Agreed +1

Oh yes! I believe a lot of online chatters put an equal sign on both sides of the slash like so "=/=" to symbolize an equal sign with a slash through the middle of it.

My own, admissibly limited, understanding of the US presidential political dynamics and the history of the Presidential races of the past leads me to believe that it is, unhappily, an either or position. That true blue liberals have enough clout to get Ron Paul nominated on the GOP ticket seems somewhat of a stretch to me (though goodness knows I'd love it, that kind of cooperation between left liberals and libertarians might create the dialogues and warmth needed to birth a liberaltarian movement).

In the absence of Ron Paul the record appears to be that Presidents challenged in their re-election from their base flank are not replaced but often then lose to their rivals in the actual election. To wit, liberals are not capable of replacing Obama with a more liberal person nor are they capable of making the GOP candidate more liberal. They are, however, capable of electing whoever the GOP chooses as Obama's opponent.

Which leaves us with the original highly distasteful either/or predicament.

Best wishes for the holiday to ya Kozster. May all yer turkeys be red and dead.

Oddly enough I would unhappily say that is technically a true statement. Rooting through garbage and starving is objectively worse off than working over a sewing machine for 12 hours a day for only enough money to buy a few bowls of rice. This is a brutal unhappy fact.

Well that's Koz for ya.

As far as I'm aware most liberals are keenly aware that PPACA was crafted as a naive pre-emptive concession by Obama while he was still hopped up on his unifier bipartisan campaign shtick and that by the time he actually copped to reality and realized that his concessions had netted him exactly zero GOP votes it was too late for him or his liberal supporters to start over. Given the choice between something and nothing (with electoral Armageddon coupled with that) every democrat concerned settled for something.

What’s annoying about all this is that you are obviously bright enough to be well aware of all of this so the disingenuousness is puzzling. Do you honestly believe that when liberals laid their heads down dreaming happily of health care reform under the newly elected Obama that visions of the GOP 1994 proposal was what floated in their heads? Seriously?

Well lets not go overboard Ethan. The stinking fact of the matter is that Obama has only one concrete arguement to make to liberals: "If you can't bring yourself to vote for me then please acquaint yourselves with my potential replacements." Any liberal who doesn't find that miserable arguement dispositive is too far out of touch with reality to be worth seeking the vote from.

... PPACA is the product of the liberal left wing base being in charge and it was their desired policy? Koz, not to pile on with the others but surely you realize what kind of lunacy that is? I mean I wasn't expecting much, but I was expecting more than that.

Not to get too deep into the kool-aid but can you name a couple specific occasions in the last thirty or even sixty years when the liberal base of the Democratic party was in charge and what policy changes they enacted during that time of empowerment?

I'd kvetch but I was actually concerned when he was elected that Obama actually believed his campaign schtick and that he'd be a nieve naif. So the realization that he was actually a relatively average politician with a large streak of pragmatism and a certain penchant for stingyness with his political capital was actually a bit of a relief.

Roger, you can sell that all you want but it's still a mostly market economy; I don't have to buy and neither does anyone else.

Gingrich marginalized? Aren't we talking about the current GOP front runner (Cain's successor it seems).

It's a hard tightrope to walk, covering all your points and bases and also being concise. I fail it regularily and I'm only a commenter!

If that was one of your points it didn't get that meaning on the first review. When I read it over the I saw you identify the poll, describe it and the results and then light into liberals and the respondants in general. I wouldn't describe it as a diatribe but it reads as very... exercised. I am missing the part where you cast doubt onto whether the poll was a good one or whether we should take the results very seriously. But I've misread many a post before so I could easily be missing something?

I feel your pain. I typo and misdeliver so much that I think I have my own personal typo-fairy assigned to sprinkle her evil sparkly dust on my keyboard.

Eliminate envy? And they say libertarians aren't utopianists.

Seriously though James, I was defending my original assertion that Jason was over reading into the poll in question. Not making some paen to the wisdom of the unwashed masses.

And ya gotta admit that the economic leaders haven't been covering themselves with glory the last few years. I mean I know, it's all statist interventions fault I don't find it surprising that the vox populi is feelin sour.

Combine the first half of my comment with the second and your average low info poll respondent can be expected to interpret that poll question very differently than you do. You see a poll asking if there should be more rich and think that more rich people means more production, more wealth and more economic activity which means everyone's better off and earning more. Your average low info respondent on the other hand probably thinks more rich means more poor, more parasites and more crooks wrecking the economy and driving the country into a ditch which means everyone's worse off and earning less.

I'm not saying that the low info respondant is correct, I'm simply saying you're failing to consider other less well informed views than yours.

It seems to me that there may be a growing disconnect in public perception between wealthy people and activities that benefit society. When a lot of people think new rich now days they don't think about entrepreneurs who invent new services or goods that make people better off nor do they think industrialist who employs thousands. A lot of them probably think of a well networked executive who shuffles money back and forth with other well networked executives producing no benefit that they can understand when they think of the rich. They may think of an executive who's appointed to head a corporation, pays himself a massive salary, flies the company into a mountain and golden parachutes out at the last moment when they're thinking about the rich.

I don't assert those perceptions as being true but the wealthy perhaps have a branding problem right now.

Also, you are deriving a lot of meaning from what is, on it's face, a pretty odd sort of question that'd be very easy to give a knee jerk answer to without considering it very much.

That there is one sweet lookin lady.

Word James. *commonwealth fistbump*

I only watched one episode (the D&D one) but oh my goodness, what an episode it was!

I'm sympathetic to the sentiment but can't help but observe that if student loans become dischargable through bankruptcy then pretty much all private forms of student loans can be expected to become extremely expensive and scarce with government provided student loans following relatively quickly after.

Ward, straight up Monarchies were mightily corrupt. On the other hand the track record of constitutional Monarchies is pretty decent. You get to seperate out an impartially selected Monarch as a symbolic head of state(but functionally near empty) and an object of national reverence and that leaves the functional head of state (typically a Prime Minister) free to be reviled as the scheming crawling politician they all inevitably are.

Now some states accomplish the same with an appointed or elected symbolic head of state but why leave such numnums to politicians? I'm biased of course but I think the British Commonwealth has got it pretty well set up.

I'm gonna make a point to stomp on some bug in the next little while that is looking uppity. *stomp*stomp* Take that, don't you go gettin any big ideas. There ain't no asteroid falling yet.