Posted on 03/23/2010 4:56:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
So what? They are still bound to stay within the limits of the Constitution. We are not a Democracy, but a representative Republic. They are the represenatives, true, but they are not free to do whatever they D*&$ well please.
More like a Zot that glows in the dark.. for years.
(It's just a little Nuke, and French to boot, but sufficient for the purpose)
With this bunch, if it's enjoyable, they'll tax it. Golf, easy to tax. Running not so easy, but maybe a special tax on running shoes. They tax our guns and they tax our ammunition and then use the money to discourage gun ownership. (It was supposed to go to wildlife and habitat preservation). They could tax our range fees, targets, etc. I can see it now, $1/round $100 per visit to the range. But if they try to enact any of htat, the second amendment kicks in .. one way or another.
What the hell do you think we've been doing since the end of the Reagan administration? I'm sure the Chicoms, the Iranians and even old Hugo would be overjoyed.
Even the Reagan buildup was a blip on a general downward trend. The post WW-II fraction of GDP spent on Defense peaked at 11.6% in the early 1950s, and then settled down to aournd 8-8.5%, but dipping to 6.5% around 1965. The Vietnam peak was 8.9%, barely above the typical '50s fraction. The next low point was during the Carter Administration when it reached 4.6% of GDP. The much vaunted/maligned "Reagan buildup" only reached 6.0%, less than the pre-Vietnam low point. The fraction stayed only a bit below that for most of Bush I, "only" dropping to 4.6% (same as Carter era low) toward the end of his time. The minor cuts he put in place were expande by Billy Jeff to the point where the post WW-II (and some pre-war as well) fraction was 2.9% of GDP. FY 2009, including the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan expeditions, rose to 4.3% of GDP, below both the Carter and Clinton troughs. Meanwhile the non-defense fraction of the budget has risen to slightly more than make up the difference (Pre BO of course), with the total government fraction of the GDP remaining about the same.
Defense Budget Authority
No War Costs, Constant FY 2009 dollars (billions)
FY 2007 FY2008 FY2009 FY2010 FY2011 FY2012 FY2013
$455.9 $490.5 $515.4 $511.5 $505.9 $503.1 $501.3
With War Costs, Constant FY 2009 dollars
$628.5 $684.9 $585.4 $511.5 $505.9 $503.1 $501.3
Starting 2010, Obama's first budget, the war costs are rolled into the total
Thus while it might appear that the budget didn't drop much from Bush's last to Barry's first buget, if you look at the "No War Costs" line in reality it dropped over 10%, even allowing for some drop in war expenditures. That 2009 budget itself reprsented a cut in both war costs, and the rest of the budget. The 2009 reductions were in part due to cuts, such as program cancellations, that Barry made after Jan. 2009.
Nope, they were too busy, along with a bunch of smelly immigrants particularly from Germany, and Scandanavia, and to some extent Ireland, settling the Great Plains and inter-mountain west, along with Czechs in some places. A little later, Greeks, Italians, Russians and Poles took the places in the big cities those earlier immigrants had left. Lots of Chinese and Japanese also immigrated, mostly to the west coast. But the Chinese also built railroads from the west as Irishman built them from the east. Accross the praires it was said their was an Irishman buried under ever mile of track. In realty, there were more than that. The Chinese were working in rougher terrain, and so their were even more Chinese graves per mile.
I don't know, but for the most part they were demographically indistinguisable from the parents of our soldiers. Although the latter tended to be more rural, and more southern and western. But that was only a tendency, not a firm distinction.
An even higher fraction of those who fought WW-II were drafted.
Only 25 percent of the US Military who served in Vietnam were draftees. During WW II, 66 percent of the troops were draftees. The Vietnam force contained three times as many college graduates as did the WW II force. The average education level of the enlisted man in Vietnam was 13 years, equivalent to one year of college. Of those who enlisted, 79 percent had high school diplomas. This at a time when only 65% of the military age males in the general American population were high school graduates.
The average age of the military men who died in Vietnam was 22.8 years old. Of the one hundred and one (101) 18 year old draftees who died in Vietnam; seven of them were black. Blacks accounted for 11.2 percent the combat deaths in Vietnam. At that time black males of military age constituted 13.5 percent of the American population. It should also be clearly noted that volunteers suffered 77% of the casualties, and accounted for 73% of the Vietnam deaths. The charge that the "poor" died in disproportionate numbers is also a myth. An MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) study of Vietnam death rates, conducted by Professor Arnold Barnett, revealed that servicemen from the richest 10 percent of the nations communities had the same distribution of deaths as the rest of the nation. In fact his study showed that the death rate in the upper income communities of Beverly Hills, Belmont, Chevy Chase, and Great Neck exceeded the national average in three of the four, and, when the four were added together and averaged, that number also exceeded the national average. (from 11th Armored Cavalry's Veterans of Vietnam & Cambodia ( a good article with lots of "myth busting" information.)
Those "myths" were put out by the likes of Obama's then future mentors and Clinton's buddies, and Clinton himself for that matter.)
Where would that be? The Australian outback or New Zealand maybe?
The government will need scapegoats, and most of us will fit their bill quite nicely.
They don’t seem to be all that interested in raising revenue. They’d follow the Reagan example if they were. No, they want to “discourage” some activites, and encourage others. They want to break the middle class most of all.
8. Find some leadership, and not a politician.
But I agree with the "so many of us" comment, but that explains Jan & Dean, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles., even the Mousketeers. (I still drool over Annette) It doesn't explain Woodstock or the "protest movement". That latter was driven by the Communists and their fellow travelers, like Obama's friends and neighbors, Bill Ayres and wife Bernadett Dorn, and of course his minister Reverand Wright.
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A real riot, much worse than LA, Watts, Huff riots, etc, is a force unto itself. They might hear it, but it wouldn't really register. Or if did, it would matter to them in their maddness. Only using it would matter. And you run the magazine dry pretty quickly, which the one real problem with the shotgun as an anti riot tool. Still if you have two shooters, or more, some can have shotguns while others have ARs or AKs to keep the hordes back while the shotgun is reloaded. Everyone should have a handgun and lots of magazines. (Lots for the semi-auto rifles too). Even pistol caliber carbine, like the Marlin Camp 9 or 45, or even the HiPoint Carbine in 9 or .40 would prove quite usefull, if only because you'd need fewer shots per hit than with a pistol in the same caliber.(Uses pistol magazines too). But I have an M-1 Carbine for such uses, which has 15 and 30 round magazines, and they are cheap, while the ammo is not as expensive as most pistol ammo, unless you want some really fancy stuff. Probably, I'd let my wife shoot it, I have an M4 style semiauto, and a bit more 5.56 than .30 carbine ammo. Or maybe I'd let the older son in law use it, and the younger one can use the SKS.
Yes they were. They broke most everyone they held, as all of them would admit. But they did not permanently break their spirits. Look at the photos of the returning POWs. They came back with their heads helf high. (And they got to enjoy the reactions of their captors during the Famous (infamous to the left) Christmas Bombings.)
their little beast from the Book of Revelations cannot live without tax revenues,
As far as I can tell, the ChiComs don't seem to mind subsidizing the Beast.
John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account
By John S. McCain III, Lieut. Commander, U.S. Navy
I said, “O.K., I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.”
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