Firestarter

And the Heritage Foundation isn't very conservative in the first place.

Of course, it doesn't help that your perception is utterly demolished by the facts. According to the Department of the Treasury and this research paper by the Heritage Foundation, people in the lowest income brackets are now and always have been moving upwards at historically unprecedented rates. Our economy works, plain and simple, and all the carping in the world won't change that.

That was a really quick shower.

How about you use actual concrete figures to make your arguments rather than "bajillion" and "I don't know?" Would it be too hard for you to argue on substance, or did the professors who taught your "several economics courses, thank you very much!" sound something like this: "So like when one of these lines on a graph I saw somewhere in a book once goes down it's like sort of bad for someone in a country somewhere on Earth... well actually it might be on Mars, excuse me, I need another shot." Seriously, what the fuck? Calling your posts in this thread "incoherent" would be kind. At least the formulae SJ "[spouts] off" "ad nauseam" actually have facts to back them up.

You'd think that after Malthus and Ehrlich et al had been so thoroughly embarrassed so many times over so very many years people would get tired of paraphrasing their arguments. SJ, I applaud your patience.

There's an amusing op-ed on the subject here.

Your position is based on ignorance or dishonest demagoguery, plain and simple. Foreign governments indirectly subsidise medicine in their countries at the expense of the American taxpayer. Drug companies are forced to sell their products at a loss abroad, at state-fixed prices, and must recoup their development costs by charging higher prices in the United States. As a result many large drug companies have moved the entirety of their operations to the United States, and fewer and fewer are willing to sell their products overseas. Thus, in this case, what you're attacking actually creates jobs here, and benefits us immensely by providing access to more advanced health care than is available anywhere else in the world. And, in case you're against Americans receiving more and better medicines than anyone else, consider this: there isn't a thing President Bush or any other President of the United States can do about it. There never has been. We don't force anyone else to create or adhere to inane socialistic welfare policies. They choose to do that themselves.

- No thanks, Mr Clarke

No theory of "Trickle Down Economics" has ever existed in any country in the history of the world, and it does not exist now. Try to focus on finishing high school.

You maintained right up to the end that you had done nothing wrong and that there was no need for you to change it, that I was being thin-skinned and overly sensitive and you were just changing it to shut me up. Don't try to paint it now as some ungrudging and immediate act of conscience. Your pretense is completely transparent. Besides, you shouldn't have changed it for me. I wasn't harmed in any way by it. I simply found it offensive. You should have changed it because what you did was crass. Nope, I only said that to point out how inappropriate your use of that picture was AFTER you were made aware of its context and AFTER you refused to change it nevertheless. As is your version of events.

Hmm, kinda like the time you used a picture of the President in Air Force One, making phone calls on 9/11, and made up an an inane caption for it as part of a supposedly "funny" joke? And then defended it as perfectly legitimate humour, and claimed I was being unreasonable by taking offense at your insensitivity and bad taste? Who's the hypocrite here again?

On the other hand, late-night comics like Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, and Craig Kilborn have been making jokes about the same thing (much funnier jokes, admittedly) for months now. No conservative I know of has said anything like what you lot are postulating. And no liberal has attacked them for daring to mock the war effort. So, you're wrong. Move on to the next bout of whining, posturing, and shrill, screeching lies, please.

In short, despite your protestations to the contrary, the article I quoted some time ago perfectly summed up your real views. Thanks for the clarification. I don't believe Americans are stupid, and neither does the Republican Party. Let's see whom the voters choose in November: the paternalistic, patronising, sneering donkeys, whose answer to every problem is to impose their own solution by diktat, or the GOP, which actually respects the people, the states, and the Constitution.

Rich Lowry just took Clarke apart. He uses Clarke's own words exclusively, so the liberals here can't whine about "lies and the lying liars who tell them" on the right. Either Clarke was lying then, or he's lying now. If you believe him now, despite the fact that he's a proven liar, you only believe him because he's pandering to your prejudices.

I love Ron Paul; he's fucking hilarious. He's not a pain for us, he's just like the court jester we keep around for kicks.

So, are you at last willing to say that Palestinian terrorists and terrorist sympathisers are complete wastes of skin and should be exterminated posthaste? Because you just inadvertently gave a pretty fair description of Israel. WOW. Hands down the most cold, heartless comment I've EVER seen on these boards. Seconded. You're a sick, disgusting piece of shit, Jobber. How many Iraqis would have had to have seen the inside of "stuff like rape rooms and whatnot" for you to finally acquiesce to the removal of Saddam Hussein? How many Kurds gassed? How many people shot in the back of the head and thrown into charnel pits? How many women should've been systematically raped to turn you on, so to speak? What's the magic number? How many people needed to die to satisfy you? Four million rather than two? Five? How about six million, do you like that number? Thank God we don't listen to your brand of solipsistic horseshit anymore. Fewer people are dying and the world's a better place. Keep longing for the good old days of Auschwitz and Treblinka if you wish, but I won't shed any tears for a sadistic mass murderer and a tyrant. Nor, I suspect, will the vast majority of Americans.

That didn't seem to help Leon Klinghoffer much. Mr Sharon, I salute you.

An excellent article on the subject by Shelby Steele. "[H]omosexuality is as permanent a feature of the human condition as heterosexuality. Nothing is gained in denying this. But neither should we deny that the two are inherently different. The gay marriage movement denies this difference in order to borrow 'normalcy' from marriage. Thus, it is a movement born more of self-denial than self-acceptance, as if on some level it agrees with those who see gays as abnormal."

Yeah, that's a good way to sum it up. I was trying to recall my own impressions of it but I couldn't at first. My head feels a little slow today for some reason. <g>

Does anyone really read USA Today? I only touch it if I'm in an aeroplane or something and they don't have the Journal.

I was just about to say.

You're all such bullshitters. The President's nominees to the bench have proved time and time again that they do not legislate their personal beliefs, which is more than can be said for most liberal judges. Bill Pryor himself ordered Roy Moore to remove the Ten Commandments monument because it was against the law - and he's one of the people you cretins try to paint as a raving right-wing Christian fundamentalist. Several of the President's other nominees have ruled in favour of abortion proponents - when the law and the facts favoured them. The simple fact is that liberals try to set social policy by imposing judicial decrees on unwilling citizens, as in Roe vs Wade. Conservatives do the same (though to a lesser extent), as in the case of Roy Moore. Constructionalists, such as every last one of the President's nominees, do neither. They strictly interpret the words of the Constitution, consider the facts, and apply the law. They refuse to make up new laws, and they send flawed ones back to the legislatures. And that, in case you've forgotten, is precisely what judges are SUPPOSED to do. Claiming that a person is unfit to be a judge simply because he or she personally disagrees with abortion is nonsense on stilts.

Which, of course, is the best and most moral argument for the war.

Working on it.