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Aw, look, our own little Hitlerjugend came out to play
By adamg on Thu, 10/13/2016 - 9:40pm
Aaron Agulneck got close up to two of the three yutzes holding signs outside the Federal Reserve Bank this afternoon.
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Anymore info on who they are?
Names? Do they represent a group? They weren't handing out anything? No website Without more info they could just as well be trolls.
I'm going to doubt they're trolls
Based on my long experience of never having seen people pretending to be Nazi jerks.
Not so sure about that
15 years back, at an anti-gay-marriage rally at the State House, there were some guys in Nazi uniforms standing at the St. Gaudens bas relief, holding up anti gay signs. I asked, "You guys are with ActUP, right?" and I'm pretty sure one of them suppressed a smirk.
There'll be a point
in the near future where you might not have the comfort of saying that anymore.
My grandparents lived through the war and fled east when Hitler decided he really did hate Stalin's guts enough to invade. I learned about it very fine detail and I still remember the stony chill grandmother's voice and the thousand yard stare in her eyes when she talked about it. So it's not as much of an abstraction for people my age, especially from over there, especially Jewish.
For others...it was always an abstraction. More to the point, an abstraction that happened to other people.
And if it's an abstraction, what's the harm in using it for shock value? Why not draw a Hitler mustache on George Bush? Why not troll a little?
Don't get complacent.
#1: Falsely crying wolf is ultimately always negative
#2: You are creating tension and hate by trolling in order to draw attention to fill-in-the-blank
#3: You sound narcissistic and paranoid. You have no right to subject the rest of society to your paranoid fantasies.
As a Drumpf supporter
You clearly learned absolutely nothing from that.
LaRoachies?
The only anti-Jewish fools I've seen in the South Station area for the past few years have been LaRoachies. Maybe they realize that Lyndon is not well liked.
Speaking of Lyndon what is his position on Mr. Trump? Or is Lyndon actually alive? Sometimes I think he was stuffed like Jeremy Bentham and is stuck in some corner of an old building inhabited by grey stringy haired ancients frozen in time covered in dust.
All the signs of Lyndon Larouche nutjobs
I think you hit the nail on the head Daan.
Young smirking men with handmade signs
The preoccupation with the Rothschild family and the alleged Jewish control of world banking
Preoccupation with the Federal Reserve
Hanging out in Dewey Square handing out literature.
Anti-Jewish, yes, but who the heck knows what LaRouche or his followers really stand for. LaRouche has been all over the map in his "career.He could be for Trump or just as easily against Trump. Try reading anything written by LaRouche. It will give you a headache.
They usually travel in bigger packs, though
And typically with the skinny black guy with a Hitler mustache pretending to be Obama.
But, yeah, they are antisemites from back in the day. My first big news story, ever, was for my college paper when a bunch of them showed up at Brandeis - at the invitation of the student radio station, no less - and gave a talk about how B'nai B'rith had helped the Nazis round up Jews for the gas chambers. Probably not the best school to be making an argument like that, especially right after the showing of a Holocaust documentary, so a brawl broke out.
Well that makes a lot of sense
So B'nai B'rith helped the Nazis, did they? .This makes a lot of sense......if you are a LaRochie
I dunno
The LaRouchies I've seen were rather well organized with flyers and tables and cool arguments and more flyers and newspapers and posters and stuff. Ones I saw years ago was calling the Queen of England the world's biggest heroin dealer. I saw some over the summer with a big poster of Obama with a Hitler moustache. I have no idea what the hell they were selling that day.
These guys seem like they just want people to look at them. Drama queens. Probably don't even understand how the Fed works or what it does. Hey, for the record, I wouldn't mind seeing the Fed audited.
I made the mistake of
I made the mistake of approaching the Larouchies once when I saw a picture of :President Obama dressed like Hitler.
Confrontation is what they want and I was wrong to give it to them.
Does anyone in their group really believe any of what they're pushing? Or are they just face to face trolls? I am amazed that any thinking person thinks joining one of these groups is a good idea.
Trumpsters?
