So this is why America is so "Loved"

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: So this is why America is so "Loved"

BadJuju,

How do you insert a file into a thread? Can it be done? I wanted to attach two charts but couldn't do it. Cut and paste? It doesn't always work for me.
Any help would be appreciated.

If one edits in Word and pastes into iTulip, at least, I get a lot of extraneous characters in the paste. With a long post, I open a second browser window to iTulip and see that it loads, before I preview my post. If the second window doesn't load, I just sit on the post until I know the system is working.

If you have a graph from somewhere else, convert it into a .png file in your computer. Then go to Manage Attachments down below the Message window and click Manage Attachments. That will allow you to import a png or pdf file, etc. Then when you click "upload" and it loads, you'll see that file (png, pdf) in the Current Attachments box (this will be in another window). Click the attachement and it will open yet another browser window that has a URL. Go up to the Icon bar in the message window and click the Image icon, which will ask you for a URL. Copy the URL from the window that shows your picture/graph into the image icon box which will put tags around it {image}...{/image} and I think that will work. {=[

I hope that helps, and works for you.

[Starving Steve]

Re: So this is why America is so "Loved"

READ the post, Steve. I said the REPUBLICRAT Congress (Republicans who spend money like New Deal/Great Society Democrats.) The Democrats did not control Congress from 2000 -2006, so the Republicans must take the blame for that period of profligacy.

I just lost an ENORMOUS post replying to your previous post because the friggin' server dropped me while trying to submit it. It gave a history of the US Gold Standard from the Civil War to the present day. It took a lot of effort and now it just went into fuckin' cyberspace. So I am NOT a happy camper at the present time. Right now I'm having a "Lukester" moment.:mad::mad:

I will be glad to reference BOOKS which you are free to read at a library or purchase them from the American Institute for Economic Research, but I don't rely on "Wikipedia" or other flimsy, unvetted sources. I have studied economics and economic history since 1969, both in college and through work (as a stockbroker and a businessman/investor).

Steve, what would you call a "Drug Benefit" added to Medicare? If that is not "Entitlement" spending, then what is? It is the single biggest entitlement increase since the Democrats expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit in the 1980s. And while the Republicans pushed it on "W"s behalf, just how many Democrats do you think voted against it? Go ahead and savage the Republicans - they deserve it.
But don't make me laugh by trying to paint the Democrats as fiscally responsible.

I will repost the complete response after the bile level in my gut drops about 50%.

Yes, the drug benefit to Medicare was a very important and very expensive entitlement passed by the last Congress. Were there other entitlements beside that one that they passed?

Althought I hate the Republicans or anyone who even calls themself conservative, I am just trying to learn what happened in Washington with the Congress under Bush. Give me the list of entitlements passed, and the drug benefit to Medicare was a very important entitlement passed. Thank you for refreshing my memory.

[Raz]

Yes, the drug benefit to Medicare was a very important and very expensive entitlement passed by the last Congress. Were there other entitlements beside that one that they passed?

Althought I hate the Republicans or anyone who even calls themself conservative, I am just trying to learn what happened in Washington with the Congress under Bush. Give me the list of entitlements passed, and the drug benefit to Medicare was a very important entitlement passed. Thank you for refreshing my memory.

Well thanks for hating me, Steve. You sound like a real prince of a guy. After I get through laying out some FACTS about American Political and Economic History you are REALLY going to hate me.

My bile count is now back to near normal and I'm slowly writing the lost post again.

"Give me a list of entitlements passed..." No, Steve, I'm not going to be your tutor. I don't have the time. YOU can vet my post and inform me where you believe I've been stating things incorrectly. Most of what I have to say should have been learned in High-School level American History and Economics 101. The rest you would know if you read a decent newspaper once a week.

[Raz]

Re: So this is why America is so "Loved"

Starving Steve wrote:
"I would gladly vote conservative or neo-con or Republican or Repuke IF their candidates would back the dollar with gold and stop running deficits. BUT THE REPUBLICANS DO JUST THE OPPOSITE, and they destroy the dollar. They purposely inflate, and they even believe some inflation is good.

The last thing I ever want to see is endless military spending. Better to have Obama than Bush and his bunch.

And the fact that Republicans have damaged the country and the world this badly means that they should never govern again. What a mistake!"


