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Faceplams: Luck and hope are not a strategy. Freakin 'mericans have no attention span, no memory, and easily influenced.Originally Posted by Your Name Here
We definitely need more people voting next go round:
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Luck and hope are not a strategy. Freakin 'mericans have no attention span, no memory, and easily influenced.
We definitely need more people voting next go round:
Bite me
See this.
See also this.
And also this.
* He implemented the first significant federal affirmative action program.
* He dramatically increased spending on federal employee salaries.
* He oversaw the first large-scale integration of public schools in the South (something the crackers where I grew up were none too happy about).
* He proposed a guaranteed annual wage (aka a “negative income tax”).
* He advocated comprehensive national health insurance (single payer) for all Americans.
* He imposed wage and price controls in times of economic crisis. This wasn’t a terribly good idea, but it was the furthest thing from a conservative idea. Truth is, it was positively socialist.
* He indexed Social Security for inflation and created Supplemental Security Income.
* He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise.
* He promoted the Legacy of Parks program.
* He appointed four Supreme Court Justices. Three of them voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade.Liberals in particular should see much to like in Nixon’s accomplishments. He recognized the People’s Republic of China, created the Environmental Protection Agency, created OSHA to oversee workplace safety and comfort, created the Consumer Product Safety Commission, created Title IX for women’s sports, added the cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security, and expanded food stamps and welfare assistance. He also supported the Equal Rights Amendment, though that failed out among the States.
President Nixon is also the first national leader I am aware of to sign a settlement with indigenous peoples that was made on equal terms. In 1971 he signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act into law; this Act constitutes the largest settlement of America’s indigenous peoples’ claims to their ancestral lands to that date, and served as a model and inspiration for land claim settlements by Eskimo and Inuit in Canada and Greenland.
He also cut Defense spending by about 1/3 and withdrew our troops from Vietnam, though of course he kept us in that theater overlong and immorally and illegally escalated that war both in the uplands and in Cambodia out of a naive intention to put our corrupt South Vietnamese ally on better military footing for our departure. (Though this plan of course ultimately failed, Nixon even successfully convinced the Russians and the Chinese to pressure North Vietnam to settle with the South.) Nixon actually used the prospect of a missile defense system–unlike President Reagan who wanted to build it promptly–as a pretext to coax the Russians into the 1st round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, both of which were a complete success and which in retrospect mark a permanent improvement in relations with the Soviet Union.
During an economic downturn, Nixon unapologetically engaged in deficit spending to get people working again and publicly declared, “Now I am a Keynesian.” When Nixon took the US Dollar off the gold standard, he said “The American dollar must never again be a hostage in the hands of international speculators…” The currency devalued, and the relative value of our manufactured goods on the export market improved.
Nixon’s political project was to unite the Roosevelt-Truman manufacturing labor coalition with the social conservatism of the South to build a populist coalition. This coalition eventually unraveled because of the expansion of international trade and emergence of a high-tech and service economy which led Ronald Reagan and his Republican standard-bearers to combine the Southern social conservatism with strictly market-oriented and corporation-friendly policies. But in the meantime, Nixon’s domestic policies managed to expand and refine President Johnson’s Great Society, his foreign policies took us past the dangerous Cold War paranoia of the 1960s, and the tone of his Presidency arguably represents the most-serious attempt to bridge our post-1960s political divisions and inspire concern for the good of the whole country until our current President, whom not incidentally also aims to be the next Liberal President. Excluding the dark moments of the pointless escalation of violence in Vietnam and Cambodia and the Watergate scandal which brought down his Presidency, Richard Nixon’s actions are those of a great statesman and, yes, maybe even a good man. But those dark moments do rank among our darkest; while Nixon had great accomplishments as President, he also committed idiomatic crimes.
Last edited by allegro; 11-06-2014 at 11:29 AM.
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^^^^ It's interesting that history is kinder to him then when he was actually president. I suspect Obama will have similar treatment.
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i have no idea what you are talking about.
