The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

[Trajan]

they'll never win that bidding war

 

[LoneLaugher]

I challenge the OP to prove that people vote based on the amount of "free stuff" they will receive.

 

[Geaux4it]

I challenge the OP to prove that people vote based on the amount of "free stuff" they will receive.

What other logical explanation could there be? What exactly is Obama doing, or has he accomplished, that warrants 51% of the vote?

-Geaux

 

[Foxfyre]

It's dead Jim.

Okay I can't resist (sorry):

But seriously, I'm with the Rabbi and sympathetic to some others here who are afraid we have passed the tipping point, and we cannot now rewind back to a country of the land of the free and the home of brave. We seem to be permanently entrenched in a land of the gimme and home of the terrified that the government might stop giving. And we have a government that knows that and everything they do is calculated to keep us in that position of fear and dependency.

I am of the school that we can correct the situation. But it will take courage and ability to articulate the problem AND the solution and it will take finesse to sell it to enough people. And I honestly do think we are the last generation who will have any ability at all to do that.

 

[zeke]

But don't you think the free stuff is a component of that, Mac? Even the most conservative social security recipients who depend on that social security are vulnerable when they are made to believe that an eeeeeevil Romney might take away some or all of it. They philosophically know that social security is a ponzi scheme and that it needs to be reformed, but they are unwilling to risk the pittance they are getting. And how many times in the campaign did Obama suggest that Romeny would be coming after them?

The people who get the food stamps, the scholarships, the grant money, the free phones, the fuel discounts, subsidized housing, extended unemployment, or who pay little or no federal taxes might also be conservatives who see the insanity in all that. But when it comes to possibly losing what little they are getting, it is tough to give it up on purpose. And if they're convinced that could happen if they vote for Romney, they don't vote for Romney.

But the free stuff itself is corrupting. To those giving it. To those receiving it. And I honestly do believe it is what has destroyed the best that was our culture.

I don't disagree, but (at least theoretically) Social Security and Medicare are not "free". But we begin to cross a line when benefits like subsidized housing, subsidized health care, free phones, whatever, are given to people who either don't know where the money is coming from or don't care.

Can you think of -- and this is rhetorical, because I think we're on the same page -- any parts of our culture and society for which we have NOT lowered standards?

At some point in our history, we decided that it was somehow better to lower everything to our lowest common denominator because we wanted to "care" than to have faith in people and inspire them to try a little fucking harder. And that, to me, is when the decay began. "Care"? Bullshit. What a horrible thing to do to people.

Is free stuff corrupting? Hell yes. But at the same time, the free stuff is going to people who more and more expect it. To me, that's cultural.

My two cents, worth every freakin' penny!

.

Mac. Do you take a interest mortgage deduction? Would you give that "free" tax deduction up?

What "free" stuff are you referring to? That mortgage deduction cost the Treasury like 120 billion a year. That's a bunch of "free" stuff right there. Why do people like you and I get this feebie Mac?

 

[Trajan]

I challenge the OP to prove that people vote based on the amount of "free stuff" they will receive.

'amount' is a slippery word, hows this- some folks will vote for those who think will not remove loopholes, lower deductions, tax credits- earned or otherwise, lower or not raise unemployment time eligibility, eliminate duplicate agencies or programs..etc.

 

[Foxfyre]

But don't you think the free stuff is a component of that, Mac? Even the most conservative social security recipients who depend on that social security are vulnerable when they are made to believe that an eeeeeevil Romney might take away some or all of it. They philosophically know that social security is a ponzi scheme and that it needs to be reformed, but they are unwilling to risk the pittance they are getting. And how many times in the campaign did Obama suggest that Romeny would be coming after them?

The people who get the food stamps, the scholarships, the grant money, the free phones, the fuel discounts, subsidized housing, extended unemployment, or who pay little or no federal taxes might also be conservatives who see the insanity in all that. But when it comes to possibly losing what little they are getting, it is tough to give it up on purpose. And if they're convinced that could happen if they vote for Romney, they don't vote for Romney.

But the free stuff itself is corrupting. To those giving it. To those receiving it. And I honestly do believe it is what has destroyed the best that was our culture.

I don't disagree, but (at least theoretically) Social Security and Medicare are not "free". But we begin to cross a line when benefits like subsidized housing, subsidized health care, free phones, whatever, are given to people who either don't know where the money is coming from or don't care.