You sound like a very angry man, Steve, and considering the present mess our country finds itself in you have good reason to be angry. And the Republicans of this present day deserve much [if not most] of the scorn heaped upon them. Yet it helps to remember, as Churchill once said,” The truth is so important that she is usually surrounded by a bodyguard of lies”.

There is nothing “new” or “conservative” about the NeoCons. They are the “Boat-People” of the McGovern Revolution, which took over the Democratic Party from 1969 – 1972. They fled the hard-left lurch within their own party to the Republican Party of that day, which was Nixonian and certainly not conservative in the traditional sense, and they carried their Wilsonian Utopianism with them (“We must fight to make the world safe for democracy”, Woodrow Wilson, 1917; Sound familiar?). Such views of the world are naive beyond belief, and, if made into the foreign policy of the United States (as George W. Dumbass did) they will bleed and bankrupt our nation. As an example, IF, as “W” said, we will not allow dictators to threaten us, and after he found no nuclear weapons in Iraq, justified the invasion because “freedom is on the march”, then we should immediately plan an invasion of Mainland China so we could free the greatest number of captives from tyranny! Sounds insane, doesn’t it? That’s because it IS insane. And it was the intellectual elite within the Democratic Party that gave birth to this idea, though not for cynical reasons like Bush. (Woodrow Wilson was one of only two Democrats elected President over a period of seventy-two years, and before taking office in 1913 he had been the President of Princeton University). Now to be fair there was also a “Progressive” movement within the Republican Party led by Teddy Roosevelt that would have sympathized with this utopian nonsense (although in a more calculated fashion), so we must be careful not to assign all of the blame to the Democrats. Neither party has a monopoly on fools.


Now to the problem of inflation. The men who founded this republic knew full well the fraud of paper fiat money and prohibited such in Article I, section 8. No less than Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted that the language must be taken literally, that “coin money” meant to strike of metallic coins, and that the whole of the Constitution’s monetary provision was clearly intended to exclude everything from use as a circulating medium of exchange except gold and silver. So did James Madison (The Federalist #44, 1788.) So the present system of TOTALLY fiat money is clearly unconstitutional to any reasonable jurist, except for the likes of Steven Bryar.
It was the Republican Party in the late 1800s that defended the gold standard from over twenty years of near continuous assault by the “Free Silver” group in the Democratic Party led by William Jennings Bryan. The Federal Reserve was established during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) and the confiscation of gold and the abandonment of the US Gold Standard was ordered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Democrat). It was Lyndon Baines Johnson (“Daddy Bird” – the biggest spender of all Democrats) who fired the opening salvo against the pseudo-convertibility of Bretton Woods in 1968, when he stopped the redemption of gold bullion for US Dollars held by individual foreign nationals through the issuance of SDRs. Nixon administered the coup-de-grace in 1971 when he ended ALL convertibility, denying even foreign central banks (most notably the French) the right to convert to US gold bullion. He defaulted on the Dollar, but the deed was already accomplished before he took office. Nixon refused to reappoint William McChesney Martin – the best central banker of them all – when his term expired in 1970. Although Martin was a Democrat, he stood up to political pressure from LBJ and refused to debase the Dollar. (He was one of the finest public servants this nation ever had – read about him!). The self-serving Nixon blamed him for his loss in 1960 against JFK and appointed Arthur Burns instead, arguably the worst Fed Chairman ever, until Greenspan and Bernanke.
Thus began the colossal mess, which we now find ourselves in, the deed having already been accomplished before Barack Obama took office. (I wonder if now having surveyed the situation Obama is tempted to ask for a recount!)


We have only had two conservative Presidents since Coolidge: Eisenhower and Reagan. Both of them placed the national interests of the United States FIRST, and through a prudent foreign policy knew when to hold ‘em and when to fold’em.
Both of them actually read the Federalist Papers as well as Washington’s Farewell Address and had the prudence and good sense to know that wars bring about the death of republics, and that this is what our country was meant to be – not an empire.

