Free Republic

“They can not control their sexual and the vast majority prey on young teenage boys.”

Are you saying homosexuals don’t have free will like the rest of us? How is that compatible with homosexuality being a choice?

The teleprompter probably malfunctioned.

No one ever said that criminals were the most logical minds of society.

Bookmark.

Darn! You beat me to it!

You can’t wash what isn’t there.

“And if his father was really homosexual, how did he manage to actually sleep with a woman and make children. It should have been repulsive to him.”

Some folks bat for both teams.

I agree. Divorce and premarital sex are WAY more common than homosexuality and therefore do more damage.

Bookmark.

“Evolving”= Code for “I’m saying nothing until I know for sure which way the wind is blowing”

That is the logo for the Human Rights Campaign.

I wonder why they changed the colors of their logo. Any self-respecting gay man will tell you that red and pink don’t go together at all.

Better evil and stupid than evil and cunning. At least the stupid evil people get caught.

If they did that you can be sure they’d be charged with a hate crime as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. In the bizarro world of leftist professors law-abiding Jews are a bigger threat to American civilization than Muslims who want to kill us. A conviction or even an accusation of a hate crime can ruin a young person’s future (i.e. try finding a job if you’ve been branded a “bigot” for defending yourself). I can understand why Harvard’s Jewish students don’t want to take that risk.

If I had to guess I’d say it’s a combination of 1) The Jews of European descent don’t really identify with Israel 2) Even Jews that do identify with Israel see the Democrats as being pro-Israel enough and 3) Jews tend to be more socially liberal, even though conservative economic policies favor the wealthy, and thus benefit many Jews.

And the reason Jews tend to be socially liberal is the historic emphasis social conservatives have put on Christian values, causing Jews to feel excluded or to wonder where they would fit into the conservative vision of America. I do believe conservatives are improving in this regard, with references to our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage instead of stating our heritage as exclusively Christian, and we are being rewarded with a small increase in percentage of Jewish votes won. It’s still not enough to prevent another Democratic victory. Even if all Jews voted Republican they’re too small a percentage of the population to swing the polls. The main advantage to winning the Jewish vote would be an increase in funding for our side.

Just my 0.02.

Considering what sort of men would like to get paid to grope other men’s junk, I’ll bet those new uniforms are just fabulous, if you get my drift.

Weird stuff. This article made me want to laugh really loudly.

Well said.

If you revoke tax-exempt status for churches that perform same-sex marriages, what’s to stop the left from revoking tax-exempt status from churches that promote traditional values, claiming they aren’t really Christian because they don’t practice the Christian values of love and tolerance for their homosexual neighbors? Any weapon you use against the enemy can and will be used against you. I’d rather see a few Unitarian churches keep their tax exempt status than see our churches lose theirs.

As for pro-gay churches not being Christian institutions, neither are Jewish synagogues, and yet they do and should continue to enjoy tax-exempt status. Tax exempt status isn’t just for Christians.

Wow. I admire and totally agree with your courteous, well-written letter that cites legal precedent for protection of the 2nd Amendment. Keep on defying the lying liberal stereotypes of conservatives as uneducated rabble.

Bookmark.

My thoughts exactly.

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CFA bookmark.

Zot bookmark.

Farewell.

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“• Sarah Smith was born several years before the others, in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade. However, California, where her mother lived, had already legalized abortion. Her mother had a presumably “successful” abortion in Los Angeles, but the doctor missed the fact that she was carrying twins. “

A friend of mine was telling me how this exact same thing happened to a friend of hers. I have never met this woman but I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to look your surviving child in the eye and be reminded daily that you killed his/her twin.

Bookmark.

Bookmark.

““Are all orthodox clergy now to be banished from civic life if they openly affirm their faith’s teachings about marriage and sexual ethics?” asked Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Wait, I thought it said at the beginning of the article that Rev. Giglio chose to back out, not that 0bama reneged on the agreement (as he has on so many others).

