@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - ”You may not like her personally but she is dead right on the issues!”

This is the opposite of true for me. I’m sure if I knew her personally I’d like her just fine.  I just think she’s dead wrong on every single issue. 

But to each their own.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - I am referring to her actual positions, the things she actually says she will do, not random broad vacuous statements of values.

If you want to play that ridiculous childish game, I could likewise ask you if you are against our troops if you are against DADT repeal or if you are against women’s autonomy by being pro-life or if you are against citizen’s health and well being by being against Health Care reform or if you are against Hope by being against President Obama.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - The game I was referring to was not the game of having values but the game of using universal values to paint the other side as being against them by making accusatory absolute statements like “You must believe in a government that controls every aspect of our lives”.  Nobody believes in that. Certainly no group as broad and varied as an entire political party that takes up  millions of people has any shared belief even remotely close to that.

Seriously nobody believes in Big Government tyranny. That’s what Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck accuses the other side of believing in but that’s them playing the same rhetorical game. Trust me if there was a leader who was actually serious about imposing tyranny upon us we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It would be pretty obvious to all. And there probably wouldn’t even be a Xanga allowed on which we could have it.

@Casbahmaniac - Powell is definitely one of those conservatives I wouldn’t have minded as President. I do wish he’d spoken up against Iraq more forcefully and publicly but I do think, based on what I’ve seen of him lately that he fits within the guidelines I’ve set forth of someone who is grounded in reality and open to facts. That even he was willing to tow the administration line on something so important as war with Iraq just goes to show how far the rabbit hole the Bush administration had traveled. They decided to try and create reality rather than respond to it and that would be a huge blackmark on Powell’s record if he were to run..

Still compared to most of the other candidates I think he’s head over heals better. But then he has no ambition to run so so much for that. But to be honest the fact that he has no ambition is one of the things that most makes me think he’d be well suited for the job.

@TheTheologiansCafe - I actually agree with LoBornIytesThoughtPalace in that I think you underestimate the Tea-Party’s influence. They will push some kind of candidate who will be a real contender.

But I agree with you about how it would be really hard for someone like Sarah Palin to win the Republican nomination. Hard but not impossible. Still a LOT of big name politicians are lining up against her already so it would be a huge fight.

While I definitely see the poltiical analysts, the politicians, and the media class will argue the “executive experience” line but I honestly don’t know if all that many voters actually care about it. I mean do voters even know that history of how many Presidents were governors in recent history? I’m guessing most don’t. Most people don’t even know that there were tax cuts in the stimulus bill or that health care reform passed through reconciliation. I’m guessing most don’t CARE either and I find it hard to believe that even a dedicated media campaign would cause most people to care. Some will. Political junkies like us perhaps. But honestly I don’t think that goes into the calculation of most ordinary citizens.

However the “quitter” moniker is much much more potentially damaging to Palin’s chances. I’m just not sure how well it will stick. It might be that  people will sympathize her and see her as being picked on and called name by the big bad main stream media. That’s been a huge part of her strategy all along. Any criticism of her is misdirected to the big bad main stream media and the old guard establishment treating her unfairly. That’s exactly what Christine O’Donnell did too and she surprisingly won the Delaware nomination against a seasoned pro.

So I definitely wouldn’t count her out unless the Republican leadership just totally heavy-handedly squashes her chances of winning the primary in the early stages. And if that happens they risk some kind of inner party republican revolution that will badly hurt their chances of winning the Presidency. So instead of the scenario you paint where you have a more experienced third party candidate to challenge the less experienced Palin and Obama (someone like Bloomberg perhaps),  you might see an actual third party Tea Party candidate run in the main election. That would be disastrous for the Republicans chance of winning the election even IF unemployment is still high.

But I do agree that unemployment rate is definitely going to be a major determining factor on whether Obama can hang on for another term. Since current projects say it will take another 15 years before we get back to an unemployment rate reasonably close to full employment at the current rate, Obama looks like he will be in a lot of trouble unless something drastic changes soon.

@SoapAndShampoo - LOL. I’m a rebel. At least no one will ever accuse me of sticking with conventional wisdom.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - Wait are you saying you want to go back to a time when we didn’t have toilets? Or is it that you just want to go to a society where anybody can buy whatever toilet they want including just a chamber pot that they dump outside on the sidewalk so they can poison the whole neighborhood?

More seriously,  your list is far from everythng. Liberals don’t want to control whether or not you are allowed to have an abortion. Conservatives do. Liberals don’t want to control whether or not you can use mairjuana. Conservatives do. Liberals don’t want to control whether or not you can put profanity on television. Conservatives do. Liberals don’t want to control whether or not gay people can get married. Conservatives do.

Judging by that all we can say is that liberals want to control DIFFERENT aspects of our lives than conservatives do and neither group wants to control EVERY aspect of our lives.

“See, once the government pays for your health care, it owns you.”

Really?!?  So our government currently OWNS everyone over 65 in this country? The government currently owns every government worker in this country? every public school teacher? The government currently owns every disabled person on social security in this country? The government currently owns every poor person on medicaid in this country? The government currently owns every soldier in this country? The government currently owns every politician who opts into government sponsored healthcare in this country? The government currently owns every veteran in this country?

I think everyone in those groups would be surprised to learn that they are slaves. 