Donald Drumpf gave a speech today about the international banking and media conspiracy. Of course he never said "Jewish", but he used other elements of classic anti-Semitic talkng points. And yes , we all know his son in law is Jewish, and his daughter converted to Judaism. That hasn't stopped him from blowing his dog whistles to get out the Nazi and KKK vote
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-conspiratorial-picture-florida
Call the man by his name
You sound like a damn fool when you say it wrong...you really do. And more to the point...you make it a whole lot easier to dismiss anything anti Trump as petulant whining.
Drumpf Drumpf Drumpt
It is interesting that you would consider someone calling Drumpf by his correct original family name to be a petulant whiner.
Do you care to comment on Drumpf calling his opponents names, like Little Marco, Lyin" Ted, Crooked Hillary, etc? By your own set of rules, that makes Drumpf a petulant whiner. At least you are correct about that.
And more importantly would you care to comment on Drumpf's not so thinly disguised dog whistles to Nazis and the KKK.?
Really Roman?
What really bothers you is someone referring to Trump as Drumpf? Really? I personally find Trump's now daily imitations of Mussolini and Hitler to be far more troubling.
Well, I think most people
Well, I think most people when reading comments see something like Odumba - there is no need to read further. Same with Drumpf. Yes, it may be his ancestry name, but you know and I know it is not his current family name.
I disagree Patricia
How do you know Drumpf not his current family name? Have you seen the birth certificate? I want to see the birth certificate. Drumpf is his real name until and unless he provides a birth certificate to prove otherwise.
Herr Drumpf
He kept a book of Hitler speeches by his bed, according to Ivana. I wonder if that book is still there, you know, for inspiration.
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-ex-wife-once-said-he-kept-a...
With apologies to Godwin, there's an unmistakable
Hitlerian lilt to Trump's current "international conspiracy of [*cough* *cough* Jewish] bankers" and its unholy alliance with the Pointy-Headed Elites and Corrupt Media against his ascent as the sole savior of Life as We Know It on Planet Earth. Up next: the pernicious contributions of the Illuminati!
Would-be Groper-in-Chief Trump is going to lose big-league, to use his own fractured parlance. Ever the spoiled child, he knows he will have earned his drubbing, but will gutlessly blame the officiating. Tragically, the stakes are much graver than a Little League game: it's a historic and unconscionably destructive choice of sociopathic ego gratification over the good of the country.
We're going to spend the next fifty years living with the cesspool of newly-empowered hatred and ignorance that Trump has geysered over America. I think it's likely that Obama's last ugly task will be putting down the post-election riots led by heavily-armed skinheads, steroidal meatheads, and three-toothed Confederate-flag-waving dead-enders that this lying-with-every-breath, morally-bankrupt megalomaniac is now actively trying to incite.
Agreed: it's like when right-wingers say
"the Democrat party".
But go ahead and try to deny that Trump has cultivated white supremacists in this election. Those sewer rats are all above ground now. He'll lose, and they'll still be with us, feeling legitimized and empowered. Thanks, asshole.
Yeah, it's our fault
Has absolutely nothing to do with a certain somebody winning by a hair in '08 and '12 and treating it as license to do as he please to such an outrageous degree that Mass elected a Republican who explicitly ran on a platform of killing the Democratic Party's supermajority in the Senate. Because racism.
We had this argument before. You did not win it.
Vote Johnson.
a hair
exactly how many electoral college votes count as a hair?
Congratulations on your self-awarded trophy
Trump has spent his entire campaign directly and indirectly appealing to white supremacists. If you are unaware of how and how often, here's another award: the Head Up Your Own Ass medal. You'll like it: it has Pepe the Frog's picture on it.
Trump and his family members
Trump and his family members can't go a week without retweeting people who openly identify as white supremacists. They are openly courting racists.
Vote Johnson
Lol!
Vote Johnson you say?
Let's see. Eliminate income taxes. Privatize everything. No environmental regulations, no worker safety regulations. Let the courts take care of everything after the fact . That should work out just fine. Yup.
Trump is a racist, sexist, neo- Nazi blowhard but doesn't really believe or stand for anything except himself.
Johnson is a committed extremist who apparently actually believes the excrement that he and his pretend party stand for. Libertarians are just another wing of the Republican party.
