This idea needs to be taken seriously. There are basically 2 options 1) Wait until the student loan debt bubble bursts the way the housing one did and see the global economy collapse or nearly collapse. 2) Forgive the debt which will free up 800 billions in payments that will then go to other areas up the economy and actually stimulate it… Which option do you think is more likely to happen?

http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/26/7978532-familiar-refrain-wall-street-protest-lacks-leaders-clear-message

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/26/7970128-first-thoughts-none-of-the-above

Yesterday was the 10th Anniversary of September 11th and everyone and their brother was busy talking about where they were, what they were doing, what it meant for them etc… every news network and nothing but coverage of an event that happened a decade ago, it was impossible not to notice… I decided to go to “MSNBC – Or as conservatives call it LIBERAL MEDIA!!!” and see what they had to say about it and I saw this on the home page:

Most people’s gaze will immediately go to the little girl with the American Flag who clearly couldn’t have been born yet on 9/11/2001, but not mine. My eye went directly to the ‘headline’ that read “77 US troops hurt after Afghan blast” the Afghanistan “war” you may remember was our response to the 9/11/2001 attacks and our attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden. This and another “war” in Iraq which no matter what anyone tells you had absolutely no link to the 9/11 attacks other than both countries having people with brown skin living in them have raged on for a combined 18 years, cost 6,226 American soldiers their lives, and cost American tax payers between 3 – 4 trillion dollars.

While the Obama Administration has drawn down troops in both countries and managed to eliminate Osama Bin Laden there is likely no real end in sight for either of these “wars”.

I guess I am just trying to express frustration at the way 9/11 has been treated in both the public and political arena, while the real effects of it are largely ignored. If the intention of the terrorists responsible for the attacks was to disrupt the American way of life then they have succeeded. It is a decade later, we are still mourning over it, we are still fighting battles that have nothing to do with it at this point, and we are still scared of everything. The best thing to do would be to no longer acknowledge it in any large way and to end the knee jerk fear based responses we had to it in the first place.

Look at it this way, how many of you have run into a loud mouthed moron who can only fight when he has a chance to sucker punch someone? Probably many of you. What is the best way to handle such a person? Confront them to their face, wait for them to give up, and then ignore them… they will usually go away after that. THAT is the approach U.S. foreign policy needs to take on this… we have shown them we will hit back and be ready for them, now it is time to ignore them and let them fade into irrelevance. Until we do that they are the ones that can truly say…

Why couldn’t it possibly be that distributors and the other evil liberals holding this movie back just thought that a movie set in modern day but based on an industry that is a century out of date, appeals to a specific demographic only, and is based on a book that is so long that the movie has to tell the story in 3 parts was just not a profitable venture?

Shouldn’t Objectivists accept that they and they alone are responsible for the success or failure of their product… especially when there has been no government intervention as is the case here?

This is an unfortunate and common problem with modern right wing ideologues, they claim that self sufficiency and individual work is responsible for the success or failure of any venture… until things don’t go their way then they blame the vast liberal conspiracy in the media/academia/entertainment etc… instead of accepting responsibility for their failure. This is why this type of thinking is unsustainable when put into real world practice.

The point that I am trying to make is this: In 2001 at the end of President Clinton’s Administration there was a budget surplus of $127 Billion dollars. We had over 5 trillion dollars of national debt, clearly not enough to even put a dent in said debt, but could have been used as funding for a plan to invest that money (as I am not an economist I will not make suggestions as to what it could have been invested in but I assume there are plenty of different interest generating resources that would be good choices, if I am wrong feel free to correct me with verifiable facts) toward eventually paying off our national debt. Instead of investing in this manner however, the newly inaugurated Bush Administration gave everyone in America a tax rebate. This of course made the everyday person quite happy… they got a few hundred dollars to buy some Pokémon cards and the new Destiny’s Child album which led to a blip in the economy. Fast Forward 8 years to 2009 when President Bush left office the country now had a budget deficit of 1.5 trillion dollars and a national debt of nearly 10 trillion dollars. So over the course of 8 years (6 of which had the government under complete control of the Republican Party) the deficit increased approximately 110% and the national debt doubled. What decisions were made in that time that led to this?

Here are the main culprits:

The Bush tax cuts (2001)
The Afghanistan war (2001)
The Iraq war (2003)
Medicare Part D

The total cost of those programs alone was just under 3 trillion dollars or 3/5 the debt increase or roughly a 225% increase from the surplus to the deficit.

Fast forward another 2 years to the 2010 mid term elections… Republicans gain several seats in the Senate and one of the most massive shifts in the House in American history… based on promises of: Cutting federal spending, and reducing the deficit. The scientific explanation? Cognitive dissonance. Since I know science is not popular with most Americans I will instead do something that is; use a short quote that people know and feel can explain everything. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

Please bookmark this article and refer to it next year when you decide who to vote for.

Sources:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGqLx61MRY6w
http://www.usdebtclock.org/2000.html
http://articles.cnn.com/2001-06-07/politics/tax.primer_1_tax-rebate-rebate-check-taxable-income?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS
http://meetthefacts.com/2010/07/22/fact-check-sen-bob-menendez-national-debt-increased-72-percent-during-the-bush-admin-there-was-a-1-5-trillion-budget-deficit-at-the-end-of-his-term/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/24/paul-krugman/bush-tax-cuts-health-care-probably/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/30/nation/na-medicare30
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a “stupid twat” and Fox News has decided that “ITS NOT FAIR!” kind of like when I was 6 and my mother wouldn’t buy me the He-Man figure I wanted that particular day.

