBMC on basically any modern computer/Operating system , then download install the repository installer here, then enable the BlueCop repository, then go to Video Add-ons, and install the "Free Cable" addon.
Here's a tutorial.
Xbmc also has plugins for Youtube, Hulu (for free, you don't need to pay for Hulu Plus), Podcasts (Apple's itunes podcast library). The World news Live Plugin, which you can download here gives you Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, CNBC, France24, Russia Today, Euronews all as a 24/7 live stream.

There's also a Fox News plugin that you can install, installation instructions are here.

2)Roku
Buy a Roku Box, use Netflix ($7.99/month) Hulu Plus $7, Amazon Prime $75/year to watch your TV programs on demand.

3)Boxee
Buy a Boxee box (which lets you watch over-the-air channels) use Netflix ($7.99/month) Hulu Plus $7 to watch your TV programs on demand.

When the true history of the housing bubble is written, I believe we'll find that the fraction of bubbliciousness coming from the CRA and associated programs was perhaps one-fifth, perhaps much less.

Great. Who reimburses the banks for that one-fifth?

Actually, I agree that the banks should sue the politicians who voted the CRA and the regulators. Legally, it would be an uphill battle. The banks would have to prove that without the CRA they wouldn't have loaned to certain people, and that the cost of those certain people purchasing houses during a certain time lead to over-inflated housing prices, market distortions that posed an existential crisis to the bank and hindered the bank from fulfilling it's fiduciary responsibility. You'd hear cries and wailing from the left since a disproportionate amount of those people would be low-income minorities, and thus the banks would be labelled "racist".

it shielded Citibank from dealing with its skeletons in the closet.

No it didn't. It didn't cover any losses, banks still wrote off hundreds of billions.

Between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010, Citibank borrowed 2.513 trillion dollars from the Federal Reserve. If it didn't have any skeletons, why did it borrow from so many credit lines instituted by the Federal Reserve (more than any other financial institution)?

Sheila Barr in her book "Bull by the Horns" nicknames Tax-cheat Timmy the "Bailouter in Chief", who was on the phone with Citibank's CEO more than any other bank. Furthermore, she asserts that Citibank was the only bank that needed help from the TARP bailout. So, yes I think we can assert that the bailout and actions by the Federal Reserve shielded Citi from its own ineptness. Here's a quote from NY Times review of Bair's book that sheds light on my assertion:

Early on in the crisis, she said, Mr. Geithner wanted Ms. Bair’s agency to financially support Citigroup’s planned $1-a-share acquisition of Wachovia. In turn, the F.D.I.C. would receive $12 billion in preferred stock and warrants.

Mr. Geithner and Citigroup held private talks about the deal without telling Ms. Bair, according to her account. Regulators then planned to allow Citigroup to count the stock as capital, a boost to the bank’s “sagging capital ratios.”

When Wells Fargo swooped in with a higher offer that required no government backing, Ms. Bair indicated her support for the new deal. Mr. Geithner, she said, was “apoplectic” and wanted the F.D.I.C. to stand behind Citigroup, which then raised its bid. The Fed ultimately approved the Wells Fargo deal and Citigroup required two infusions of government capital.

As Citi continued to suffer in 2009, Ms. Bair pressed for the bank to put its troubled assets into a “bad bank” supported by private money. Ms. Bair said she received no support from other regulators, who feared it would unnerve the markets.

In essence, the US Treasury was subsidizing the risk and indeptitude of Citibank.

Citibank should have been liquidated

Why?

Sheila Bair answers your question here. Again, it's not the role of taxpayers to subsidize badly run businesses.

Furthermore Goldman Sachs shouldn't have been give 100% restitution for the insurance it bought from AIG.

So?

Any other market-based payout would not have been 100-cents on the dollar for all the insurance AIG insured to Goldman and all of it's other counterparties.

To complete the incestuous circle, banks made money by borrowing from the Federal Reserve at near zero interest rates and buying government bonds.

Near zero? The discount rate is 0.75%.

The Federal Funds Rate is between 0.00% and 0.25%

Banks were the first ones to take advantage of the Federal Reserve's Zero interest-rate policy.

But banks can't borrow from the Fed at near zero.

Yes, the banks did borrow from the Federal Reserve at near zero rates. Under the TAF Program Citibank borrowed money at 0.2% in late 2008, 2009. It wasn't until March of 2010 when the Federal Reserve raised the interest rates to 0.50%. The Primary Dealer Rate is now 0.75%, and you're technically right...it's not zero. That doesn't mean that low-interest rates are not a subsidy to banks.

I've wondered if TARP would've made money if interest-rates would reflect the inherent risk in the market at the time (2008-2010).

I wonder why people think a collapse of the banking system, similar to the Great Depression, would be better than the profitable bank TARP that prevented a banking collapse.

The banking system would not have collapsed if TARP was not passed, bad assets would've been written off a lot quicker. Bair puts it like this,

“Our bailout strategies didn’t clean out bad mortgage assets, and we didn’t force banks to take losses,” she says. “We imposed no accountability and did no fundamental restructuring. We were Japan, and I think we have a Japan-like recovery because of it.”