What's the alternative?
Jill "here, let me graffiti your truck for you with anti-vax slogans" Stein?
Hillary "it's OK when I violate standing executive orders on handling classified because I'll get off scot-free" Clinton?
Johnson's far from the perfect leader, but he's an adult and he's not a criminal. The cognitive dissonance is all on you if you don't realize that it's that bad that not being a criminal is the bar you have to cross.
I can only assume you stood up and called for W's impeachment
when his office deleted 22 *million* emails when it was under investigation for its partisan hit-job on US attorneys, to saying nothing of its cooked-up casserole of lies justifying a war roundly described as the worst foreign-policy blunder of the last century, the pulling of the Jenga stick that resulted in the steaming shit-pile that provided the fertile soil from which ISIS sprouted? Just like Daddy HW and Sith Lord Cheney once predicted was exactly what would happen?
What, you didn't? There's a word for that. Hippo-, hypoc-, hibibibibibup: uh, two-faced blather.
Go ahead and burn your vote on the bong-smacking, foreign-policy-illiterate, fake-libertarian Boy Wonder. It's your funeral. Poor Bill Weld: I voted for and loved him as our governor, but I suspect he now knows he made a terrible mistake aligning himself with that hapless dope.
Here's an exercise
Tell me how I can vote for Hillary, Trump, or Stein in good conscience instead of rolling out the name-calling on Johnson. Or W. Who's not on the ballot..remember?
I admire the purity and rigor with which you have
convicted Clinton as a criminal. This clearly frees you to make the highly moral choice of electing, sorry, shredding your vote on a candidate who didn't know what Aleppo is and could not name a single other world leader. He sounds pretty good! Hey, he's a "libertarian", so we don't need a foreign policy anyway, right? I believe his plan is to wall us off from the rest of the world, which is very messy and complicated and would be better off without our interference.
Not to be too callous
but for the purposes of this election, I don't care what Aleppo is either. That bed's been made. Nor do I find much to admire about the rest of the foreign leaders out there today.
What I do know with extreme precision and clarity by virtue of having made my career in defense is that if anyone with a clearance who wasn't named Clinton handled their correspondence the way Hillary handled hers, no stream of bullshit excuses and obfuscations would save them.
And then there's the fact that while Trump panders to racists and winks at white nationalists, Hillary panders to socialists and winks at black nationalists. That's not better. Its just as bad, except in a different way.
Maybe you don't care at all about Aleppo,
but you know what it is. Maybe you don't care about foreign leaders, but you can probably name one or two. Those two things stumped a candidate for President.
I'm going out on a limb here, but I think we should hold any would-be Leader of the Free World to a higher standard than uHub commenters on that sort of question. I'd be in favor of a written test on basic Constitutional issues, too.
Constitutional issues, eh?
Like separation of powers, limited government, and rule of law? Which side are you arguing for again?
Go ahead and continue to duck the fact that Johnson
appears to be woefully unprepared for the Presidency, at the very least in terms of his knowledge of the world. You can press your case that Hillary is a criminal -- how many Congressional and Justice Department investigations came up empty? -- but her readiness for office in terms of knowledge and experience isn't remotely in question.
I'll take the modestly corrupt, extravagantly qualified candidate every time. It's the grownup thing to do. Voting third-party under our current system, with virtually no grassroots support at the school board, local, state and US Congressional levels, is sophomoric.
Quack
I'm not ducking anything. Nor am I denying that Clinton passes the threshold of being able to tie her own shoes in the morning or find America on a globe.
What I am telling you, have been telling you, and will continue to tell you (more for my own entertainment at this point...you're not budging) is that a president who gets runs on promises of free stuff and a record of being a hard left elitist would be more dangerous to America than a president who runs on promises of limited government and a record of limited government. Even if he can't find Syria on a map.
Yeah, I'm mostly here for the entertainment value, too.
I know you won't budge, either. I still think it's childish to vote for a guy who's polling at 6% so you can feel smug about a protest vote. True, it won't make any difference in MA, but there are enough voters with your same adolescent righteousness about Clinton's endlessly yet futilely prosecuted alleged crimes to potentially throw a close election to a monster who represents an existential threat to our democracy.