I understand that, but everyone else on this thread talks about her as if she’s a real person so I decided to follow suit. It’s rather long-winded to say, “I pray that the young women whom this character represents find God and turn their lives around.”

bookmark

“He will live out the rest of his live missing his child,”

So will she. It’s just not possible for a woman to have an abortion and not feel some degree of regret or remorse unless she’s a sociopath.

“while she becomes a NOW activist talking about her “lady parts”, and how someone needs to pay for her birth control.”

We don’t know that. Personally I’m praying that this young woman finds God and turns her life around, just as Bristol Palin used her personal experience as a teen mother to become an advocate for premarital abstinence.

Ah yes Michael Moore. So many fat rolls, so few brain cells. Remind me again why I should care what this nutcase thinks of me.

Should be “use it as ammo”

Anyone want to start a betting pool as to when the libs will get hold of this and use it ammo (no pun intended) for their attempts to increase gun control?

So the 7-year-old girl elbowed a boy to get away? Good for her! When the authorities are as negligent as these teachers obviously were, self-defense is a necessary skill to have. If the school did suspend her I would happily donate money to fund a lawsuit against the school.

And the Left tells us there’s nothing wrong with sexualizing children!

If the police don’t have a duty to protect us, then what is the point in having them?

I know someone who contracted polio as a child and is paralyzed from the waist down. His advice for what to do with able-bodied people parking in handicapped spots: break both their kneecaps. If they want to be disabled, we should humor that request.

“If they ran it into the ground, it was their business, not mine, even though I would suffer their loss along with them. If they somehow were successful, then good for them and for me, since the better they were, the better they did, the better I did, as I worked more hours and got better raises.”

I’m glad that was your experience but in many corporate situations if the company does poorly the workers lose their jobs while the CEOs and other senior executives take the golden parachute out and retire in style. The old notion of a captain going down with his ship appears to be a foreign concept to them. Whereas if the company does well, that doesn’t always translate into better wages for the workers.

Put it this way: I may be in the driver’s seat and I may be the one who decides which fork in the road to take but I didn’t choose which road I started out on. Some people start off on well-paved roads, others start on potholed dirt roads. So while I can choose to choose wisely or unwisely at every fork in the road, I can’t get somewhere if there’s no road from where I am to where it is. Most conservatives say that an individual’s success or failure depends entirely on that individual’s merit and most liberals say that an individual’s success or failure depends entirely on luck or fate. I don’t believe the world is that black-and-white; I believe that the roots of an individual’s economic success are more complex than either side acknowledges, a middle ground that is based partially on merit and partially on chance.

One thing I have noticed about successful people is that their ideas are much more likely to come to fruition during economic booms than during recessions for obvious reasons. I’ve also noticed that most successful people are American, Canadian, or from a small handful of countries in Europe and Asia. This is not because the Sudanese and the Malaysians, to give a few examples, don’t also have brilliant ideas but because their governments are too unstable or too corrupt to allow those ideas to flourish into successful businesses. In a sense you and I have already won the lottery simply by being born in the US as opposed to a third world country. Which goes back to what I was saying about the complexity of individual success and failure: a Malaysian can be intelligent, thrifty, and hard working and yet reap much poorer fruits of his labors than if that same man had been born in the US. Similarly, if a rich American kid and poor American kid have the exact same intelligence, business acumen, ability level, work ethic, etc. the rich kid will generally do better than the poor kid because he/she has more opportunities to develop his/her gifts. The rich kid will go to a decent private school while the poor kid will go to an extremely low quality public school, the rich kid’s parents will use their connections to help him/her network while the poor kid will have to build his/her own network from scratch, the rich kid will have more time to study while the poor kid will have to work to supplement the family income, etc. I could go on but the bottom line is Same Merits + Different Circumstances= Different Results.

I don’t know if Paris Hilton is happy either but I do know that she is materially better off than many who actually work for a living, and that that violates every principle of the American dream.

