Free Republic

Amazing. Anyone here that seriously considers themselves a small government fiscal conservative and votes for Bush is either out of it or a hypocrite.

Government growth has been much faster under W. than it was under Clinton.

The only balanced budget in the last quarter century was passed by Clinton.

You may not like the man, but the fact is that a Dem in the white house and a republican congress did good things. Bush has undone a good number of those things. His budget projections, deficit projections, job forecasts...everything his admin predicts about the economy has been horribly wrong. Why in the world would you trust him to fix things at this point?

Look past the letter next to the name for 5 minutes, look at what actually happens. You want to stand on principle? Fine. Stand on ones that matter. Fixing the budget, slowing government growth. Those matter. The letter next to the name is just a bunch of bull compared to that.

Ya know, Dean may seem "unelectable" to you...

But he's getting people who didn't even vote last time interested. And a good chunk of those people have decided to vote for ANY dem in 2004, because they want to see Bush out.

If Bush lost the popular vote last time, and now he's energizing more Dems to get going, that doesn't bode well for him.

And of course, if Dean does win (which is more possible than you'd all like to think), wouldn't that make all your attempt to "freep" the campaign look pretty foolish?

Perosnally, I'd love to see a Dean commecial that says "Paid for by the crew at freerepublic.com". That'd be fun. You guys could be like all the guys that voted for Nader.

In case anyone cares -

MoveOn had to limit voters to people over the age of 18...because this counts under federal rules as an actual primary (or something similar), according to them. A 15 year old liberal blogger found this out the other day when he tried to get a ballot.

So there may indeed be some sort of penalty for faking your info. Not sure if anyone will get caught or followed up on (most likely, it'll just get tossed out), but I figured I'd let you all know.

As for those that think this is just a "straw poll", MoveOn is prepared to give any candidate that gets more than 50% of the vote their full support, including their extensive funding support (in 2000, as I recall, it was close to 2 million dollars).

And unless tens of thousands of you signed up, voting for anyone but Dean, Kucinich, or Kerry is pointless. Those guys were top 3 in the actual straw poll not long ago...no one else has a very good shot at getting to 50%. Odds are, no one will anyway..it was a pretty close race last time.

Yup, nothing shows a support for democracy like stuffing a ballot box. But please, do vote for Kucinich. Sharpton isn't getting any votes over there.

But one question. What makes you think that MoveOn is communist? I've looked over the site, and can't find anything suggesting overthrow of the government or any of that. Do you have access to secret internal documents?

Oh, and seriously...the FBI hasn't come crashing through the doors of suspected communists since McCarthy was around. (And while I'm sure a few of you think he was a great American or whatnot, but he really didn't do anything about communism in America. Hoover did, but McCarthy just embarrased some lefty actors/film makers.)

You're right that the economic problems that we face today have been building for a long time. Some of these go back to policies Reagan implemented. One of the best economic texts I've read is Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips. It covers all of American history, and looks at how much influence the wealthy had at different times, and it also compared the economic policies of the internet bubble to other speculative bubbles.

One of the most striking things it details is the shifting of the tax burden away from corporations and the wealthiest Americans, and onto the lower and middle class. Right now, the government makes 3 times the revenue on payroll taxes that they make on corporate taxes. Companies like Halliburton and Enron didn't even pay taxes some years...they got money back. And the percentage of income paid by the middle 20% of americans is just about equal to the top .5%, at about 25% for both. Considering the middle 20% make something like 40-60 grand, that 25% is taking a big chunk of their income...the top .5% (people that make over 1 million dollars a year) are much better prepared to pay the 26% that they pay, on average.

Completely forgot the point about unionizing vs. a national political movement.

For starters, unions are national political movements, or can be. And I doubt that any national movement will work fast enough to save some of the jobs of people here. Altho I agree that there does need to be a national discussion on this, and preferably some action taken soon.

My feeling is that the democrats are generally going in one of two directions: towards the right (like Lieberman or Clinton did, trying to be centrists), or so far left they've become parodies of themselves, ala Jesse Jackson.

Kucinich is a stand up guy by all acounts, and he's got a solid progressive agenda...balanced budgets, improving the social saftey net, and protecting American workers. Too bad the corporations that donate the majority of money into political races won't touch him. He's got ideas that could (and should) by campaign issues (like NAFTA), but no one else will even touch them.

I figured I'd toss these 2 questions in here.

Please note, this isn't baiting or anything like that. It's a request for actual discussion on a couple issues that came up in here.

First, on the concept of "orgainsing" to prevent immigrants on H1Bs from taking your job. Do you see that as somehow different than unionising? Were you against unions to begin with? I'll agree that there are bad unions, but I don't think the concept itself is flawed. I'm curious as to what the people considering this plan of action feel.

Second, NAFTA and GATT were very bad pieces of legislation. But they weren't part of any liberal agenda. If you're against them, the only guy in the Presidential race actually talking about it as an issue (including Bush) is Dennis Kucinich (http://www.kucinich.net/index.htm and if you're wondering, it's pronounced coo-sin-ich). He's a progressive, which is sort of like a liberal. Some of you would call him a communist, but that's a tad strong. He's quite against those sort of free trade agreements, pointing out (correctly) that they helps multinational corporations at the expense of American workers, and (in the case of NAFTA, at least..I'm not sure about GATT) also work against democratic principles, since the corps can sue nations for enacting any law that may cut the profits of a corp compared to the laws of one of the other nations involved.

Also, please note that the "trade promotion authority" aka Fast Track authority that has been granted to George W. Bush will more likely bring about more deals like this, as opposed to ones that protected American jobs. Clinton was denied this authority by the Republican Congress. Personally, I think Fast Track is an awful idea, since it takes the Congress out of any trade debates, when the Congress is generally a better representative of the will of the people than the President.

Anyawy, that's my 2 cents. Flames will be ignored, actual debate will be responded to. I'm not going to call names, lay blame without evidence, or argue unfounded points. All I ask is the same in return.