I don't expect you to grow up, but I truly hope for the sake of the country that young voters outside of deep-blue states do when it comes time to pull the lever.
A good laugh indeed
I'm positively in stitches when I imagine (and sometimes even recollect) the exact same words coming out of your side about Obama/Romney, Obama/McCain, and on and on.
I was never going to vote for Hillary, dude. I don't vote for socialists who assure me that they know what's best for me.
Yes, the two major-party candidates: they're
pretty much the same. I was ready to vote for McCain till he picked Palin as his running mate, blanched at the prospect of that pathetic idiot taking over were something to befall him, reluctantly voted for Obama. Obama over Romney was a much easier choice: Barry had already demonstrated a steady hand at the wheel, and all Romney offered was more risible trickle-down bullshit.
Kids these days, they know better: vote for the guy with a snowball's chance in hell at winning, maybe throw a few close states to Trump. That's the way to effect positive change for our democracy!
I'm old enough to remember Anderson helping Reagan get in, Nader doing the same for W. I vote with my conscience, but with pragmatism. Voting for Johnson is like wishing the world were a better place. It's a lovely dream, but if you're not backing up that dream with the hard work necessary to seriously craft a third way, it's just the brilliant idea you write down after the fifth bong hit, but is an indecipherable scrawl the next morning.
Off to the margins again
Did it ever occur to you, O Elder Statesman of the Forums, that a little pain now is better than a big blowup later? I'm very consciously referring to your nightmare scenario of Trump getting a few states spoiled his way as a little pain now.
I say this out of the simple observation that politicians in their echo chamber down in DC don't quite seem to understand that they aren't doing a good job. They're signing poorly negotiated treaties, they're inflating public debt much faster than the growth rate of the economy, they're imposing larger and larger compliance costs on American companies, and even when to all outward appearances they're falling flat on their faces, they have the nerve to tell us all that they know best. Validating that sort of attitude by voting for the same old thing is just not something I can bring myself to do, and I honestly think that casting a vote like that in any state, not just a solid blue one, will just send a signal that it's OK to keep the same problems festering. Like you said in your earlier post, what we got ain't pretty at its root.
I'll add that If Trump weren't such a nut, but saying exactly what he's been saying minus the twitter BS, he'd be winning by double digits. Because about 75% of what he's saying isn't wrong. And about 75% of what Hillary is saying isn't right.
Let's continue
down-thread.
Johnson is an adult??
Nah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXhR41lsEJY
Cognitive Dissonance
As you would say,
.
You think Hillary Clinton a criminal, yet she has not been arrested, tried, or convicted of anything, despite Republicans working overtime for many years at accomplishing just that.
Believe it or not Roman, in the USA, for someone to be defined as a criminal, they have to be arrested, tried , and convicted. Then and only then , can you call Hillary Clinton a criminal. You clearly hate America, hate the Constitution, and hate the rule of law.
Clinton is a very good choice for president and she's going to win. Trump, Stein, and Johnson are all frauds, and none of them will be president.
Well if you want to be technical
Nixon wasn't a criminal either.
Then again...maybe you should just mentally insert a 'should be' or 'ought to be' where appropriate instead of pretending you've made a clever point with a word game.
Clinton is a terrible choice. And she's not even the best of the bad choices. If the Republicans had nominated a squashed cockroach, she'd be down by double digits.
Well, if you want to be constitutional...
Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79 (1915),[1] was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that:
A pardoned person must introduce the pardon into court proceedings, otherwise the pardon must be disregarded by the court.
To do this, the pardoned person must accept the pardon. If a pardon is rejected, it cannot be forced upon its subject.
A pardon carries an "imputation of guilt", and accepting a pardon is "an admission of guilt."
Nixon and Ford and their lawyers all knew this.
As for another Republican candidate, this is pure speculation on all of our parts but I see no way in hell HRC would be down double digits against Ted Cruz, the Republican runner up, nor Rubio for that matter.
Electoral margins
Barack Obama's popular vote margin in 2008 was 7.27%. That is not a hair. That is about middle of the road for presidential victory margins. In modern times, it's practically a landslide.