No need to apologize for the length of your post, especially given the length of my own posts. You want to make sure you’re addressing all my concerns, and I respect that.

FReegards

Okay, now I understand the Twinkie reference. I never said private sector unions were guaranteed to calculate accurately how far they could push the line; miscalculations can and do happen, as the Twinkies clearly show. All I said was that private sector unions have an incentive to moderate their demands that public sector unions don’t, which is why I don’t consider the former to be as big of a threat as the latter. The union for Twinkie laborers has now put itself out of business as well, thus eliminating itself as a political force, and for every Twinkie-type bankruptcy there are dozens of unionized companies who are surviving this recession because their unions know better.

I’ve Googled the topic using several different search requests, looked at pro-union websites, anti-union websites, and neutral websites, and I can’t find anything that says unions are legally permitted to use violence during protests.

If you’ve worked your way up to a better job than the one you started with, then I’m happy for you. Just please understand that a) not everyone who is willing to work can find a job and b) not everyone is as fortunate as you in terms of hard work leading to promotion.

“I read a lot of hostility and frustration, class warfare stuff in your post. Personally, I never go there and refuse to let myself do that to my attitude. It’s poison. It’s the dark side. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Feel free to add your own Yoda quotes.”

I don’t consider myself a socialist or a class warfare advocate, just a realist who sees the world as it is rather than how I would like it to be. I simply haven’t seen any evidence that the world works as you seem to think it does, where hard work by itself ensures success. I have seen people who have worked hard their whole lives who are still not getting ahead and I have dated a guy who has skated by on his parents’ money and connections, without having any particular work ethic of his own, yet he has more money than they will ever have. My ex, by the way, is a die-hard Democrat. Don’t ask me how he squares that with his self-interest as an affluent Jew.

I’ll admit it irks me that a pro-abortion atheist (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_faq#obj_q5) is considered the be-all and end-all of conservatism by some on this forum but that is a topic for another thread. If I am pessimistic about economic issues it is for 1 reason: I am in my early 20s. That is to say, I will still be here when the fecal matter really hits the ventilation device and makes our current crisis look like a walk in the park. Not to play the generational warfare card but my generation is the one that’s going to have to pick up the tab of this deficit, and that includes the tax cuts for the rich, which are not being translated into jobs for people my age, not even for those with a decent work ethic. There are 3 ways we can deal with the deficit while cutting taxes for the rich: 1) Cut spending by a considerable margin 2) Raise taxes on the non-rich or 3) Ignore the deficit and keep pretending everything’s fine. Option 1 is not going to happen anytime soon, not unless there is a complete overhaul of the leadership of both parties and all politicians channeling federal money to their pet projects are thrown out of office simultaneously. What are the odds of that happening? Option 2 would raise taxes on those whose financial resources are already stretched to the breaking point from the recession, and could very well spark a French Revolution-style uprising, maybe not now, but 10-20 years down the road. I’m pretty sure neither of us wants that for our country. Option 3, which seems to be the one favored by our esteemed GOPe leaders, would saddle the younger generation with an even larger tab than we have already. The time to cut taxes is not during a multitrillion dollar deficit.

“Just who are you calling rich? Anyone who owns a mom and pop business is rich? The guy with the gas station? Or any of those businesses around town, those are rich people? The guy with a Subway shop is rich? The electrician or the heating and air guy who wants to add a crew and grow, they are rich?”

Nope, those people are middle class, upper middle class at best, and are being crowded out by their larger competitors every day. I’m all for small business; the problem is when the government cuts taxes most of the tax cuts go to the owners and CEOs of large businesses who need the tax cuts far less, who are putting the aforementioned small businesses out of business, and who, coincidentally I am sure, contribute far more to politicians’ campaigns than small businesses do.