TARP was unnecessary, if the US Treasury wanted to spend money, it should've issued tax refunds not cash to a mismanaged financial institutions. Individual taxpayers have to bear the brunt of the risk taking, mismanagement, rate subsidization, debt-guarantees of the government to the financial institutions, not necessarily to stimulate the general economy (which financial institutions do) but to encourage rent seeking, (i.e. borrowing from the Fed at low rates, loan the Federal government, and make money on the spread.).

I wonder why people want to prevent forest fires at all times, even when the forest is filled with overgrowth, especially when if more forest fires were allowed, afterwards the forest would be more vibrant and promote growth.

When the US Treasury injected money into the banks (regardless of the health of the bank) via what was basically forced equity stakes using the Capital Purchase Program, it shielded Citibank from dealing with its skeletons in the closet. Citibank should have been liquidated, but wasn't. Furthermore Goldman Sachs shouldn't have been give 100% restitution for the insurance it bought from AIG.





The above image from the Congressional Oversight Panel's February 2009 report page 7. Notice in the above image the average subsidy in injecting capital to these banks was 22%. We know now that it was paid back with interest (except for Citi, which need more capital injections).

To complete the incestuous circle, banks made money by borrowing from the Federal Reserve at near zero interest rates and buying government bonds. Banks were the first ones to take advantage of the Federal Reserve's Zero interest-rate policy. I've wondered if TARP would've made money if interest-rates would reflect the inherent risk in the market at the time (2008-2010).

"STFU, Farah. Like it or not, it worked."
--1rudeboy

"Bailouts that were paid back and saved the banking system."
--Toddsterpatriot

The bailouts worked at covering over the losses of the banks, and socializing risk, but subsidized a dysfunctional banking system, along with zero percent interest rates. We would have had a better banking system now without the bailouts if we took the medicine and wrote off bad debt in 2008.

Here's a quote from Steve Randy Waldman from his article Yes, Virginia. The banks really were bailed out.

But who has lost anything from the bailouts? Wasn’t it a win-win? This all sounds very abstract. Where are the transfers?

If the government borrowed or printed a trillion dollars and gave the money to me, would there be any losers? If you don’t think there has been a wealth transfer, if you don’t think ordinary people have lost, please call your Congressperson and ask her to cut me a trillion dollar check. In some abstract sense, this policy of giving me money would push government debt higher. But that is so very vague a cost! I promise I’d do great things with a trillion dollars. My ideas are so much cooler than Goldman Sachs’, despite all the wholesome commercials they are running.

During the run-up to the financial crisis, bank managers, shareholders, and creditors paid themselves hundreds of billions of dollars in dividends, buybacks, bonuses and interest. Had the state intervened less generously, a substantial fraction of those payouts might have been recovered (albeit from different cohorts of stakeholders, as many recipients of past payouts had already taken their money and ran). The market cap of the 19 TARP banks that received more than a billion dollars each in assistance is about 550B dollars today (even after several of those banks’ share prices have collapsed over fears of Eurocontagion). The uninsured debt of those banks is and was a large multiple of their market caps. Had the government resolved the weakest of the banks, writing off equity and haircutting creditors, had it insisted on retaining upside commensurate with the fraction of risk it was bearing on behalf of stronger banks, the taxpayer savings would have run from hundreds of billions to a trillion dollars. We can get into all kinds of arguments over what would have been practical and legal. Regardless of whether the government could or could not have abstained from making the transfers that it made, it did make huge transfers. Bank stakeholders retain hundreds of billions of dollars against taxpayer losses of the same, relative to any scenario in which the government received remotely adequate compensation first for the risk it assumed, and then for quietly moving Heaven and Earth to obscure and (partially) neutralize that risk.

The banks were bailed out. Big time.

Even if the therapeutic behavior is unusual, since both parties consent I cannot see how it should be illegal.

"Consumer protection" laws could be used to ban gay conversion therapy on questions of its efficacy. There's a case in New York about gay men and some of their moms suing counselors on the grounds of the effectiveness of gay conversion therapy. To liberals, gay conversion therapy never works, but there is a fluid continuum of sexual orientation in which people can be at different parts of their life. Their disingenuous and incoherent stance seems to be that wherever you are on the "sexual orientation" continuum you can only change in one direction, to becoming more homosexual.

Second point, if I were a lawyer arguing against this irrational law, I would ask whether banning pedophilia conversion therapy was any different from banning gay conversion therapy.

Liberals could have made this law a little more subtle, regulating anyone who provides gay conversion therapy that they must post notices before any treatment begins stating that the claims they make are not medically verifiable, that the American Psychiatric Association or whatever disagrees, etc.

Even if liberals dispute the effectiveness of gay conversion therapy, outright banning it altogether is really close to banning the freedom of association. This law should be held in suspicion by all Americans, irregardless of their sexual orientation.

Even if the therapeutic behavior is unusual, since both parties consent I cannot see how it should be illegal.