Can you think of -- and this is rhetorical, because I think we're on the same page -- any parts of our culture and society for which we have NOT lowered standards?

At some point in our history, we decided that it was somehow better to lower everything to our lowest common denominator because we wanted to "care" than to have faith in people and inspire them to try a little fucking harder. And that, to me, is when the decay began. "Care"? Bullshit. What a horrible thing to do to people.

Is free stuff corrupting? Hell yes. But at the same time, the free stuff is going to people who more and more expect it. To me, that's cultural.

My two cents, worth every freakin' penny!

.

Mac. Do you take a interest mortgage deduction? Would you give that "free" tax deduction up?

What "free" stuff are you referring to? That mortgage deduction cost the Treasury like 120 billion a year. That's a bunch of "free" stuff right there. Why do people like you and I get this feebie Mac?

A tax deduction is not 'free stuff'. A tax deduction is what the government does not take of what we earn. It takes nothing out of anybody else's pocket; it just allows us to keep more of what we worked for and is rightfully ours.

"Free stuff" is what you did nothing to earn but you receive while somebody else pays for it out of their pocket.

There is a difference between these two things for those with the ability to reason and understand.

 

[Mustang]

The following is excerpted from a longer piece available at the link:

The Rise and Fall of the American Empire​

by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky​

"The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo - for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted.

But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.

Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.

That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues - the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness - no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate.

The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff.

Every businessman knows this; that is why the "loss leader" or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama's America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who - courtesy of Obama - receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentive-izes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote.The lure of free stuff is irresistible.

The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which "47% of the people" start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money - "free stuff" - from the government.

Almost half of the population has no skin in the game - they don't care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else's expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.

It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.

That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is ignorant and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters - the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.

During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" Stevenson called back: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"

Truer words were never spoken.

snopes.com: Rabbi Steven Pruzansky -- The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

I wonder if anybody cares?

Nonsense.

Average Americas have been getting the shaft for going on about 30 years now since that idiotic economic idea (it's not a theory) of supply side economics took hold, and big money captured the electoral process. The trend has only accelerated in recent years,

And average Americans increasingly understood prior to the election that the game is stacked against them.

They took a look at Romney and his secretive overseas bank accounts, his carried interest earnings, and his tax rate of less than 15% on millions of dollars of earnings and knew one thing for sure: Romney wasn't a shill working for the big money men like a lot of current and former DC politicians. He WAS a big money man who had directly benefited from the new grafting of big money interests onto legislative agendas, and the American people could see where his sympathies were. (Hint: it wasn't with average folks)

So, average Americans asked themselves a question, and that question was this: How stupid am I? And the answer, quite unsurprisingly is that most of them were not stupid enough to vote for Romney.

 

[Trajan]

But don't you think the free stuff is a component of that, Mac? Even the most conservative social security recipients who depend on that social security are vulnerable when they are made to believe that an eeeeeevil Romney might take away some or all of it. They philosophically know that social security is a ponzi scheme and that it needs to be reformed, but they are unwilling to risk the pittance they are getting. And how many times in the campaign did Obama suggest that Romeny would be coming after them?

The people who get the food stamps, the scholarships, the grant money, the free phones, the fuel discounts, subsidized housing, extended unemployment, or who pay little or no federal taxes might also be conservatives who see the insanity in all that. But when it comes to possibly losing what little they are getting, it is tough to give it up on purpose. And if they're convinced that could happen if they vote for Romney, they don't vote for Romney.

But the free stuff itself is corrupting. To those giving it. To those receiving it. And I honestly do believe it is what has destroyed the best that was our culture.

I don't disagree, but (at least theoretically) Social Security and Medicare are not "free". But we begin to cross a line when benefits like subsidized housing, subsidized health care, free phones, whatever, are given to people who either don't know where the money is coming from or don't care.

Can you think of -- and this is rhetorical, because I think we're on the same page -- any parts of our culture and society for which we have NOT lowered standards?

At some point in our history, we decided that it was somehow better to lower everything to our lowest common denominator because we wanted to "care" than to have faith in people and inspire them to try a little fucking harder. And that, to me, is when the decay began. "Care"? Bullshit. What a horrible thing to do to people.

Is free stuff corrupting? Hell yes. But at the same time, the free stuff is going to people who more and more expect it. To me, that's cultural.

My two cents, worth every freakin' penny!

