Haha.. was just watching some clips of Morton Downey, Jr. on youtube. Man, I loved that show! I remember seeing him live a few times too.

Funny, seeing how he was a conservative mouthpiece, and everyone I knew in college and all my other friends loved him and his show. But we still voted for Democrats and Clinton. Mainly because we didn't take him seriously, he was just entertainment.

Guess young folks aren't always so dumb after all.

Although I must admit if Downey had organized a rally in DC, it wouldn't have taken months of pre-promotion and billionaires busing in people to make it look impressive, he'd have gotten a million people there in a day just by saying to show up.

I'll take pablum puking liberals over bile belching conservatives.

The GOP always has a plan to better the country where the hell is it? A party of NO and caring only about BIG BANKS AND LARGE CORPORATIONS. Puking conservatives! J

Heard a guy on the Ed Show make a great comment...
When considering the 2 parties, something always beats nothing ("party of no!").

The GOP has nothing constructive; it's always tax cuts for super rich, privitize SS, eliminate public education, more wars, and of course don't pay for any of it !

I was watching the movie Midway over the weekend and one of the lines struck me. Pat Morita was talking to Tishiro Mifune who was playing Adm Yamamoto. Yamamoto remarked they must defeat the US quickly and decisively because if they don't the American industrial might will rise up and they'll be overwhelmed.
We've lost that industrial base, if we needed that today - we'd be screwed. Can we afford to farm that out to Korea, China, and Taiwan if we got into another large conflict ?

Good column by Ann McFeatters.

WWGOPD? (What would the GOP do ?)

Many conservatives like Palin, Boehner, McConnell want to "take America back" !
Back to what? the 1940's and 50's ? Back to Bush 2?

What would they really do? NONE have actually said - they have no cohesive plan, but consider these GOP "talking points".

Extend Bush tax cuts for the top 2%?
Well they say it creates jobs... if so, why didn't the last 10 years produce millions of jobs? We should be at 3-4%, not 9-10%. And the GOP complains about deficits, so how do they PAY for the tax cuts which are projected to cost $2 trillion over the next 10 years.
No answers.

Privitize SS.
Oh, that would have worked well in the 2001 and 2008 market crises. We can really make it insolvent more quickly and throw more Srs into a financial chasm.

Repeal Health Care.
Ok let's revoke coverage for the 45 million Americans just added, and remove all those kids with pre-existing conditions. That' s just what Jesus would do ! NOT !
The GOP professes to be Christian, but many of their policies are 180 degree the opposite. Very un-Christ like.

Deregulate businesses.
yes, give us more Enrons, Tysons, housing market, Wall Street debacles. . . and then we bail them out with tax payer $ (Bush initiated these). Deregulation brings business corruption and gouging the middle class, and we get BP Gulf disasters. Most of the time, higher prices to the consumer follow deregulation. Doesn't work, except for the wealthy CEOs.

Create Jobs.
Sorry, they have said nothing coherent or promising. They have no plan. Tax cuts alone don't do it. We've been there, done that. Still have 10% unemployed. Ben Stein (conservative) said it best, "NO one has a sure fire plan!" That's why the GOP is silent. All their mouthing is just a cheerleading skit (Beck in DC).

My Proposal (kinda- I don't own it):
Tax the top 2% at 38—39% (that's only a 3-4% increase over current levels; Clinton did and we had prosperity). Take that $ and rebuild our infrastructure to create jobs... bridges, roads, schools, develop rapid transit, renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal) which creates new industries. That's what FDR did to pull us out of the Great Depression. It's not rocket science. Yes we'd have debts for a while longer, but eventually the economy would get rolling and we'd come out of the mess (look at the 1990s), and then we can talk about balanced budgets. Ever try to restart a car on "E" with no gas ? That's where we are now.

LOL
Actually, CBS took aerial photos and did more of a scientific approach of counting... they report 87,000 +/1- 9,000. but even the 100,000-300,000 Beck says is pretty wimpy considering all the $ and prep that went into it. No way near a million, sorry Sarah that's "fuzzy math" !

Well, it doesn't look good for manufacturing to come back. The numbers don't add up, and these kinds of decisions are done like equations. It's just business.

Actually, we're the largest beneficiary of outsourcing: The rest of the world outsources more to us than we outsource to it. It's just that they outsource creative, development, incubation and information work to us - We're the best at it, with the most bang for buck because of our greater proficiency and efficiency with it - We incubate for the rest of the world. Of course, if we lose our edge on proficiency and efficiency, then bang for buck and ROI goes down, so obviously education is a huge priority, especially since we're shaping up as a one nut country, the realized information society.

But, other places are better, faster, cheaper at manufacturing and that work goes there. The manufacturing trades guys that are out of work now need to suck it up and retrain, because most of them will probably never work in manufacturing again.

Pretty straightforward, except for the part when the world takes a dump, most intangible stuff aint worth diddly squat, whereas if you're holding tangible stuff, you're holding something still valued and negotiable, so yeah, I would think some kind of symmetry/balance/whatever between producing intangible stuff and tangible stuff.

When the world takes a dump, if you don't produce what you need, if you've got other tangible stuff, you can trade/arbitrage/whatever around to what you need in the end, circuituitously/circumspectly/convolutedly/whatever, but if you got what nobody's interested in for the time being, you're stuck, you're hosed.

That happened to mighty Spain and their 80 percent of the gold in the world at the time, and they got cast back into an ancient backwards backwater age for several centuries that was really hard to eventually climb back out of. They were deader than dirt. Showstopper dead. Zombieland.

Ed

Why don't you respond to my statement I replied to you?