The only "victory" I had was some schadenfreude watching the Dems become shocked at their loss and try to rationalize it (some were even agreeing with Sarah Palin to do it). The schadenfreude I obtained from the Romney loss 2 years ago was a bit more delicious though.
Active Member
It really depends. Like, who is the next president going to be? Can they give credit for any of the positive things to the next president?
Look at all the awesome shit Jimmy Carter did that everyone gives to Reagan. Deregulated the airlines, deregulated the railways, deregulated trucking, deregulated beer and homebrewing, deregulated oil prices, deregulated various aspects of banks. I'm probably missing one. He also helped cut inflation. All the sudden The Second Coming of Jesus Reagan takes over this newly deregulated economy with cheap oil
and other cheap shit, and OMG THE ECONOMY IS MAGICALLY BETTER PRAISE REAGAN! That asshole still decided to jack up the deficit anyway... Fuck Reagan supporters.
Bite me
You got that wrong, dude. The economy was a fucking NIGHTMARE under Reagan.
http://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/1...ans-recession/
I was there, I got laid off. Mortgage interest rates were 18%. The auto industry in Detroit was almost as bad as it was in 2008.
Also, Carter sucked.
Last edited by allegro; 11-06-2014 at 07:14 PM.
Throbbing Member
Wow. All I remembered from American history class about Nixon was Watergate. Title IX and desegregation had long term positive influence and Watergate eclipsed them.
Bite me
His meeting with Chairman Mao was legendary. I don't think people understand just how important that was, how huge that was.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...34Q_story.html
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/
Last edited by allegro; 11-06-2014 at 08:26 PM.
Member
A lot of people slagged on Richard Nixon but he had something that Obama nor G.W. Bush had... personality. The list of accomplishments that allegro mentioned is worth noting as I think he did a lot more than the country gave him credit for. Sure, he was corrupt but he got the job done.
Active Member
I don't think Dick Nixon had more personality than Obama has.
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Ok, I was a bit overzealous, but Reagan fanatics frequently give him credit for things Carter did. And Carter may have been shitty, but not as bad as Reagan.
right?
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Yes, like getting the hostages freed in Tehran.
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Iran deliberately waited until Carter was out because they hated him. The Apache helicopter crashing in the desert didn't help Carter's already-bad approval rating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw
Reagan tried to undo any good that Nixon ever did, including our relationship with the People's Republic of China which Reagan damned near FUBAR'd because he was obsessed with Taiwan because he was part of the old guard conservatives who'd been bamboozled by Chiang Kai-shek, but thank God Reagan's advisors stopped him. Otherwise you wouldn't have that iPhone.
Last edited by allegro; 11-07-2014 at 11:44 PM.
Member
He still has more balls than Obama.
Active Member
So, it's about manhood? Or are you using that as a figure of speech in that Nixon had more guts? I don't know. I think deep down Nixon just wanted people to like him, didn't have a hella lot of confidence so felt the need to cut corners. Elizabeth Warren- I think she might actually have more confidence than Tricky Dick ever had.
/yeah I'm making this shit up.
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Why do people like Warren? She has been one of the most disappointing politicians for me. Endless amounts of bitching to get attention with very little solution.
Bite me
Good question. And good summation. She's ultimately just more of the same, part of the same machine.
Active Member
"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet" - Ted Cruz tweet November 10, 2014.
What are the odds of Cruz getting the nomination?
Gizmodo ran a piece on Cruz's comments.
http://gizmodo.com/ted-cruzs-net-neu...nge-1656821283
Last edited by Deepvoid; 11-10-2014 at 02:32 PM.
Bite me
He wasn't born in the U.S. but his mother is was a natural-born American citizen. And that wouldn't be okay with the Obama birthers but let's see if that would be okay for Ted Cruz.
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I hope Ted Cruz runs.
Bite me
I wanna see what Donald Trump does about it, LOL.
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THAT actually might be a horse race!
Bite me
LOL, no I meant that The Donald is a "Birther." I wanna see if he's still a Birther if a guy with a Canadian birth certificate runs.