“Makes me wonder, where does all the hostility to ambition, to working hard and getting ahead come from? Have we so demonized the old work ethic that got us this far? We really do have a bad attitude to go with our sense of entitlement and our enhanced self esteem”

I’m not hostile to the value of hard work; I’ve just lost faith that hard work alone gets you anywhere unless you were born into one of the “elite” families, attended the “right” schools, and moved in the “right” social circles. Of course, all else being equal, a person who works hard will do better than one who slacks off. Sadly, in the real world all other things are not equal, and a person’s economic success is determined more by the circumstances he/she was born into than by how hard he/she works. If Paris Hilton had been born into a poor family she would been just another common tart. Instead, because she is a member of the elite class, she is fawned over as a celebrity and leads a far easier life than those small business owners you mentioned who actually have to work for a living, all without producing anything of value. Meanwhile, small business owners all across America, who have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into their businesses, have seen their businesses fail and continue to slip closer to poverty. The American dream is dead and both parties killed it.

I did read about Wisconsin and Michigan but they didn’t make a strong impression on me because 1) I didn’t follow them in as much detail as other Freepers. I wish I had more time to dedicate to reading the news but I don’t. 2) What I did manage to read still doesn’t compare to the US in the 1960s or what I have seen in other countries, either in frequency or intensity. Michigan and Wisconsin made headline news because they were rare; in countries like Italy and Argentina where these types of strikes actually are common nobody bothers to report most of them because they’re not considered newsworthy.

There’s quite a difference between public sector unions and private sector unions: namely, public sector unions’ employers have the capacity to tax. So, public sector union bosses reason, why shouldn’t we make outrageous demands? After all, the government can’t go out of business. That’s why I agree that public sector unions like those of teachers and prison guards are out of control and have to be reined in. Private sector unions, on the other hand, know their employers cannot simply raise revenue with the stroke of a pen, thus it is in their self-interest to moderate their behavior lest they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

In a perfect world there would be no unions, each worker could negotiate his/her salary with boss individually, and salaries would accurately reflect the value of the worker’s labor to the company. We don’t live in a perfect world. The playing field is not level. For instance, CEOs of America’s biggest 350 companies earned 231 times what the average private sector worker did in 2011 (Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/ratio-ceo-worker-compensation) I find it hard to believe the CEO’s labor is really worth 231 times that of the workers who are actually making the widget. Part of the definition of being a leader of any kind is that you have more power over your subordinates than they have over you. Theoretically, of course, a top-performing worker who feels he/she is being underpaid can leave for another job but if all the company’s competitors are also paying their workers less than the value than value of their labor (and they will be because it’s in their self-interest to maximize their own profits) where exactly is he/she going to go? The idea that the non-rich have the same opportunities as the rich is idealism to the point of utopianism. First you’d have to get rid of the natural human instinct of rich parents to provide the best for their children, e.g. a host of SAT tutors that poor parents couldn’t begin to afford, a job in management in whatever corporation he/she owns regardless if the kid is qualified or not, etc.

You mentioned self-interest as the primary motivation for human behavior. Okay, so let’s talk about self-interest. Right now the GOPe is telling me to put my trust in so-called “job creators”, who have a self-interested incentive in hiring as few workers as possible and paying the workers they do have as little as possible, to increase employment and get us out of the recession. That doesn’t make sense to me. Relying on self-interest alone is not going to get us out of this. For example, another poster mentioned that rich are hoarding their cash (as are plenty of non-rich) because it is in their self-interest, which is true. Yet if everyone does this, the economy will remain mired in a recession because our economy is so dependent on consumer spending. So sometimes the aggregate of all self-interested decisions actually leads to everyone being worse off, rather than better off. I’m not saying Adam Smith was wrong, just that his theory of the invisible hand doesn’t work in every circumstance.

I agree our educational system is a failure. I just picked up a copy of our local high school’s student newspaper and apparently we are adopting something called the Common Core System (talk about a vague name!) which has “removed the need of requiring the students to take the annual STAR testing”. The newspaper itself was proof of our educational system’s decline: spelling errors on every page and more articles on pop culture than on substantive topics. I graduated from that same high school less than 10 years ago and the paper was much better written back then.

