Recent comments

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Well the trickle down theory does work, but only on a very limited scale. If 1% of the people of a country of about 310 million people have enough money to employee people for their personal use, how many would they really need for their pampered asses, 10, 20 maybe 30 people, hired at minimal wages (less than today's current minimum wage, since they'll be able to eliminate it, and they would). So what could we expect 30% of the population working directly for the wealthy, for subsitance wages. The only other work necessary/available would be to provide services for common population. Again at subsitance wages. Trickle down economics can also be considered wage slave economics. We're not far from it now, as more and more manufacturing moves offshore, all were being left with is service jobs, whether its a clerk in a department store, grocery store, or McDonalds (all of which you can find in a Walmart), you get two things... diddley and squat (where do you think the came up with the term Trickle Down anyway?)

    N

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    The Butler did it.

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Smedley Butler was a man who demonstrated fearlessness. He was one of the very few people decorated with the Medal of Honor - twice.

    I only wish he'd realized the criminal aspect of war before he joined the Marines.

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    The Republican Party has a lot of faith in its talent for public relations. This may be their Achilles' heel.

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Well if the Republicans believe that gaining the Congress and White House is as simple as putting the current economy into a Depression while the Democratic Party is in charge, they also better have a plan for actually getting the country out, and out quick. The Democratic Party held on for so long, because they resolved the problems of the Great Depression, and alleviated suffering ASAP. The Republicans don't seem to have the ability or desire to help out the "small people", and it won't take much convincing by progressives to put the blame where it belongs. If it weren't for the Supreme Court, and the danger of a violent revolt, I'd say let the morons get what they're wishing for, but I don't think a Pyrrhic victory and schadenfreude is much consolation to those of us that will be threatened and victimized by the iron heels of injustice.

    N

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    What have progressives ever gotten from any Democrat operating at the national level? Distanced from.

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    What have progressives gotten from the Obama administration?

    Monday nothing

    Tuesday nothing

    Wendsday and Thursday nothing

    Friday for a change, a little more nothing

    Saturday, Sunday nothing

    By and for Tuli Kupferberg

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    It looks like Paul Craig Roberts wrote the same articles with different titles.

  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago
  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago
  • Daily Topics - Tuesday July 13th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago
  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    How low can you go? It will only get worse.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100713/us_nm/us_obama_poll

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Dear Thom,

    I sense that you are starting to lose some of your optimism on our country’s future. You will deny my words but prolific writing of articles and books can at times be considered an escape from reality.

    Since you have a radio show for three hours per day, for five days in a week, you must maintain some optimism for America’s future. Unless you reveal optimism, I feel that you will require counseling for your mental status. After this counseling the psychologist will determine whether or not you can adjust in our world. Optimism keeps you alive. If you would lose optimism in our nation’s future, I fear that the defeat may cause some serious imbalance in your life. Optimism will keep you in balance with what you believe and you can remain a fully functioning person.

    Please be on guard against some shattering of your optimism on America’s future. If you sense a loss in optimism, please wean yourself slowly, very slowly, away from your optimism and America’s future. Your slow weaning away from your long time beliefs will ease the shock that will follow and you will be able to survive a shattered belief system.

    Personally, I believe that the United States of Hell does not have any future other than to fulfill her manifest destiny of killing off God’s children through either economic and/or military means.

    Sincerely, Gerald

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Evidently the entire language of freedom no longer applies to people...only to corporations.

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    It was good to have Stephen Moore on and Tom handled him well but he's hard for me to take seriously even though he does write for the once-great WSJ.

    He's been on Realtime where he tends to talk over others, have a jolly time playing what appears to be a competitive game (rather than a rational one) and evading serious questions and contradictions in his own arguments.

    Teachers overpaid? Teacher or any other public sector benefits a personal effront to those making less? Give me a break. The illogic is enough to drive one to the brink of insanity. By the same logic CEOs should be being paid what teachers are because their salaries are insults to teachers. Clever Stevie, turning the progressive CEO argument back on lower-middle class teachers... He has no sense of proportion or scale and his arguments are ridiculously fruity.

    I suppose we should all be at the mercy of those who would like an anti-competitive captive job market because even living wages are an insult to those who don't have one ande the first one helped will hurt the feelings of the ones not helped. Nothing could be more wrong, seeing even one of the middle class get a fair shake gives the rest of us hope. That hackneyed tactic of turning people against one another in order to weaken what would otherwise be stenght in numbers is paper thin.

    I find him as irritating as fingernails on a chalkboard but what the heck, if that's all they've got...

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    If free speech means being able to advertise on TV, then someone has take my free speech away.

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Or perhaps you mean Intellectual Dishonesty as in pretending all parents are well enough informed and have the means to make the healthier choice.

    Cheese and crackers, there's adults out there that believe the healthy choice is going to KFC!

    N

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Intellectual Dishonesty, you mean like McDonalds advertising policies?

    N

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Children are very susceptible to advertising (way more than adults, I would guess), and so do need protection from predatory for-profit corporations who want to exploit this. Libertarians don't seem to ever have a problem with anything corporations do. if you don't like it, then go somewhere else or buy another product. Even if the corporation kills you. Still they should not be regulated in any way, shape or form, right?

    By being on the side of the corporation, you seem to be against the rights of parents and children.

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Plus, one other thing to consider is that a lot of people take their kids to McD's (hate to just pick on them) because it is relatively cheap compared to other restaurants, and fast and easy. And for kids who are at the lower end of the economic scale, that little cheap toy is a huge incentive because they most likely don't get nicer, better quality toys whenever they want. So there's more influence from them to their parents on where to go for dinner. I think it unfairly targets the poor for this reason.

    Parent always have the right to say no to their kids, but why make it so much more difficult with advertising aimed directly at little kids?

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    And I was responding specifically to the blurb, which mischaracterizes the libertarian position on this issue. Hartmann, or his staff, are being intellectually dishonest.

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    I know you didn't use the word "federal" but it seemed to me you were implying it, as though the big bad Government was hurting poor little McD's.

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    I did not use the word "federal" in my post. Reading comprehension fail.

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    No one outlawed taking kids to McDonald's or Burger King or Jack-in-the-Box. The recognition that enticing kids to eat meals that are not good for them by advertising this food with toys that are based on the latest movie and then enacting a measure to separate out the food from the toy is hardly going to infringe upon the "free speech rights" of corporations. If sales of kids' meals plummeted at these establishments, then you might have some kind of argument, or at least something to talk about.

  • Daily Topics - Monday July 12th, 2010   14 years 46 weeks ago

    Tonio, you obviously just read the blurb advertising the segment and didn't listen to the conversation or Thom's points. Anyway, it was not the federal government, it was a county. If people are outraged, then they can choose not to re-elect those who voted for the extremely unfair (?) no-cheap-toy-in-a-kids meal advertising, right?

    No regulation of any kind for any corporation, ever!!!!!!!!!!

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