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OOOOOH, see, that's how good I am at tuning out The Donald. I thought you meant the two of them ran against each other in the primaries. Donald seems to be all talk and no action. Just a huge attention seeker who listens to those few folks around him (his kids) who say he could win. Amirite?
Bite me
Yes, that, too. He retweets tons of "you should run for president!" comments just for his huge ego.
Alt-Left Leaning Cunt
His children actually seem very smart and well adjusted. Unsure how that happened.
Must have been raised by nannies.
Active Member
And now everyone is posting this cartoon by The Oatmeal which is so fucking wrong it hurts. Cruz is horrible, but so is the misinformation about Net Neutrality and shit like the Comcast vs Netflix issue. The telltale signs should be obvious: That netflix speed graph is sourced FROM netflix, and the fact that 4 other networks experienced equal slowdowns at the same time Comcast did.
Bite me
i'm on the fence about this, as somebody who lived "before the Internet" and used fucking ihnp4 where we POLLED 10 times a day and my email address had 14 fucking bangs in it. I'm fully willing to pay more money for faster speeds so that it's consistent, instead of some fucking asswipe cheapass stealing my bandwidth.
Last edited by allegro; 11-11-2014 at 07:33 PM.
Active Member
My issues with The Oatmeal's cartoon hit two specific areas:
1 - net neutrality vs Net Neutrality. This graphic sums it up in a mediocre way, but you get the idea: http://i.imgur.com/qOf4NpQ.png
2 - The "Comcast throttling Netflix" things is very commonly used in the net neutrality debate, but it is completely wrong. The explanation requires an understanding of how the internet works, and I'm happy to go into this a bit, but you can actually pick up on a decent amount just by looking at the charts. Look at the chart The Oatmeal annotated (blue annotation is by me)
So, firstly, this data is sourced from Netflix. That should be a red flag for anyone wanting accurate data on a disagreement between two parties.
Secondly, and most importantly, there are 4 other ISP's who's netflix download speeds dropped at the same time and at the same rate as Cogent. You don't see that kind of thing if this is being caused by Cogent throttling traffic. You see this kind of pattern when there is something bigger at play. An example could be Netflix traffic growing across all ISP's and having it result in congestion.
Yeah, the Cogent line is going to spike up immediately after the "agreement." This is because that agreement was, if I remember correctly, a peering agreement. To simplify, it means that netflix and cogent added a new connection directly between their networks. The entire internet exists on top of peering agreements between various networks in a similar fashion (this is what I immediately assumed when I saw the graph). A more sinister, but entirely possible, would be Netflix actually triggering this.
Also, there are some 3rd party graphs and examinations of this situation that are very interesting and will tell a very interesting story that the Netflix sourced data conveniently misses.
Here is one that includes ISPs that the Netflix chart did not. Notice how they all drop around the same time, and then bounce back in perfect synchronicity? This is NOT what you see in a "comcast is throttling netflix to extort them" situation.
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 11-11-2014 at 09:38 PM.
Active Member
Nothing I posted is corporate bullshit. It's literally how the internet works and data moves across networks. The only thing corporate is the names of the ISP :P
This is the roughly equivalent of having a roomate who torrents tons of shit (aka Netflix) and bitches to the one girl who pays the internet bill (aka Cogent) that because the network performs shitty (due to excess torrenting), that the owner must totally be throttling the torrent traffic and it is her obligation to upgrade the service with her own money. It sounds dumb as hell, but that shitty roomate has managed to convince all the other roomates that he is right and that everyone is entitled to a higher connection plan that the owner should pay for. He has done this by showing all the roomates that everyone's internet gets super shitty whenever he starts downloading torrents... "this is proof that the owner is trying to extort us!" he says.
net neutrality won't do shit for the price of your internet. When is the last time increased government involvement resulted in a move AWAY from having the lower cost people subsidizing the higher cost people? I'm not just talking about the ACA here.
Cut your TV service and only use internet. That's what I've been doing for the last 10 years
Last edited by DigitalChaos; 11-12-2014 at 01:36 AM.
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