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SuperJerk

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Posts posted by SuperJerk

  1. Posted · Report reply

    Let us not forget that many of the studies on unemployment and such in the FDR years, get ready for this, does not count those employed by the government as employed, they are counted as unemployed.

    I went in and added an allusion to this in a re-edit of my post. We don't measure things the same way today as we did back then, so the author is really over-stating the conclusiveness of his evidence.

     

    The truth is that government spending as a percentage of GDP was too tiny in 1921 to have any real impact on the economy. The post-war recession following World War I was most probably ended by a post-war business cycle,

    The recession after WWI was not "probably" a post-war business cycle, it was a post-war business cycle after the crest, during the switch from a wartime to peacetime economy.

     

    and the post hoc reasoning the author uses that the Harding economic policies caused the roaring 1920s (which we learned later weren't so great for farmers or long term growth).

    Big understatement here. The farming sector collapsed.

    Well, I was trying to be cordial, but yeah...you're right.

     

     

    And for the last 80 years, conservatives have been struggling to find a way to blame government expansion for the Great Depression, as to not invalidate the argument for laissez-faire capitalism. Like I said, to blame government expansion for the Great Depression is a cause-effect paradox that ignore simple facts like when the Great Depression began and when the New Deal started.

  2. Posted · Edited by SuperJerk · Report reply

    Its pretty fun to find out something I never learned about in school. Hell, I think we completely passed over Harding's presidency since it was so short.

    That's because history classes usually don't spend time on things that didn't happen.

     

    Whoever wrote the piece apparently has the clairvoyance to not only predict what would have happened had Harding not implemented his policies, but can also draw conclusive conclusions from incomplete economic data (the modern means of measuring economic trends hadn't been developed yet) from over 80 years ago.

     

    The truth is that government spending as a percentage of GDP was too tiny in 1921 to have any real impact on the economy. Government spending had already declined following the end of World War I, and the post-war recession following World War I was most probably ended by a post-war business cycle, and the post hoc reasoning the author uses that the Harding economic policies caused the roaring 1920s (which we learned later weren't so great for farmers or long term growth). This whole article is one big reactionary fantasy about how the 1920s were this huge laissez-faire utopia that only ended because big government exploded onto the scene in 1929 (which, from a cause and effect standpoint, is an obvious paradox since so-called big government was a reaction to the Depression).

     

    Don't get me started on how wrong Harding's foreign policy ideas (the author calls them "non-interventionist", but was really the standard isolationism that was common up until World War II) were.

  3. Posted · Report reply

    Most Republican members of Congress are just ignoramuses that recite whatever talking point their corporate masters feed them, encouraged by the paid propagandists that dominate AM radio.

     

    Exhibit A:

    “When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression. He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.” — Congressman Steve Austria (R-Ohio)
    http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004383

     

    This is what we are dealing with, folks.

  5. Posted · Report reply

    Here is the winner, or rather loser. FIRED UP!, the trailer looks fucking horrible.

     

     

    I saw the trailer for this in the theaters, the first thing I thought was that they should have just ponied up the extra $50, and gotten the America Pie name attached to this movie.

    I saw this trailer as well, then immediately turned to my friend and said "If this isn't rated R, there's no point."

     

    Well, it's not, and there isn't.

  6. Posted · Report reply

    Blizzard Man’s first rap was lame, but I liked the second one about a strip club, and you got to love Kenan’s reactions. The third rap was just bad and killed whatever this one had going for it.

     

    The first and third raps were funny because they openly mock rap music cliches like ego-centric proclamations of self-greatness based on random things like where you're from (50% of and over-reliance on electronic gimmicks (i.e. Lil Wayne), though the second was definitely the best.

  8. Posted · Report reply

    I think Zarek was definitely a bad guy because he killed innocent people who didn't immediately fall in line with his agenda.

