lol, you don't need an amendment banning the federal government from doing something. The constitution is a privilege system. It implicitly denies whatever isn't explicitly granted. Now, if only it were enforced by the courts that way without garbage interpretations that destroy that entire model by allowing anything under the "general welfare" clause and such...

I think it's funny that if it was under Bush's presidency, rougy's comment would turn into something to the degree of "only a dumbass Repub would think of doing something like this." Since he can't criticize his own party because he's a sheepdog, he can only muster a forced insult along the lines of: "well, those Repub... bystanders want... torture! I tell you!" Honestly, why are you so hopelessly stuck on this left vs right nonsense? They're practically the same BS, yet you worship Democrats after Vietnam, the Clinton stock market bubble, Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagall, the condoning of the same Fed policies and government expansions?

Forget about stupidity on both sides, you people always pick a punching bag who can't defend their position to make your own dumb viewpoint seem like the right one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/co2_fairytales_in_global_warmi.html

CO2 is a fundamental building block of life, and current levels are NOWHERE NEAR where they have been in the past. Moreover, the correlation of CO2 and Earth temperature is deeply flawed. It's far more likely that temperatures rise and fall in the short term as a result of solar cycles or some other phenomena, and that increased CO2 levels are a corresponding RESULT of temperature change rather than the cause. That's what gives the idiots that nice correlating graph where they can claim the opposite. A more detailed look at ice core graphs show us that temperature changes occur BEFORE changes in CO2 levels. The global warming crowd has it completely reversed that CO2 is driving temperature.

Moreover, the last century's warming trend has been a mere .8 celsius, well within natural expectations given the last 1000 years. I suppose the vikings were also somehow responsible for the even larger climactic swing in temperature known as the Little Ice Age from 1000 to 1200 AD? From 1940 to 1970, there was a cooling trend which led to a global cooling scare. We were all supposed to be frozen in ice by now.

The idea that mankind is capable of affecting earth's temperature is just laughable. If it was even possible to have globally banned coal and oil the last 200 years, the only thing you'd have accomplished is a complete eradication of 200 years of human progress towards cleaner, more efficient technologies like nuclear (which you luddites have also blocked while countries like China and France kick our freaking asses).

http://www.dailytech.com/Chinas+Nuclear+Power+Efforts+Surge+Ahead/article14911.htm

So what exactly are we supposed to do? We can't do nuclear because you boneheads don't want to recycle or store the voluminously small captured waste, you'd rather burn your fuel and disperse it into the atmosphere than put something in a single mountain for a thousand years until we jettison it into the sun. You herald wind power, which takes massive amounts of steel, land, and maintenance for relatively little power output. You'd have to cover an area the size of Montana with windmills just to meet TODAY'S domestic power demands. That's how bloody inefficient it is relative to nuclear, and unless you magically discover a magical material like steel that is way cheaper and 1% as heavy, it's going to hit a wall pretty soon. Wind is fine for the wind belt and rural areas in Iowa, solar is fine for the desert in Arizona. But to say that wind and solar can themselves provide even a majority of our national need for cheap power is pure insanity. It's pure insanity, and anyone who's looked at the numbers knows it.

Rougy, a lot of people prosper in this country as a result of one of their ancestors working hard and building wealth to pass down through the generations. Most immigrants here don't have anything to start with. I'm not sure I understand your proposed solutions. Surely, you don't mean to steal from those families with generational wealth because you're envious of the fact that some people are born into more ancestral wealth than others?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

We've had a form of economic fascism for a long time. Militarized, favoring the creation of a strong centralized state with a corporatist, government directed economic policy. Unfortunately, this guy is just an attention whore who is throwing words around without knowing what they mean. It's perfect fodder for the Obamanites to make themselves feel better, who have turned a blind eye to bailouts, the monopolization of money, debt-based money, the future effects of today's unprecedented reinflation, price fixed interest rates, welfare ponzi schemes that are going to explode, deficit spending on consumption twice as much as Bush... but hey, he changed the tax code a little bit.