.

Mac. Do you take a interest mortgage deduction? Would you give that "free" tax deduction up?

What "free" stuff are you referring to? That mortgage deduction cost the Treasury like 120 billion a year. That's a bunch of "free" stuff right there. Why do people like you and I get this feebie Mac?

all interest payments since 1913 were deductible. It started with the idea that biz expense was an offset offered to defray the new taxes and real estate, housing, the investment financing in rent bearing property is enormous, they allowed interest deductions for the creation there of.

as to the mortgage deduction itself, here;

Prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), the interest on all personal loans (including credit card debt) was deductible. TRA86 eliminated that broad deduction, but created the narrower home mortgage interest deduction under the theory that it would encourage home ownership.[18] A New York Times article notes that, in 1913, when interest deductions started, Congress "certainly wasn't thinking of the interest deduction as a stepping-stone to middle-class home ownership, because the tax excluded the first $3,000 (or for married couples, $4,000) of income; less than 1 percent of the population earned more than that;" moreover, during that era, most people who purchased homes paid upfront rather than taking out a mortgage. Rather, the reason for the deduction was that in a nation of small proprietors, it was more difficult to separate business and personal expenses, and so it was simpler to just allow deduction of all interest.[19]

Home mortgage interest deduction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[zeke]

I don't disagree, but (at least theoretically) Social Security and Medicare are not "free". But we begin to cross a line when benefits like subsidized housing, subsidized health care, free phones, whatever, are given to people who either don't know where the money is coming from or don't care.

Can you think of -- and this is rhetorical, because I think we're on the same page -- any parts of our culture and society for which we have NOT lowered standards?

At some point in our history, we decided that it was somehow better to lower everything to our lowest common denominator because we wanted to "care" than to have faith in people and inspire them to try a little fucking harder. And that, to me, is when the decay began. "Care"? Bullshit. What a horrible thing to do to people.

Is free stuff corrupting? Hell yes. But at the same time, the free stuff is going to people who more and more expect it. To me, that's cultural.

My two cents, worth every freakin' penny!

.

Mac. Do you take a interest mortgage deduction? Would you give that "free" tax deduction up?

What "free" stuff are you referring to? That mortgage deduction cost the Treasury like 120 billion a year. That's a bunch of "free" stuff right there. Why do people like you and I get this feebie Mac?

A tax deduction is not 'free stuff'. A tax deduction is what the government does not take of what we earn. It takes nothing out of anybody else's pocket; it just allows us to keep more of what we worked for and is rightfully ours.

"Free stuff" is what you did nothing to earn but you receive while somebody else pays for it out of their pocket.

There is a difference between these two things for those with the ability to reason and understand.

Oh bull shit. The mortgage interest deduction should have absolutely nothing to do with the payment of income tax. It is a freebie to people like me that have a mortgage. It reduces my tax obligation. Why?

The government has nothing to do with the contract I entered into for a mortgage loan.

So what are you talking about when you say the highlighted section above? Or do you know what you are talking about?

 

[AVG-JOE]

The Rabbi is wrong.

America is wrapping it's head around the fact that The Constitution guarantees the rights of everyone, not just white folks.


Women haven't been legal voters for 100 years yet. That kind of perspective is important here.


Don't give up on The Constitution yet... just understand that as the next generation takes power, it will prove itself to be the bane of the modern conservative.

 

[hortysir]

Tea.....Stamps.......

We've survived worse against greater odds

 

[candycorn]

I challenge the OP to prove that people vote based on the amount of "free stuff" they will receive.

What other logical explanation could there be? What exactly is Obama doing, or has he accomplished, that warrants 51% of the vote?

-Geaux

Absence of evidence is not evidence....Carl Sagan.

 

[zeke]

I don't disagree, but (at least theoretically) Social Security and Medicare are not "free". But we begin to cross a line when benefits like subsidized housing, subsidized health care, free phones, whatever, are given to people who either don't know where the money is coming from or don't care.

Can you think of -- and this is rhetorical, because I think we're on the same page -- any parts of our culture and society for which we have NOT lowered standards?

At some point in our history, we decided that it was somehow better to lower everything to our lowest common denominator because we wanted to "care" than to have faith in people and inspire them to try a little fucking harder. And that, to me, is when the decay began. "Care"? Bullshit. What a horrible thing to do to people.