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2011/03/22/maher-calls-sarah-palin-female-vulgarism-stays-mum/

Here are some of the complaints…

“Widespread sexism in the media is one of the top problems facing women, and seriously affects women in politics. A highly toxic media environment persists for women candidates, and discourages all women – irrespective of political persuasion – from running for public office,”

“Despite the fact that women make up half of the population, we’re only 17 percent of congress. Bill Maher’s misogynistic comment about Sarah Palin hurts all women, not just Palin, and not just conservative women. By insulting her gender, rather than her platform or stance on issues, he insults women as a group.”

The whining gets cranked up a bit after that…

Terry Dougherty, editor of Women magazine, said “[Maher's] choice of words shows an enormous lack of respect for women. If his preceding joke had been about a man, I can’t imagine him using an equally derogatory term to describe a male. That type of language shows a lack of consideration toward women.”

Before jumping into full conservative “The whole world is against us!!!” rhetoric…

Matthew Vadum, Senior Editor at the Capital Research Center in Washington DC, said Maher’s insults spotlight hypocrisy in the media.

“Bill Maher feels he can get away with such jaw-droppingly offensive verbal attacks on Sarah Palin because virtually the entire media-academia-entertainment complex agrees with him,” Vadum said. “Clinging to their political correctness and disdain for her quintessentially American values, the left-wing cocktail circuit regards Palin as a punch line.”

Fox is then nice enough to lead the interviewee where they want him to go with an unrelated hypothetical question that shows HOW UNFAIRLY they are treated

So if a prominent media figure had made such a disparaging remark towards a leading female Democrat, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would the mainstream media have reacted with outrage?

and he follows along just like he is supposed to…

“If a conservative used that language to describe Hillary Clinton, we wouldn’t be hearing very much about Japan or Libya,” said John Ziegler, creator the documentary “Media Malpractice.” “If they said it about Michelle Obama, the media would be going 24/7 with the story.”

And finishes up by telling us how a particular women’s advocacy group didn’t over react to a joke (twice) and are part of the global left wing conspiracy to press and BE REALLY REALLY MEAN to them.

“I suspect NOW hasn’t come to Palin’s defense because the group agrees with Maher,” added Vadum. “After all, NOW didn’t have a problem with someone on California Gov. Jerry Brown’s campaign staff calling his Republican opponent Meg Whitman a ‘whore.’ NOW really ought to change its name to National Organization for Liberal Women because as far as it’s concerned conservative women aren’t real women at all.”

Poor oppressed conservatives.

http://www.passthebba.com/2011/01/freshman-senator-backing-a-balanced-budget-constitutional-amendment/

A Constitutional Amendment requiring a balanced budget… what happens when the budget doesn’t get balanced? Does the entire federal government go to jail? Does he really think he can be the first Senator since the Founding Fathers to call for a Constitutional Convention? Furthermore his case is so weak that he has to rely on an analogy, and a weak one at that to make his point:

“If the U.S. government’s budget functioned more like a typical American household, Lee says “the credit cards would have been “cut to pieces” a long time ago.”

He then goes on to say that “no program should be held immune from review” even if it is vital. Since he used an analogy in lieu of making his point with direct argument and example I will offer one in rebuttal in the form of a question “Would the typical American household look at cutting the budget for rent to save money?” Some things are too important to cut and spending time looking at them takes time away from areas that require greater focus, so applying a little common sense doesn’t seem to be out of line.

A good place to start on balancing the budget would have been the 3% tax increase on wealthy Americans that was recently negotiated away by Democratic law makers to appease their Republican counterparts. I know Senator Lee was not in office at the time and cannot be held accountable but I suspect he would have joined the rest of his party in resisting said tax increase.

If this is an example of the realistic solutions this congress intends to offer then a lot of the electorate is going to be disappointed.

Editors Note: I am trying a new writing style, if you have read anything I have written in the past, and you notice the difference please share your opinion.

Let’s have a look at how that played out…

Irish rescue talks in crunch, thousands protest

Well done Senator.

The Irish problems are very similar to those through Europe (Greece, Portugal etc…) and if we were to follow the suggestions of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform which is a “bi-partisan” commission designed to identify “…policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run.” or if we follow the advice of some of our newly elected teabagger congressman and senators such as Rand Paul what’s happening in Ireland will pale in comparison to what ends up happening here.

The good news is that there are other ways. Stay tuned for the answers…

I have seen too many of these things fall by the way side to be pleased until it actually becomes a reality, but for now I will be cautiously optimistic.

The scariest thing about this article is that 10,000 people have been kicked out of the military under this policy. 10,000! We have two wars and military operations all over the world and we are throwing people out because they like to have sex in the naughty place? Its time for America to grow up.

One last thing, whenever I write about gay rights issues someone always says something to the effect of “why do you care are YOU gay?” the answer is no, I’m not. In fact until recently I couldn’t name even one gay person that I know personally, and even the one I know of now I really don’t know that well. It is just a matter of doing what is right, and trying to move past a nonsensical, religion inspired issue that has no negative effects for anyone. Oh and you know who else is a heterosexual gay rights activist?

Henry Rollins

Just saying…