"Consumer protection" laws could be used to ban gay conversion therapy on questions of it's efficacy. There's a case in New York about gay men and some of their moms suing counselors on the grounds of the effectiveness of gay conversion therapy. To liberals, gay conversion therapy never works, but there is a fluid continuum of sexual orientation in which people can be at different parts of their life. Their disingenuous and incoherent stance seems to be that wherever you are on the "sexual orientation" continuum you can only change in one direction, to becoming more homosexual.

Second point, if I were a lawyer arguing against this irrational law, I would ask whether banning pedophilia conversion therapy was any different from banning gay conversion therapy.

Liberals could have made this law a little more subtle, regulating anyone who provides gay conversion therapy that they must post notices before any treatment begins stating that the claims they make are not medically verifiable, that the American Psychiatric Association or whatever disagrees, etc.

Even if liberals dispute the effectiveness of gay conversion therapy, outright banning it altogether is really close to banning the freedom of association. This law should be held in suspicion by all Americans, irregardless of their sexual orientation.

I support farm subsidies.

Agribusiness used to be considered a military sensitive industry, because you need to be able to feed your own army.

How does paying people who own farmland to not grow food help create an abundance of food? Farm subsidies subsidize high food prices.

Now, I know you'll say, "If food is too cheap, then farmers won't produce it since it won't be profitable." That may have been true in the 1930s, but today farmers have financial instruments to partially shield them from price fluctuations in their products.

If you still support farm subsidies, would you be willing to gradually phase out the federal program, and allow states to decide whether it's economically beneficial to continue agricultural subsidies?

Was the above photo the one you're referring to, [it's from this website]?

If it is, the photo was taken in 1976, according to Wikipedia's Nelson Rockefeller page:

In what would become an iconic photo of the 1976 campaign, Rockefeller famously responded to hecklers at a rally in Binghamton, New York with a raised middle finger.

Is he as kooky as his old man?
No, he is conservative, except for his "immigration reform".

I really don’t know much about him.
His budget is better than Paul Ryan's, he would make a good VP candidate, but unless he can deftly handle the press like Ronald Reagan, he probably won't be able to be President (with the current electorate it might be hard for even Reagan to be elected).
Here's a link to a summary of his 2013 proposed Federal budget.

Allen West. The last leader.

When it comes to a institutions that use democracy, we have to appeal to low-information voters, Allen West, will seem too "confrontational" to low-information voters.

Obama's proved that speaking in meaningless platitudes, ambiguous statements, and emotional fluff is what wins elections. We need someone who can do the same, but for the conservative side, a person who can be just as ambiguous and amorphous as Obama when campaigning, but the complete opposite to Obama when it comes to actual government policies, a solid conservative instead of the current Fabian Marxist.

Actually, the best thing conservatives could do is to register en masse as Democrats and run for office everywhere as Democrats.

Already registered as a Democrat the day after the election, (I'm out here in California). We should be asking ourselves then, who should conservatives run in the DNC Presidential primaries of 2016?

Is there a candidate like Zell Miller we conservatives could use to be nominated for the DNC's presidential candidate?

She should run for president in 2016 with Rand Paul as her running mate.

She should run in 2016 with Rand Paul as her running mate.

Why not rot the Democrats’ super majority from the inside out? All it would take are a few more pro-gun, pro-life, anti-tax, free-market, conservative Dems to gum up the works in Sacramento. They exist, but they need a little help.

That's what I did after the election, I registered as a Democrat in California. If enough of conservative Californians do this we can take advantage of the low-information voters who vote for anybody with a (D) next to their name.

Unless it has a quantum mechanical component to it, it will just be a big computer.
Classical computers can simulate quantum mechanics, just not that efficiently.
Here's a link to a discussion on whether quantum mechanics is central to simulating the brain.

If conservatives and/or Republicans were smart, they would amend this legislation to ban conversion therapy for pedophiles. Maybe some liberals would see the absolute lunacy of this legislation, but I’m fearful some would actually support it.

You might want to check out Romneys picks for judges when he was Gov. Well, being the governor of one of the most left-leaning states, Romney could argue that none of the more conservative judges would be approved anyway, so why try? He should have tried though, at least to show what Massachusetts could have had if it had a little more sanity.

Half the reason folks on this thread are bitching is because he won’t stand up and yell “LOOK AT ME”!!

In fact Romney is implicitly stating "Look at me", "Look at me" leftists and center-leftists, I agree with the fact that government coercion is a form of compassion, see, look what I did in Massachusetts?

It's as if Lenin stated, "Look, I'm compassionate, I fight for the proleteriat, there will be no more evil capitalists exploiting the working class." Now, I'm not saying that Romney is a Leninist, but he implicitly accepts a watered down form of socialism, and then tries to ingratiate himself with those of a leftist bent.
,br> What Romney should do is use the emotionalism of the left against itself, state the obvious, "everybody wants good healthcare" but then segue into the fact the best way to get good healthcare is to not legislate quasi-socialist healthcare bureaucracy but by unleashing the power of the free market, transparency, property rights, etc., he can use the same model for education, etc and all the other topics leftists use to champion there cause. Leftists appeal to emotion a lot better than conservatives, and if Romney was smart he could use the emotionalism of the left against itself by pointing to history and the intellectual arguments of the right. Instead he seems to implicitly accept the moral matrix of the left.