The tax cuts passed by the Democratic Congress during Reagan’s first year in office were not the cause of all of our problems. Tax receipts to the US Treasury almost doubled from 1981 to 1988 (up 188%). It was out-of-control spending by the House of Representatives under “Tip” O’Neil, Jim Wright, and Tom Foley that drove the deficits to such high levels. There was a large military build-up during those years, and I supported it then and make no apology for that now. Johnson and Nixon had squandered a whole decade of military procurement in Vietnam. The Soviet Union was a mortal threat to the United States and was at its peak of military power, even as their economy was in terminal decline. With men like Brehznev, Chernenko, and Andropov running their government it was a very dangerous period indeed. But, even with the military build-up, there was no excuse for the Congress to far more than double Federal spending during those eight years. In fairness, the Republicans controlled the Senate for six of those eight years and did little to hold down Federal outlays. As a people we have always been willing to listen to “vote buyers” running for congress who love to promise us things that the government (read: “someone else”) will pay for. As Walt Kelly said through his famous cartoon character, Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy, and they is us”.


There is plenty of guilt to go around, and I NEVER voted for either of the Bushes. The only answer from the government side would likely come from Ron Paul or someone else just like him - in terms of economic and foreign policy.
I am far too conservative in the real sense of the word to be a Republican. And looking for fiscal responsibility from the Democrats is also a pipe dream.

[Starving Steve]

Re: So this is why America is so "Loved"

Raz. are you Lukester because you sound intelligent?

I will NEVER like Reagan, but I have changed my opinion of Ike. I now think he was one of the best presidents the U.S. ever had.

I remember the fifties: a rising standard of living, silver dollars at the banks, and almost no inflation. Those were great years.

My grandparents hated the Eisenhower Administration in Minnesota. They were Democratic Farmer-Labour. The Cold War is what soured them on Ike, and they were right. The spending on the Cold War is what got the inflation going.

But the perspective of history has proven Eisenhower to have been an outstanding president, and the fifties were the best years to live in the U.S. So, I like Ike now.

Eisenhower was also outstanding as a general in WWII, as older Europeans will remember.

I can say nothing good about Ronald Reagan. In fact, I hate him more now than ever because we are in this economic mess thanks to Reaganomics and Arthur Laffer.

[Raz]

Re: So this is why America is so "Loved"

Raz. are you Lukester because you sound intelligent?

I will NEVER like Reagan, but I have changed my opinion of Ike. I now think he was one of the best presidents the U.S. ever had.

I remember the fifties: a rising standard of living, silver dollars at the banks, and almost no inflation. Those were great years.

My grandparents hated the Eisenhower Administration in Minnesota. They were Democratic Farmer-Labour. The Cold War is what soured them on Ike, and they were right. The spending on the Cold War is what got the inflation going.

But the perspective of history has proven Eisenhower to have been an outstanding president, and the fifties were the best years to live in the U.S. So, I like Ike now.

Eisenhower was also outstanding as a general in WWII, as older Europeans will remember.

I can say nothing good about Ronald Reagan. In fact, I hate him more now than ever because we are in this economic mess thanks to Reaganomics and Arthur Laffer.

Eisenhower was not to blame for the first Cold War - Stalin was.
If there is a Second Cold War it will be because of Clinton and Bush.

Ronald Reagan was not perfect, and is not singularly to blame for this present mess - no one person is. Yet if I had to narrow down a place to lodge the blame I would give it a 50%/50% split between Alan "The Maestro" Greenspan and George "Dumbya" Bush. Anyone who made a "C" in Econ 101 would have known that Laffer was an idiot.

Your grandparents were wrong about Ike (my parents were "Yellow-Dog" Democrats and voted twice for Adlai Stevenson); I hope that one day you will realize you were wrong about Reagan.

And no I'm not Lukester; I don't just sound intelligent, I am intelligent!

(Just kidding!)

PS. Take me up on the suggestion to read about William McChesney Martin, Jr. The Wikipedia article is very accurate. I might have to give them more credit than in the past!

[flintlock]

Re: So this is why America is so "Loved"

The sooner people realize both parties have been shafting us for years, the sooner we get out of this mess. Politics is not a playground teeter totter where if one side is good, the other must be bad . While that way of thinking appeals to our sense of simplistic order, the real world rarely works that way. In most cases, both sides are merely trying to gain wealth and power in any manner they think will work best. Until our system builds in protection against a politician gaining either, we'll get the same garbage.