again you are not listening to what I'm telling you and instead arguing with the person you think I am in your head.. Padilla and Hamdi? Sure, they are like Al Awlaki.. just like him in fact, there isn't a shred of difference in the 3 of them.. Oy Vey! you are literally bringing apples into an orange fight..
Hey, you're stealing my complaint about you!
They are all 3 US citizens. Apparently that isn't a similarity that means anything to you, however I think it's the most important distinction in this case.
Let me try this... I agree with the death penalty right?.. but, I don't know that I would agree that Bob Ward deserves to die for his crime.In fact, I would be completely against it.. I would probably even picket the jail.... but I damn sure don't have a problem with Ted Bundy getting to ride the lightning...
see the difference... Padilla and Hamdi are Bob Ward... Al Awlaki is Bundy. If you can't see why I'm good with one and not the other, then you're not trying hard enough or you just want to argue Bush-blah Obama-Blah, R/D blah..for arguements sake...
It's not like we, as a country, don't have 'hypocritical' views either.. Just look at Sammy the Bull.. he gets immunity from killing 7 people.. why? to get John Gotti....Why? Because Sammy the bulls are a dime a dozen, but Gotti? He's the mastermind behind them..
Padilla and Hamdi, they are criminals who did terrorist things..Al Awlaki is the mastermind who orchestrated,funded,rallied whatever you want to call it.. he was the head of the snake instead of it's body..There is no shame in killing him, there is very much shame in indefinitely detaining Padilla and Hamdi..
Ward and Bundy got trials. It's never been about the severity of what they did, it's about their status of US citizens.
I can't be any more clear.. you will choose to stay inside your bubble by clinging to the flawed theory that if it was Bush.. blah blah blah.. you will cling to that because that is how you react to everything and anything.. it's how your party reacts.. even when given your own policy from a president with a D after his name, you go against yourself and oppose it.. I do not mind being called a hypocrite, not at all..never have since I don't see things as black and white, somethings are for the greater good even when they are bad. It's the same thing we've gone over in the past, I don't like torturing people, but if there is a missing child or tickeing bomb, torture that fucker until he bleeds information.. you, otoh, live so staunchly in the black and white that you twist yourself into a pretzel for fear of being outed as a hypocrite.
well go on with your bad self..
So to be clear, you still oppose indefinite detention of non citizen enemy combatants, but you support the execution of US citizens if they are bad enough guys as determined by the President? I just want to make sure I understand your position as clearly as you will allow.
if you think McCain would have come up with comprehensive healthcare reform, then I finally understand why you voted for Palin and Rick Scott.. you'll believe anything an R tells you even when you know they would never, ever... EVER do it..
besides that, I'll use your own reasoning against you.. the Dems controlled both houses, McCain's plan wouldn't have passed the way he wanted either..
wouldn't have happened.. You would have been 1st in line with Gryff and Gordo on each butt-cheeks whining about people getting something for nothing. Rush and Hannity would have been crying afoul of all the brown/black people getting gov't assistance.. the chant would have been "Let them fail"... Just like it was with the auto baillout.. You would have been against helping people who got into the mess on their own.. you know it, I know it. Anything else would be hypocritical of you..
Then you would have been screaming 'free market' because the only way to fix the problem was to enforce regulation.. sure, a Republican regulating wall street HAhhaaaHA!
it's sure not as bad as it was in 2009-10... that's all I know.
You're not a president, neither is any pundit anyone puts up there..The ones you listened to were there to oppose Obama, which is why you listened, you wouldn't have heard them if they agreed.. You would have disagreed with Obama if he used your own ideas.. you would then be calling for the plan he did use...But You don't know the behind the scenes of what can/cant' and will not ever be done.. Your idea of a path could have worked out worse, of course we'll never know so you can claim to it would have worked because you know it would.. just like you to be on the 'safe' side of things..
There was only one path, altho he should have asked for more stim..he did what he could with what he had.. same as now, you can pretend your idea would have worked, but you would have put millions out of work and that would have destroyed the majority of us.
unfortunately we only have 3 sources of spending, gov't, private and consumers and when the latter two aren't spending, the gov't has to.. you can put up as many graphs as you want, the fact is I can 'tighten my belt' as tight as I want, but if there isn't any money coming in it doesn't matter what I cut I'm going to starve...
No one was spending.. gov't had to.
I said that I was going by McCain's platform, not your imaginary dream of him throwing his platform overboard in favor of a defeated opponent's platform. If the dems had rejected McCain's housing plan, then we would have had gridlock and nothing would have been done. I prefer doing nothing and not making things worse than spending a
whole lot of money to actually make things worse,
We both know I understand economics better than you, so although I appreciate your attempt to educate me, I'll decline the lesson that's already proven to fail in the real world. Frankly, Obama misunderstood the nature of recession. The financial crisis that we suffered was a symptom of the housing market collapse. We were already well into a recession when the financial crisis happened. And also well into a stimulus. We had already had a Bush stimulus in 2008, the rebate checks. By the time we were discussing Obama's stimulus in February 2009, we already had the data in on how that worked, which was; it didn't. We already knew that when we were posting on the Muche about the stimulus bill. It failed because households were in so much debt that this time they really did use the stimulus to pay down debt rather than spend, spend, spend; which had been the intent. This was because the US household saving rate was actually in the negative right before the recession, so when the recession hit, people started out in a deep hole.
So the Obama response to those conditions? More stimulus! Naturally it didn't work. And for the same reason the Bush stimulus didn't work. We were already too deep in a hole. All it did was add the nation's indebtedness to the nation's household indebtedness, so it made things worse of course.
The other issue was the Bush/Obama response to the financial crisis. Since as a liberal you may not understand that in capitalism, crappy firms are
supposed to go out of business. It kills me that for years the liberals had bitched about Wall Street and the finance industry, but when the free market was actually going to correct that and eliminate the worst firms and trim the industry down to a size that would fit our economy, the government came in and showered tons of money on these same bad actors. The more stupid your decisions, and more venal your finances, the more money you got from the government.
Lesson learned unfortunately.
Recessions are a lot like a hard freeze that kills the weakest plants, but as conditions improve, allow the the hardiest ones to thrive. Thats why job creation and economic growth is usually very strong after recovering from a recession.
Except this one of course.
We fertilized the weeds, and then are surprised that weeds took over the whole lawn.
Bush did a lot of damage before he left office with TARP and bailing out firms like AIG, but Obama, supposedly the smartest guy in the history of
forever, came in and double downed on the Bush bailout policies, continuing the bailout of AIG, bailing out GM, and spending the rest of the TARP money.
Probably the only effective program was the FED backing up of the banks, QE1. But even then, they sabotaged it by paying the banks interest on the dollars sent to the banks. Considering the low interest rates and uncertain economy, it made more sense for the banks to sit on the money and not loan it out, which choked off new economic growth.
This is just a small piece of what I think we did wrong, but you get the idea. We did exactly the wrong thing for this type of recession, just like the Japanese did, and we are paying the same sort of stupid price. FYI, the Japanese economy is still weak, almost 20 years later.