Is free stuff corrupting? Hell yes. But at the same time, the free stuff is going to people who more and more expect it. To me, that's cultural.

My two cents, worth every freakin' penny!

.

Mac. Do you take a interest mortgage deduction? Would you give that "free" tax deduction up?

What "free" stuff are you referring to? That mortgage deduction cost the Treasury like 120 billion a year. That's a bunch of "free" stuff right there. Why do people like you and I get this feebie Mac?

all interest payments since 1913 were deductible. It started with the idea that biz expense was an offset offered to defray the new taxes and real estate, housing, the investment financing in rent bearing property is enormous, they allowed interest deductions for the creation there of.

as to the mortgage deduction itself, here;

Prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), the interest on all personal loans (including credit card debt) was deductible. TRA86 eliminated that broad deduction, but created the narrower home mortgage interest deduction under the theory that it would encourage home ownership.[18] A New York Times article notes that, in 1913, when interest deductions started, Congress "certainly wasn't thinking of the interest deduction as a stepping-stone to middle-class home ownership, because the tax excluded the first $3,000 (or for married couples, $4,000) of income; less than 1 percent of the population earned more than that;" moreover, during that era, most people who purchased homes paid upfront rather than taking out a mortgage. Rather, the reason for the deduction was that in a nation of small proprietors, it was more difficult to separate business and personal expenses, and so it was simpler to just allow deduction of all interest.[19]

Home mortgage interest deduction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Didn't quite answer the question as to why, in this day of hatred for free government, why do people with mortgages get the freebie from the government? Do you know? Would you complain if you had to give up your deduction (if you have a mortgage note?)

120 BILLION A YEAR in tax deduction. A freebie for mortgage holders. Now if you only owe 30k on your house, big deal. But lets say you owe 2.2 million on a mortgage. BIG DEAL is the tax deduction.

You don't think the deduction works really well for the very rich do you? You don't think Dems and Repubs would protect that write off to keep their real rich friends happy. Do you?

Now lets go back to complaining about the woman who get 112 dollars freebie food stamps.

 

[Trajan]

Mac. Do you take a interest mortgage deduction? Would you give that "free" tax deduction up?

What "free" stuff are you referring to? That mortgage deduction cost the Treasury like 120 billion a year. That's a bunch of "free" stuff right there. Why do people like you and I get this feebie Mac?

all interest payments since 1913 were deductible. It started with the idea that biz expense was an offset offered to defray the new taxes and real estate, housing, the investment financing in rent bearing property is enormous, they allowed interest deductions for the creation there of.

as to the mortgage deduction itself, here;

Prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), the interest on all personal loans (including credit card debt) was deductible. TRA86 eliminated that broad deduction, but created the narrower home mortgage interest deduction under the theory that it would encourage home ownership.[18] A New York Times article notes that, in 1913, when interest deductions started, Congress "certainly wasn't thinking of the interest deduction as a stepping-stone to middle-class home ownership, because the tax excluded the first $3,000 (or for married couples, $4,000) of income; less than 1 percent of the population earned more than that;" moreover, during that era, most people who purchased homes paid upfront rather than taking out a mortgage. Rather, the reason for the deduction was that in a nation of small proprietors, it was more difficult to separate business and personal expenses, and so it was simpler to just allow deduction of all interest.[19]

Home mortgage interest deduction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Didn't quite answer the question as to why, in this day of hatred for free government, why do people with mortgages get the freebie from the government? Do you know? Would you complain if you had to give up your deduction (if you have a mortgage note?)

120 BILLION A YEAR in tax deduction. A freebie for mortgage holders. Now if you only owe 30k on your house, big deal. But lets say you owe 2.2 million on a mortgage. BIG DEAL is the tax deduction.

You don't think the deduction works really well for the very rich do you? You don't think Dems and Repubs would protect that write off to keep their real rich friends happy. Do you?

Now lets go back to complaining about the woman who get 112 dollars freebie food stamps.

writing off interest is a freebie? I'd say since biz gets do it , why not? Seems fair to me

oh so now it matters what you owe...I see.

instead of hyperventilating you might want to think a moment before you post on this...to wit; if you own a 250 K home or a million $$ home, and only have 30k left on your mortgage, I doubt you are paying much interest at that point....eh? The amount of the interest deduction, is automatically progressive.....

You do realize that a house is the single largest/most valuable asset folks 'own' in almost all income brackets?