Ultimately, Winstonfield, marriage is just a word and the meaning of a word can change to mean something different to different people. I suspect the word marriage will be adopted by gay couples to describe their relationship and be fully understood by the person to whom they are speaking. And there's nothing you or the church can do about that.

As for your point about the religious construct, I think you're being paranoid. A religious group is a social construct with built-in prejudices unassociated with the government (although they do get tax exemptions, which is wrong). A gay person suing the Catholic church is akin to a black person suing the KKK for denying them membership. It's an absurd prospect.

Government recognition of marriage for certain goodies is the problem. The SSA is a $50 trillion ponzi scheme that needs to be phased out immediately, it's Medicare promises have extended far, far beyond our future capacity to meet them. The IRS needs to be replaced with a VAT or nothing. That would make this and many other social inequities disappear overnight. Groups should not be able to vote themselves things from other groups. It is a prime failure of democracy that should have been permanently addressed a long time ago in our constitution.

>> ^rougy:
"Libertarian Logic" - two words I've rarely seen used together, and for good reason.


Oh?


I guess it escaped your purview that tax codes are not even on the list of why NOM wants to discriminate against homosexuals, or why any social conservative chooses to for that matter.
I guess "Libertarian Logic" is a euphemism for "missing the point."


Swing and a miss. The tax code is not the goal, it's the means by which the goal is accomplished. The religious want to push their concept of "marriage" and marriage itself by giving tax benefits to that particular union for which licensure is required.

>> ^jwray:
You're forgetting about child support, alimony and property that can be disputed before a divorce settlement can be reached. These are some of the protections gays are denied.

No, I'm not. There are people who have children and never got licenses. There are people who live with each other and share property and never got licenses. And their disputes/divides are settled in our court system regardless, or should be. It's mostly the IRS that requires licensure, gays can't get child or marriage credits without it.

Sorry your tax code logic is pretty flawed. If you're a childless couple it's really not much of a difference, if anything the married couple is more likely to get screwed come tax season.

How so? What's the point of seeking government permission to get married then if the tax benefit is negligible? Have a ceremony, swear oaths, profess love, print up your own certificate, you don't need permission from bigots to love someone or live with someone. Licensure is meaningless if not for the fact that it creates inequity by granting superior tax status to one legal choice over another.

If you do have children the system is set up to reward who ever has custody.

If you're referring to child support, that's restitution rather than a tax. Fact is, both parents will then lose their IRS marriage credits, but why would we want to reward/penalize based on marriage status?

As for children, the more dependents you have, the more government services you use, yet the less taxes you pay. We don't want to incentivize people to have children they can't afford by using money taken from other legal behaviors, like being single, being gay, or being childless. Subsidizing one legal choice with another makes no sense and creates tremendous distractions and infighting in this country.

If you're an abused spouse and can prove it,you'll have a better shot and getting custody of any children and recieving child support.


Child support is restitution ordered by the court, it's merely a transfer payment as part of an inferred contract when the child was born. Why are you even adding a child to my scenario? Stop trying to confound the clear example I am giving you. If a marriage is loveless, abusive, dishonest, or some other breakdown, the tax code says "stay in that marriage or we'll penalize you by revoking the subsidy we gave you for being heterosexually married." This is a carrot/stick system from a religious viewpoint that goes back a long ways when divorce for any reason was frowned upon and never seen as the best solution. And this is the system you still support, even when including gays as applicable for licensure. You're not going to worm your way out of this by adding a child and child support to confound the argument.

This is more of a tax dispute than anything. Government is only in the business of licensing marriage because we tax the heterosexually married less than we tax single people and gays, and they need licensure to enforce that. Seriously, all the people in this thread still fundamentally support a tax code that says "if you're a woman in an abusive marriage, we will penalize you the minute you get a divorce." If you truly wanted marriage to become about love again, you would create an environment in which government licensure was unnecessary.