Other modern presidents elected with slimmer popular vote margins:
Bill Clinton, 1992, 5.56%
George W. Bush, 2004, 2.46%
Jimmy Carter, 1976, 2.06%
Richard Nixon, 1968, 0.70%
John Kennedy, 1960, 0.17%
And let us not forget:
George W. Bush, 2000, -0.51%
Sorry, Roman, the facts of history are not on your side in claiming that Barack Obama won by an unusually slim margin. Nor do the facts of history support your assertion that he conducted himself outrageously. Your boy W has him beat by a country mile on both counts.
Are you going to bake me a cherry pie?
Because you've certainly been cherry picking.
Clinton in 1992 won a plurality of the popular vote, coming in at a grand total of 43% of the popular vote. He then proceeded to try to ramrod HillaryCare down the public's throat and promptly got himself a Republican Congress in 1994. Perfect example of treating statistical noise as a sweeping mandate and having it handed back to you. Incidentally, Obama got himself a Republican House in 2010 for much the same reasons, as I said.
Remind me again what it was the W tried to push through in 2001 or 2005 after having been barely elected and barely re-elected? The Iraq war isn't a particularly good example, I'll warn you, because he actually went to Congress for that, and got approval. Yeah, yeah it wasn't technically a 'Declaration of War,' but he wasn't operating in his own little vacuum either.
Jimmy Carter didn't really have any big transformational agendas in his administration so that kind of makes my point for me. And all of Nixon's big accomplishments (EPA, diplomacy with China, etc) weren't party-line votes. He had a Dem Congress, so he had to get opposition buy-in and compromise.
Kennedy squeaked by. Cough cough Chicago. And he had a friendly Congress. Unfortunately he did not live to see "his" signature accomplishments to fruition and much of the stuff he gets credit for he didn't carry through himself. And it was slow. And I'm told that things like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts aren't exactly a done deal either.
And of course, you've cleverly elided the big elephant in the room. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won a narrow majority of the vote (50.7% to 41.0%) and won re-election in a landslide with 58.8% to 40.6%. And famously worked very well with one obscure Democratic Party politician named Tip O'Neill from some backwater state in the eastern part of the country.
Kid, lemme explain how this works
You claim Obama won by a hair.
I go to the list of presidents and sort by popular vote margins.
I write down the modern presidents who won by less of a margin.
You need a better dictionary if yours says that's "cherry picking."
And, yes, the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war was a radical departure from all previous US foreign policy. You should read up on it. You might be surprised.
Obamacare, on the other hand, was a very middle of the road policy, very similar to the health care policy proposed by Republicans in 1993 as a counter to Hillarycare, very similar to the Romneycare enacted in Massachusetts by a Republican governor. There's nothing radical about it.
And, since you bring him up, Reagan was a disaster for this country.
Apples, then?
No, this is how it works: You bring up all the presidents that won by less. I tell you exactly how they didn't comport themselves the way Obama has, with the exception of Clinton, who got the same pushback. And I give you an example of a bigger winner who still managed to be a bigger consensus builder.
You then say the Bush doctrine was a radical departure. I never said it wasn't. What I did say was that it was done through the democratic process with debate and congressional approval; not a case of dictating terms the way Obama famously declared he would shortly after his inauguration.
Also, how exactly was Reagan a disaster? Was it the time he surrendered to the Soviets? Or was it the time he let social security go bankrupt instead of willing to set aside ideology and compromise? Or was it the time when he rounded up and deported 3 million illegals instead of granting them amnesty? I might agree with you a little on the last one.
How do you like them apples?
You appear to be very
You appear to be very intelligent.
Reagan was a weak, corrupt man
-Reagan's administration supplied weapons to America's enemies, supplying Iraq with chemical weapons, which were used against civilian populations, at the same time he was illegally selling arms to Iran. These atrocities were a major factor in later trouble in the region.
-Reagan caved repeatedly to the demands of terrorists, encouraging the enemies of America. He provided weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages, did nothing when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut besides run away, and did nothing when an Iraqi fighter jet fired upon the USS Stark.
-Reagan's administration funded terrorism in Afghanistan, destroying a country in process of modernization and leading directly to the creation of Al Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden was on Reagan's payroll.