I wasn't complaining abut $112 in 'free' food stamps, why don't you go back and have another drink?

 

[AVG-JOE]

I don't disagree, but (at least theoretically) Social Security and Medicare are not "free". But we begin to cross a line when benefits like subsidized housing, subsidized health care, free phones, whatever, are given to people who either don't know where the money is coming from or don't care.

Can you think of -- and this is rhetorical, because I think we're on the same page -- any parts of our culture and society for which we have NOT lowered standards?

At some point in our history, we decided that it was somehow better to lower everything to our lowest common denominator because we wanted to "care" than to have faith in people and inspire them to try a little fucking harder. And that, to me, is when the decay began. "Care"? Bullshit. What a horrible thing to do to people.

Is free stuff corrupting? Hell yes. But at the same time, the free stuff is going to people who more and more expect it. To me, that's cultural.

My two cents, worth every freakin' penny!

.

Mac. Do you take a interest mortgage deduction? Would you give that "free" tax deduction up?

What "free" stuff are you referring to? That mortgage deduction cost the Treasury like 120 billion a year. That's a bunch of "free" stuff right there. Why do people like you and I get this feebie Mac?

A tax deduction is not 'free stuff'. A tax deduction is what the government does not take of what we earn. It takes nothing out of anybody else's pocket; it just allows us to keep more of what we worked for and is rightfully ours.

"Free stuff" is what you did nothing to earn but you receive while somebody else pays for it out of their pocket.

There is a difference between these two things for those with the ability to reason and understand.

When that deduction is described in a tax code that contains a word count in the high millions or low billions it becomes "free stuff".



First generation to implement fair and simple taxes, public budgets that are balanced by law and transparency in all things politics gets to watch their grand kids play among the stars.

True Story!​

 

[OKTexas]

We will indeed not sruvive is the debt and unfunded liabilities continue to rise, they are currently about 669% of our economy. It would take every penney our economy produced for almost 70 years to pay it off and the dems don't see that as a problem. Really?

 

[candycorn]

The Rabbi is wrong.

America is wrapping it's head around the fact that The Constitution guarantees the rights of everyone, not just white folks.
Women haven't been legal voters for 100 years yet. That kind of perspective is important here.
Don't give up on The Constitution yet... just understand that as the next generation takes power, it will prove itself to be the bane of the modern conservative.

Anytime you tie your economic fortunes to a 200+ year old business plan, you're going to have problems. You'd have problems if you didn't make adjustments in a 5 year plan.

Our "business plan" is antiquated and is in need of being overhauled. As far as I know, Madison and Jefferson were the best minds of their time. Forgive them if they couldn't foresee the abysmal behavior of Boehner and Harry Reid. In their time, such repugnant Americans could not elevate to positions of such power--and you'll note that the documents they wrote are silent on the prospect because they couldn't envision such division.

I doubt the best days of this nation are behind us but I also doubt that the better days that lay ahead will be experienced by the majority of Americans.

 

[francoHFW]

The following is excerpted from a longer piece available at the link:

The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky​

"The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo - for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted.

But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.

Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.

That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues - the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness - no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate.

The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff.

Every businessman knows this; that is why the "loss leader" or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama's America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who - courtesy of Obama - receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentive-izes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote.The lure of free stuff is irresistible.

The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which "47% of the people" start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money - "free stuff" - from the government.

Almost half of the population has no skin in the game - they don't care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else's expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.

It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.

That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is ignorant and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters - the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.

During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" Stevenson called back: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"

Truer words were never spoken.

snopes.com: Rabbi Steven Pruzansky -- The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

I wonder if anybody cares?

Pure Pubcrappe, of course-

First, the US VOTED DEM- dEMS GOT 3 MILLION MORE VOTES FOR THE HOUSE, only radical gerrymandering got Pubs 33 more members, a disgrace barely mentioned by the ''liberal media'' LOL.

Sorry about helping the victims of the SECOND Pub cronyism/corruption world depression- and if you include ALL taxes and fees, the middle class pays more percentage wise than the rich now, under voodoo...

BRAINWASHED HATER DUPES...PATHETIC. Stupidest voters in the world...

 

[francoHFW]

The economy and the debt will take care of themselves once the power of the mindlessly obstructive, brainwashed debt cult Tea Party is broken and the recovery can proceed. IDIOTS.