I might also add that the rich have a financial incentive to employ as few workers as possible to reduce their labor costs. This is true regardless of how high wages are because 2 workers will always cost more than 1 (unless of course they are 2 illegals competing against 1 American citizen). Add that to mechanization and you have our current situation where there are simply more potential workers than jobs. Even if we closed the borders, stopped giving China a free pass on currency manipulation, and eliminated the minimum wage, all unions, and all unnecessary regulation tomorrow I doubt we could ever return to the employment levels of the 1950s simply because there is so much less work that needs to be done by humans.

My apologies for the length of my previous post.

I agree our corporate tax rates are too high but Google “top 10 personal income tax rates” and you will not find the US on there. The rich are, of course, free to move to any country they wish as long as that country will accept them but where exactly are they going to go? Japan, Canada, and especially Europe have more regulation and higher taxes than the US, Russia and China have repressive governments that require bribes to get anything done and deny basic rights like freedom of speech we Americans are used to, and, while many developing countries would be happy to accept affluent American immigrants, they are developing countries for a reason: repressive and/or unstable governments, anti-American sentiment, and a lower standard of living are common in third world countries. In short, the US is the worst country in the world to be rich...except for all the others.

The executive class isn’t the only one that produces. Isn’t the worker whose labor actually produces the widget also a productive member of society? Management plays an important role in the economy, to be sure, but to believe the rich are the only productive members of society, as you seem to, ignores the contribution of the working class (emphasis on “working”, I’m not talking about welfare queens here, just the working poor).

What “frequent disruptive strikes”? I haven’t heard about any strikes in the last few years. Of course that could just be the MSM covering things up as usual. But I will say that compared to some countries I have been to (e.g. Italy and Argentina) the US unions are downright amateurs when it comes to strikes, particularly the private sector. The Italian workers, in spite of their high wages and generous benefits, go on 1-day strikes for the sheer heck of it and the student occupation of University of Buenos Aires in 2010 lasted months. We haven’t seen that kind of radicalism in the US since the 1960s, and for that I am very thankful.

I agree that the deficit is a huge problem that should not be ignored by liberal politicians. but I fail to see how more tax cuts for the rich is going to help the deficit or indeed do anything except create more jobs in currency-manipulating China.

I never said it was Bush’s fault because 1) Congress and the Federal Reserve have more power over our economy than any president. It was Congress that passed fiscally unsustainable budgets (when they could pass a budget at all) and the Federal Reserve who enabled the housing bubble with its unrealistically low interest rates. 2) This crisis has been decades in the making. What we have now is the end result of decades of political mismanagement by Democrats and Republicans alike, each obsessively rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. So I don’t believe it’s all Bush’s fault (as the liberals would have us believe) or even all 0bama’s fault (as some conservatives believe).

Agreed. By the way, great article and posts. The consumer truly is the “forgotten man” of trickle-down economics. Without him, the economy grinds to a halt. Also, it’s nice to read an article that includes actual numbers and graphs instead of just an exchange of vitriol between progressives and conservatives.

“Also people don’t stay in the bottom quintile their ENTIRE lives unless they are losers, mentally handicapped, lazy, or liberal welfare parasites.”

You’re generalizing a bit there, FRiend. I have known poor people who were born welfare queens and I have known poor people who have slaved away at their jobs and still haven’t gotten ahead. Classifying people based on how much money they have is a classic liberal tactic; conservatives see people as INDIVIDUALS.

I know trickle-down economics states that deregulation and tax cuts will lead to job creation but WHERE are those jobs being created? Not in the US, that’s for sure. Even if the minimum wage were abolished tomorrow Chinese workers would still work for lower wages than US workers because cost of living is lower in China. Our federal government has turned a blind eye to the outsourcing of practically our entire industrial sector to China and to China’s blatant currency manipulation but China would not be so powerful today if executives had believed and invested in America.