     

    Adm. Adama's mindset was finally explained with the line "They gave aid and comfort to ME." The Cylons he is defending, remember, were mostly defectors who helped destroy a Cylon resurrection hub and include 4 Cylons who have been loyal members of his crew (Tigh, Anders, Tyrol, and Athena), unlike Gaeta, Narcho, or Kelly. I think if they knew the exact role Caprica Six played in the destruction of the colonies, though, they might make an exception and chuck her out of an airlock.

     

    The last 2 episodes of this show have blown me away, and I hope the final 6 are just as intense.

  10. Posted · Report reply

    I was told by the other forum that I'd be schooled if I came here and participated in the stimulus talk.

     

    I look around this thread and all I see is the same here that I see over there: People who need to read this and understand that there is no such thing as pork in this situation if it creates jobs.

    Three things the Republican Party seems to have forgotten:

    -economic expansion in the 1980s was directly tied to the deficit spending by the Reagan Administration.

    -the Great Depression was ended because of government spending on military goods during World War II.

    -the LBJ tax cuts, combined with military spending in the late 1960s resulted in the inflation of the 1970s.

  11. Posted · Report reply

    Someone made hillarious exerpts from the audiobook version of Dreams From My Father, in which the president tries to accurately impersonate a childhood friend:

     

    http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_BLAM.mp3

     

    http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_NUMBER.mp3

     

    http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_IGNORANT.mp3

     

    http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OB...COMPLICATED.mp3

     

    http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_THAT_GUY.mp3

     

    And the best line ever:

    http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_FRIES.mp3

  14. Posted · Report reply

    Reducing executive bonuses and salaries allows more funds desperately needed to keep the company running (i.e. the whole point of the bailout).

     

     

    You're confusing two philosophies. The trickle down theory and the free market theory are two different things, and the latter has been discredited in the last 6 months, not really the former.

    Correct.

     

    And there are plenty of other historic examples of trickle-down economics failing miserably, the last 6 months doesn't really even need to.

  15. Posted · Report reply

    Yes.

     

    However, in November of 2004, the war was only a little more than a year old and there was still a majority of voters who were willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt about it. There was even still a strong pro-war faction within the Democratic Party at that time.

     

    Had Bush been running for reelection in 2005 or 2006, Dean would have destroyed Kerry and Edwards in the primaries, and gone on to when the White House easily.

  22. Posted · Report reply

    Remember "John F. Kerry"? Seriously, who thought that up?

    His parents.

    Except no one referred to his middle name until the campaign picked up. And no one refers to him as "John F. Kerry" anymore. It was the lamest attempt at trying to make a Kennedy parallel, nothing more.

    I'm not disputing it was a silly tactic, but it was not unheard of for him to use it (though usually while running for office in Massachusetts), since it really was what his parents named him.

     

     

     

    *Was too reluctant to attack Obama on his various associations (i.e. Wright, Resko, Ayres, etc.)

     

    Maybe someone realized if she went any further she'd sound exactly like Joe McCarthy.

  25. Posted · Report reply

    Hey, did you know Iraq was haivng an election this weekend?

    Good:

    More than 14,000 candidates, including about 3,900 women, are running for 440 seats on the influential councils in all of Iraq's provinces except for the autonomous Kurdish region in the north and the province that includes oil-rich Kirkuk, where ethnic groups were unable to reach a power-sharing formula.

     

    Not good:

    Although the voting was generally peaceful, a shooting occurred in Baghdad's Sadr City district. Shiite lawmaker Ghufran al-Saidi said a military officer opened fire and injured two people after voters chanted slogans at a polling station.

     

    But Iraq's military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, told Al-Arabiya television that the shooting occurred after some people tried to carry mobile phones through security cordons. One person was killed and one injured, he said.

     

    The reason for the conflicting accounts was not immediately clear.

     

    In Tikrit, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, three mortar shells exploded near a polling station, but caused no casualties, said police, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.

     

    A bomb found near a Tikrit voting center was defused, police added.

     

    Hundreds of Iraqi Kurds stormed an election office in the disputed northern city of Khanaqin after claiming many of them were not on voting lists. There were no reports of serious injuries. The incident was part of lingering disputes between Kurds and the Arab-run central government over control of the city near the Iranian border.

     

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