Sorry to blow up your conservative/liberal pissing contest with libertarian logic, but I have a simple rule when it comes to taxes: the tax code should not be used as a social engineering tool to incentivize one legal behavior over another.

Never forgive the Democrats for Vietnam, never forgive the Neocons for Iraq.

>> ^NetRunner:
^ When is our hyperinflation coming? What's going to be the inflation rate that makes you call it "hyper"?
Just asking, so we can mark our calendars, check the inflation rate at that point, and then call you a quack for getting it wrong, or give you a medal for getting it right.


Within 5 years, if you don't see abnormally rising prices across the board on products, I'll virtually lick your boots. The amount of monetary expansion right now is insane, and NONE of it is going towards creating exportable production, it's all consumption. So you won't have to wait long before foreign creditors on which we've depended for years to reduce their buying of our bonds (debt), forcing the Fed to step in and buy them directly with pure inflation/counterfeit (quantitative easing). Deleveraging, liquidation sales, and kneejerk flooding into treasuries will eventually give way to massive price increases as a result of too many dollars chasing too few goods. I also predict price controls within 10 years, similar to what we had in the 70s.

>> ^rougy:
>> ^BansheeX:
My, aren't we young and gullible.

You just made the ignore list, fuckwad.
Say hello to Quantumushroom. I'm sure you'll find you have a lot in common.
And keep pretending that you're the only person in the world who pays taxes, or that all of your taxes are wasted on "entitlements" and foolish research.
It's really the only leg you have to stand on.


Quantumushroom is an inflammatory neo-con who parrots hypocritical fiscal criticisms and pro-interventionist nonsense. What has he criticized Democrats on that Bush didn't DO when he was in office? Other than a few social issues, nothing, yet he defends the (socialist) neo-conservative party to the last.

Question is, why do you want to force others to finance things they believe are inefficient and don't want to participate in? Public schools and retirement schemes would theoretically be very easy things have opt-outs for. It's not illegal to sell education services apart from the government, or manage your own earnings for retirement. I'd prefer not to waste my time trying to convince you how Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable ponzi schemes, you've already convinced yourself of the impossible. Yet you are adamant at forcing me to participate in them with you despite my preference (after an enormous amount of research) not to devote part of my earnings there. All YOU should be concerned about, is you and those like you who believe it will work between you. Whether I believe I can save and invest my money more efficiently than the social security system shouldn't make any difference to its proponents. And the same logic goes for this fucking sea slug. A politician could come to your door with any damn reason to want money, and you'd give it to them, we already know that. But you don't own what others have or earn, so stop trying to vote in a learned minority who has doubts.

Have you even been paying attention to the stimulus packages? These people do not fucking care about you, buy a clue. If they cared about waste, Obama would have used his veto pen umpteen times already instead of verbally admonishing earmarks and the undeserved bonuses begotten by giving billions of stolen money to idiots who drove their companies into the ground. If they cared, they wouldn't brazenly state it out loud that you don't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEfICUoWKBw

>> ^imstellar28:
As far as spending millions of dollars researching this for human benefit, well that would be quite a waste wouldn't it?


>> ^rougy:
But you don't know that, stellar.

...if the government did it, then we all would have the chance to benefit equally from the new technology, and that would be socialism, or communism, and that would be bad.


My, aren't we young and gullible. The government basically takes your money, by force, and then it's hands it out to researchers of its choice. Now, why would we do this? Why would we give the money to someone who didn't earn it and allow them to spend it? They have none of their own labor behind it, so there's no risk of loss to prevent the recipient from being chosen on the basis of campaign financing, friendship, or other conflicts of interest. Socialism expects the politician to be completely impartial and decide with more knowledge and thrift as he who earned the money, but that's an idealist absurdity. Research and invention in the private sector has always blown away USSR distribution models. Nobody spending their own money wants to create a product that utterly fails to be seen as valuable to others, they need voluntary purchases or they'll never offset the costs of making it.