-The Reagan administration was the most corrupt in US history. 138 Reagan administration officials were investigated, indicted, or convicted of crimes, including his Secretary of the Interior, Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, and Assistant Secretary of State.
-Reagan tripled the national debt in eight years. Fiscally, his was an administration of colossal failure.
-Reagan's incompetence in economic management drove unemployment above 10%
-Reagan's financial deregulation lead to the failure of 747 different financial institutions
-Reagan's administration threw hundreds of thousands of mental patients out of hospitals and onto the street
-Reagans lack of any moral core led him to support Apartheid in South Africa long after it was on the decline and to keep denying funding for AIDS research long after it was clear there was an epidemic underway
-Reagan's administration financed its illegal overthrow of a democratically elected government in Nicaragua through smuggling cocaine into the United States, leading directly to the crack epidemic. Guns went down, and coke came back, in the same planes.
-Reagan was responsible for more than 50,000 murders by the Contras in Nicaragua. He claimed these Contras were the "moral equivalents of our founding fathers," but they raped and murdered nuns.
Reagan deserved to die in jail. He was a weak, corrupt, evil man, and if there is a hell, he is there.
What is
Johnson?
I, I, I...
I just don't feel comfortable explaining that to someone whose nick is bulgingbuick.
I heard that guy Al Leppo
had a Johnson problem. Tremendous.
Yooge problem
Yooge.
Ok, how about...
You don't like "Drumpf", the name of his immigrant ancestors? OK. How about Bumph? Look it up.
I'll call him Drumpf
if you start referring to the current president exclusively as "Barry" or by his full name, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, with that exact orthography.
Today Trump becomes Drumpf. Tomorrow Jon Stewart becomes (((Jon Stewart))). This shit is playing with fire. It really is.
Ok Romie, we have a deal
Start calling him Drumpf as you promised.
I have no problem calling Obama "Barry". Apparently he called himself Barry at one point in his life. I also have no problem calling him Barack Hussein Obama. I'll even capitalize it as you did. "HUSSEIN". I know the name "Hussein" makes you cower in fear, but it doesn't scare me. It's his name. According to the internet, Hussein is an Arabic word that means good or handsome. I think President Obama is both good and handsome.
I look forward to all your future posts about Drumpf, not Trump.
HUSSEIN!
HUSSEIN IN BIG SCARY CAPITAL LETTERS! (Scary only if you are an Islamaphobe). Shame on you Roman for thinking you are going to scare anyone by using Obama's middle name.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
Remixed: Insane Anglo Warlord
IT MUST BE TRUE!
ugh this is revolting, all of it
we had a president named after tom hanks friend in castaway? NO THANK U
Only "References" and "Recommended Videos" in their flyer
I got one of their flyers. It's just a tri-folded 2-sided letter, but they paid the copy house for the folding.... The flyer moves from an intro to the Fed Reserve to blaming Jews for everything bad in the world (seriously). They don't name themselves or send anyone to a single website (so probably not Larouche, I think), instead they list References and Recommended Videos.
The approach reminds a bit of "creation science", a completely different topic but one where the advocates insist on referencing facts and research (typically their own bunk).
"they list References and Recommended Videos"
Care to share any of them with Uhub nation?
bad scan.... "they list References and Recommended Videos"
This scan is marginally good enough to read the URLs. Couldn't find an anon freebie pdf host and didn't want to include actual links....
https://postimg.org/image/f4a1rys4x/
Speaking as a Jew
I'd like to know where can go to claim my economic weath and powers of social control. I've been told i have these things yet my bank account is thin and I can't even control telemarketers from calling me, let alone the media or governments.
Anyway, if these people would be so kind as to let know where i can go to prove I'm Jewish so I could collect my riches and power, I'd be much obliged.
Well, that's what you get
For always missing the meetings. I'll secret mail you the next time and place.
I knew it.
I knew it.
Come on...not even trying
That's what you get for not wearing your horns. Them things pick up the signals, you know.
Grounding
You also need your bag of gold around your neck to ground the signal, otherwise it just comes in fuzzy.
Horns?