And on top of that, Obamacare doesn’t even pay for that many additional people’s healthcare at ALL. It just increased medicaid rolls. Everyone else still pays for their own damn healthcare so if it’s a liberal plot to put everyone into government tyranny it’s a really really bad one.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - If by “dictating the design of” you mean setting up standards that require that toilets don’t use too much water and plug in properly to complex sewage systems then yes you’re right. Governments do do that. But it’s not liberalism or conservatism, it’s just common sense.

I mean they aren’t creating these standards for no reason. For example, limits on water usage allowed exist because there’s a serious water scarcity problem. There are lots and lots of places in this world where people don’t have enough clean water to drink or bathe in. There are even places in the United States where water is scarce and they have to import it from distant states at considerable expense. When you use the toilet you contaminate a small but not insignificant amount of water and cleaning that water is expensive, often more expensive than getting more clean water.

So with simple rules governments have managed to preserve water and keep water cheap for everyone. How is that wrong? And what has it hurt? There’s still plenty of room for innovation on toilet designs. If you shop for a toilet you’ll find that there are tons of different types and models on the market. If you build your own house you can put any kind of toilet you want in there. You can put a Japanese style toilet or a traditional American toilet or you can have a urinal. Some houses are sold with these different varieties.  The only thing is that all of them follow the standards set by the government and nobody at all is hurt by that.

Lightbulbs are an even more cut and dry example. There’s tons of innovation in that front too. You have halogen bulbs, incandescent bulbs, lcd bulbs, cfl bulbs, combined CFL-halogen bulbs. But some bulbs are just less efficient than others. They produce less light at greater cost in energy. Preserving energy is an important goal because it means we can use energy for more important uses light running our computer systems or life preserving devices in hospitals. The less energy we use the less we have to rely upon foreign sources of energy and the more reliable all of our energy systems are. Simply saving energy wasted on inefficient lighting can have huge benefits to the society so creating some minimum standards on how efficient light bulbs have to be is not conservative or liberal it just makes sense. And it doesn’t even hurt innovation. If anything it HELPS innovation as private companies are incentivized to come up with new and creative ways to produce the same level of innovation at lower energy levels so they can still participate in the market.

“Government ownership of people and their wealth is LIBERALISM.  Therefore liberalism is immoral to its core.”
If you define liberalism in that way then of course it is. The problem is you are in a very small minority of people who define liberalism that way. Those people who actually describe themselves as liberals do not.  In fact WE have been explicitly against “ownership of people” for many generations. It was liberals, self-described liberals, who fought immensely hard to liberate slaves and to ensure that minorities have equal rights.

Dependency is NOT the same as being owned. There are levels of dependency. Are you owned by your parents when you are dependent upon them as a child? How about if you are an adult who still lives with their parents are you owned by them simply because you are dependent upon them for shelter? I am dependent upon my landlord for shelter and to fix appliances when they break, does my land lord own me? If you are dependent on your teachers for an education that you need to compete in this society are you owned by them? If you are dependent on the fire department to put out a raging fire are you owned by the fire department? Are you owned by Xanga since you are fully dependent upon them in order to be able to post these comments? Are we owned by the sun? Are we owned by air? We are dependent on a lot of things and a lot of people in this world. The question isn’t whether a dependency exists but how deep a dependency is it, how is that dependency used, and how free you are to leave the dependency.

Taxes are not “owning people’s wealth”. Taxes are just redirecting resources to serve the greater good. They aren’t in any significant way different than the collection plate at a church. People chip in to help the Church operate. That’s the theory behind taxes. Everyone chips in to keep the country operating, to provide for the common defense, to help people survive, to ensure that we are all well educated and to create equal opportunity. We vote as a society to decide which of these things we want government to use our money on and how much of our money we want our government to use.  Some people want government to use more, others want their government to use less but we all want our government to use SOME of our money if only to police our streets and defend us in times of war against foreign powers.

There is a real problem with politicians getting excessive campaign cash but you’ve got it all backward. The problem is that excessive campaign cash makes the politicians dependent upon the donors and funders more than they are upon the voters, so they are incentivized to make legislation that benefits donors and funders and not the people who voted for them. But that wasn’t the case when programs like Medicare and Social Security were created. Those were explicitly passed in spite of funder influence because they were extraordinarily popular amongst the people, the voters. Similarly with the Civil Rights Act. These bills were passed through public struggle, people on the streets demanding change.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace -

“You wrote a lot of words and I can’t understand what you’re saying, therefore you must be wrong!”

Is that really your argument?

I wrote a verbose response because A. it’s my nature to write a lot and B. I was trying to break down a simple concept into smaller pieces that are easier for you to understand since your earlier statements indicated a vast misunderstanding of reality.

“Stealing is stealing. Tyranny is tyranny.”

If the only ideas you accept are vacuous statements like these I guess it’s better that we stop wasting our time attempting to communicate now.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - Saying that over and over again doesn’t make it true. It’s as simple as that.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace -  Have you ever considered that if “the lies that liberals tell seem like the truth” that it might be because there actually is some truth to what they are saying?  Maybe the liberals aren’t lying. Maybe they are saying exactly what they believe. I know that I am and I consider myself to be a liberal.

@LoBornlytesThoughtPalace - Well that’s good then since no liberal I know believes that it is.