Now, it's true, there's a lot of private funding towards highly experimental and directionless research at universities to "maybe stumble on something major." But philanthropy from wealthier members of society is sufficient for that as well. Priorities dictate that we pursue these interests when we've secured our necessities. Like hell we need to deprive somes families, with a generalized tax, from having a second kid or a better education or more food so that we can blindly finance public research on things no private company sees as having potential.

You should look at monster blunders like corn ethanol, a continuous misallocation of research money that never would have happened in the private sector. The massive subsidies it got made it profitable to reduce field use for food crops, thereby raising the price of food. Doh! Also turns out that ethanol is very inefficient, taking almost as much energy to create as we get out of it.

When oil does become too expensive, you begin to see private research and investment in companies with the best records and most promising ideas. Unfortunately, some of the best ones lose to competitors because their competitors have political connections and win forcibly appropriated money. The oil companies themselves get special tax credits. It's all been manipulated, delaying replacements by subsidizing the price of fuel. Not easy to compete with businesses that never had to convince an earner of a voluntary investment or purchase. I personally think electric cars are the future, with a nuclear infrastructure, always have. Nuclear power is very cheap and safe and independent, but our government has blocked new plants for DECADES. We are such a socialist, interventionist failure at this point economically and with energy policy, it is a disaster waiting to happen.

>> ^blankfist:
Freedom of choice?! That's crazy talk! Who will pay for the schools and the police and the fire department!


Please tell me you're not serious. Go research libertarianism and discover the difference between duties related to the protection of rights (police, fire, military, courts, some roads) and services within an economy (educating, insuring, advising, managing, delivering goods, entertaining, operating on bodies, etc...). Yes, we should be free to choose any product or service we want. No, we should not be anarchists without specific and very limited powers granted to a federal government. Why the hell would you want the government to forcibly appropriate money from you for services you do not wish to partake in? Should people who never go to public schools pay taxes towards public schooling? Should people who prefer to save and invest their earnings themselves be forced to participate in SS and Medicare ponzi schemes?

Umm, earth to dumb blonde, most Republicans are also socialist, they just pretend not to be. Bush approved a bill from congress that expanded Medicare to include prescription drugs, $8 trillion ontop of what was already a $20 trillion underfunding. The GAO comptroller general at the time called it the most fiscally irresponsible bill since the 1960s. Bush also refused to let banks fail, expanded the department of education, had a couple of unnecessary war adventures. Definitely a social conservative, but hardly a capitalist.

>> ^StukaFox:
"He came in with a recession" -- WHAT?!?!?!


Clinton's entire term was a dot-com stock market bubble whose inevitable and proportionate bust began to occur in 2000 when Bush took office. Greenspan was very loose with money as Fed chairman under both Clinton and Bush, and Bernanke is even worse. Not wanting the painful withdrawal to happen under his watch, Bush did what was politically expedient and shot up the veins with record deficit spending and artificially low lending rates. Greenspan price fixed interest rates down to a record low 1% rate in the middle of a recession and held them there for a year. That transformed the speculative misallocations from stocks to real estate, got consumers borrowing and spending instead of saving to produce, and the day of reckoning was effectively postponed and enlarged until Obama's term. Obama is essentially choosing the same reinflationary path, and it's really only a matter of time before our creditors become net sellers of our bonds and turn the game into a hyperinflationary nightmare.

It also helped that Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, which allowed much higher leverage and the securitization of mortgages. Ideally, we'd just get rid of the spiker and stop trying to regulate the drunken behavior, but Republicrats don't seem to think in those terms, they're quite party-whipped. I talk to Democrats who think Clinton decreased the national debt, social security is a success, Vietnam was a Republican war, banks don't create money, the dollar is still backed by gold, trade deficits are good. It's quite sad, just two socialist parties who spend all day trying to figure out who's more to blame while libertarians sit back and watch the country go to hell.