Shofar, shogood!
Now this is a first
A winning comment from Swirly on a Friday night. Kudos.
Ya I know
Similar to your issue, I'm waiting for my copy of the "Gay Agenda" to arrive in the mail. But it's been ~24 years now since I came out soooooo I think it got lost in the mail.
Psssh, that's nothing
You may have the riches and power, but we gay folk have the agenda. You know, the one to destroy America's morals?
One on the left
disguised as a panhandler's sign.
I mean, really
They really need to get better at making signs. I mean, who has the time to stop and read all that nonsense? At the very least, it should be a very short message that grabs the passer by and can be read in the blink of an eye.
The bad sign is a "good sign"
Totally agree with you Neal. Obviously the fact that they can't get a decent marketing person to help them tells you that they are so nuts that no one will work with them to craft a coherent message.
Better signs, you say?
I would imagine Doug B is looking for work these days. He paints a fine sign.
Federal Reserve
There are legitimate concerns about the central banks, but way too late. I think the US economy might now be dependent on this situation, so I'm not going to call for it to be abolished.
If these demonstrators actually wanted to criticize central banks, they should've left off the anti-Jewish message. That instantly discredits the demonstrators in many or most people's minds. And discredits their central bank message.
Where did they get the Halloween outfits? The one guy is going as a Mormon missionary? The Russian costume is half-hearted.
I disagree and agree
I totally disagree with this insane idea that the Jews are somehow controlling us for some world domination purposes, but I do agree that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation that is enslaving Americans with debt and there are evil people of all nationalities allowing it to happen.
So teach the controversy?
Step away from the tin foil, Art.
Not how I see it
It's strange, but everyone I know who has too much debt (aside from student loans) simply buys more crap than they can afford. And that's the Fed's problem how?
What in the world are you talking about?
Republican tax cuts for the rich, bringing us to the lowest tax rates in the post WW2 era are the number cause of national debt. The Fed has nothing to do with it.
From basement -
Mom have you seen my poster board?
Mom - Dad used it last week for his Hillary for Prison poster.
Continued from above.
Some of the anger that Trump has tapped into is legitimate. Plenty of voters are deservedly angry at how globalization has left them behind -- I have many relatives who fall into this category -- how all the manufacturing jobs went away. There's an argument to be made that tighter border controls are a good idea, but most of the jobs that immigrants are taking are ones that Americans don't want to do or can't: ask a restaurateur how many native-born Americans show up the next day after a washing dishes on a busy Friday night. The real goal there is inciting xenophobia and bigotry, a tried-and-true right-wing trope.
I don't know how you get the toothpaste that is the exodus of low-skilled jobs back into the tube. But Trump's 18th-century mercantilism is an absurd answer: the damage of trade barriers to the American economy would dwarf the value of bringing back a few low-skilled jobs. The difficult answer is that we have to transform our education system to something more like Germany's, where there's a track to train kids for the kind of highly-skilled manufacturing jobs that are harder to outsource. Neither candidate is truly addressing that problem, but Trump's proposed fixes are hopelessly naive and backward.
Add to that his tax plan, trickle-down on steroids. By any educated analysis, it's a recipe for gigantically ballooning the debt and shoving us into recession.
I'm a hardcore liberal, so even if I believed that Hillary were the base criminal that 20 years of right-wing smearing have tried to make her out to be, I'd still vote for her on the Supreme Court nominations she would make. I expect her to face the same kind of obstructionism from Congress that stymied Obama's agenda, but the legacy of those choices will far outlive her administration. Imagine Citizen's United being overturned, crimping the ability of the Kochs, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and the NRA to buy local, state, national candidates. Do you really want to see religious-extremist prejudices against gay rights enshrined into law? How do you feel about the ongoing rollback of voting rights?
So I don't agree with your 75/75 take on who's right here. I expect Trump to get drubbed, but the legacy of Trumpism is going to be with us for a long time. My fear is of the next right-wing candidate in 2020 or 2024, someone who will wrap Trump's cuckoo economic policies, hostility to government institutions that protect the poor and the middle class, aggressive disdain of a free press, suicidal global-warming denial, and hateful white nationalism in a much more palatable package. When that guy gets elected, we will all be well and truly fucked.
Stop squeezing the toothpaste, for one
Signing free trade deals with places that have crazy low prevailing wages while simultaneously raising the legal wage floor here is not a recipe for success no matter how it's sliced. That much is not old time mercantilism.
Bringing in more folks from places without as strong of a sense of rule of law as we have here to open up a black market of off-the-books labor isn't a recipe for success either. And it's more than a little disingenuous to say that Americans won't do that work while keeping the stream of cheap labor flowing. Cut off the source and wages will rise by themselves to the point where Americans will do the work, or else get jobs making and maintaining robots to do that work. I'm simplifying only slightly, but last I checked, supply and demand still worked the way I think they do.
You're not required to agree with my split. You're only required to acknowledge that the leadership of those government institutions you liberals revere so much has had less than stellar results and has produced some abject failures. For some fundamental reasons. That Trump happens to have identified correctly, if crudely, and Hillary is in official denial about.
It is no longer possible to reverse the tide of globalization.
You could build 18th-century trade barriers to prevent American-based multi-nationals from outsourcing those jobs, only to see their flight to countries without such restrictions. We spent the last 40 years building the global infrastructure that makes the movement of unskilled labor to the lowest-cost location possible. That cannot be undone. The only solution at this point is to cultivate an economy that includes highly-skilled manufacturing jobs.
Tech-driven automation has eliminated an order of magnitude more jobs than outsourcing, and that trend will only get worse. Imagine several million truck and taxi and limo drivers getting replaced by self-driving vehicles: that's ten years away at most. That's a tough nut to crack, but in the face of that reality, throwing up trade barriers is like trying to piss up a rope.
Republicans like to rail against the damage of immigrant labor while conveniently exploiting it for their own profit, Exhibit A being Trump himself, also an outsourcer of manufacturing jobs. Democrats, despite their cozy ties with Wall Street and big business, somehow seem to fight occasionally for things that help middle-class and poor people, like expanded healthcare and a living wage. I grew up poor but am now a comfortable two-percenter; my status there owes a lot to Democratic programs like work-study jobs and cheap loans to help afford a good education, the mortgage-interest deduction, and the like. I'm not one of those I-got-mine, up-yours types. I still trust the left to do a better job at reversing the hollowing-out of the middle class than the right, and despite being a privileged straight white man, I'm firmly in their camp on social issues.
(Ugh, I just noticed the Johnson is a climate-change idiot, wants to build more coal-fired plants and basically do nothing to reduce carbon levels. Another deal-breaker.)
Quack again
If you want to sell to a rich country from a poor country, you have to cross the trade barrier between if it exists. If it costs more to do that than manufacture in your market...
What gets lost in the usual dismissive talk about trade wars and protectionism is that free trade is a wonderful builder of overall wealth for all participants only when they're at roughly the same level to start with. Free trade with Western Europe is a no-brainer. Free trade with Canada, Japan, Australia, is a no-brainer. Free trade with places where there are no labor laws and the prevailing wage is pennies on the dollar to here is nonsense. You're right that that's the road we've gone on. You're wrong in that we can't do anything about it.
Automation is one of these things that gets overblown. When self-driving cars come, they will be a niche market for some very fundamental reasons. It'll be an even smaller niche in the delivery and goods transportation industry for even more of those same reasons which all boil down to the fact that a truck driver doesn't just drive a truck. So it'll be a nice slow transition like these things usually are.
See you and I have a fundamental philosophical difference about the purpose of government programs. You seem to view it as a buttress against the forces of the cruel harsh world that no one alone can face. I view it as temporary support for people who for one reason or other can't stand on their own for the time being.
That's why you can tell me with a straight face that things like the mortgage interest deduction (wherein renters in cities subsidize buyers in suburbs through their taxes) is a good social program to support the middle class. Whereas I will tell you with a straight face that if the deduction goes away, property values and/or interest rates will drop to make up the difference because the number of buyers and sellers will stay the same, to first order at least.
Ugh. You're an alarmist, aren't you? Well...you can pry my winter thermostat setting of 76F from my cold--err warm!--dead hands!