Sam Stone, you’ve tangentially managed to get your finger on the most important piece of this whole puzzle.
It’s all about power: who has it and who gets it.
The Bush Administration displays this in its rawest form. As the Plame Affair illustrates, the only thing that matters is Bush’s simple formulation: are you for us or against us? Asking that question automatically presumes a corollary: whatever it takes to defeat those who are against us is fair.
Ergo, checks and balances, like the Constitution’s restrictions on the military, or the UN Charter’s restriction against military action except if attacked, are to be thrown out, because they are restrictions on doing whatever it takes.
It’s the attitude of the big boss at the company that dominates the local economy in any given county in any given state of the union. It’s the attitude of the big political dealmaker, like Tammany in old New York, or Rove in the Bush White House.
Liberals are for checks and balances, by far the most important of which is restricting the power of the President to make war. Presidents who like to make war, like Bush, or his Texas predecessor LBJ, also love to spend money, because war is inherently expensive. You can’t make war without spending massive amounts of money. Conservatives try to obfuscate this to death, but most of the debt was accumulated because of war. Nothing else but war. Eliminate these stupid foreign adventures and you eliminate most of the cause of the debt.
Which will never happen, until the people wake up and realize that Presidents love to make war because it automatically increases their power. And power is what it’s all about.
I’ve quoted this before, and I’ll quote it again: “It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.”, Hamilton, Federalist Number 8.
Truer words were never written.
The SDMB American Conservatives always cry of being besieged because they get their rocks off by being self-made martyrs. 
That said, even if we assume the SDMB readership has a representative sampling of world view, the simple truth is that American politics is already more conservative than that in the rest of the world. With American Conservatives skewing (by definition) even more to the right, it’s no surprise they feel outnumbered – they’re already on the far end of the scale as it is.
Too bad they don’t have the sense to get back towards the middle with the rest of us… 
Posters to this thread thus far who have made comments that suggest their political leanings…
** Liberals_________________18
Conservatives_____________8
No indicative remark________ 8
Libertarians_______________4**
Wrong again, boyo. Only Americans think of liberals and left-wingers as being the same. Everyone else distinguishes several varieties of left-winger. I, for instance, am an archo-syndicalist in the short term, and an anarcho-communist in the long term. I spit on liberals. If you distinguished among them, like the Inuit have 200+ words for snow, it would be more like:
Leftist 1: 1
Leftist 2: 1
Leftist 3: 1
etc.
I’m curious, Milum.
How did you count me?
Apparently you have never been subjected to conservatives cawing about tax cuts.
I should probably have used the terms most polls use, Evangelical or Fundamental Christians. Typically people in the US who self define themselves under those categories accept biblical literalism and see a larger role for religion in government. This role includes, but is not limited to, the elimination of abortion rights and the protection of traditional definitions of marriage.
I would struggle to find as many as six people who post here regularly who fit that description. Even if six regular posters identify themselves as such, that is six of at least a thousand regular posters living in the US. Less than one percent compared to at least twenty percent compared to the population at large.
You may ascribe that to any number of reasons, but they certainly don’t have an easy time of things when they do assert themselves here.
If you can stomach a liberal long enough to explain this, can you be so kind? What does left-wing mean if not liberal? Seriously, this has been going over my head for some time.
Also, when you say “everyone else”, do you literally mean everyone else? I heard someone try to explain something political to me, and it turned out that by “rest of the world besides the USA” he just meant Canada, Australia, and Europe. So I’m never clear on this.
These aren’t bad, but I’d quibble with the last one. For one thing, people who self-describe themselves as conservatives (and are labeled that by others too) don’t seem to believe in cutting spending either. They currently seem to favor cutting taxes AND raising spending and not worrying about the deficit. Of course, Sam Stone is trying to define these folks as not really being conservative and I suppose one can do that but then one is left with some counterintuitive definitions of who is what.
Also, I think one needs to distinguish who gets tax cuts. I.e., conservatives favor tax cuts going primarily to the well-off (supply-side stimulus) while the liberals favor tax cuts more to the lower income groups (Keynesian stimulus).
In a related vein, liberals think it is important to worry about the amount of economic inequality and believe that one can’t have equality of opportunity when there are vast inequalities in wealth and income that lead to inequalities in education, the environment in which children are raised, etc.
Conservatives, by contrast, tend to believe this isn’t a concern…i.e., that equality of opportunity simply means that everybody lives by the same set of economic rules of our capitalistic market economy with minimal regulation and whatever distribution of wealth that results is that which ought to be.
Finally, another important question I’d add to your list: Do believe there needs to be more or less regulationof industry (or other methods of correcting market failures) in order to adequately protect the environment and public health?
Most conservatives favor spending cuts. It’s Bush who doesn’t, because Bush is a big government conservative.
I’d guess that even most liberals would like to see budget cuts (I certainly would), so that’s hardly a conservative issue. It’s certainly not an issue of any of the administrations the conservatives have given us in recent times.
Where we usually disagree is where to make said cuts.
Yeah, but most liberals seem to favor expanding more programs than they cut.
I agree with the “or what” part, but that “without (too much) rancor” is questionable.
Cite?
I can think of all sorts of programs I’d want cut, and only a few I’d like to see expanded or newly implemented. Which “most liberals” are you referring to?
Achernar,
There is more than one left wing ideology. Depending on strictly how you define “ideology” there can be as many as there are leftists. But as the word is usually used there are 2 major groups on the left: liberals and socialists. Not In Anger would fall into the later category and his attitude is not unusual for a socialist. The ones I’ve met tend to think that us liberals are compromising with the devil. These are economic terms. Liberals favor reforming capitalism while socialists want to junk it all together. Since the socialists have such a low profile here in the States people tend to equate leftists with liberals. Just remember that all liberals are leftists but not all leftists are liberals. There are other leftwing folks as well. Most of the moderates, as the term is generally used in the American media ( socially liberal, economically conservative but not antigovernment ) are on the left. Even some of the libertarians ( same as the moderates but antigovernment ) are leftists. Given how the terms “conservative” and “liberal” have been demonized here many on one side or the other refer to themselves as centrists or independents.
Yes the terminology is messy but still useful in estimating how someone will jump on an issue. But there are no guarantees. I have seen a Christian socialist who supported keeping the words “Under God” in the Pledge and even a Reagan Socialist!?!
Most Congressional liberals back expansions of Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC, Homeland Security, aid to states, and agriculturual subsidies.
Those are big ticket items.
I thought Homeland Security was the darling of the conservatives. While many on both sides were all for it, it’s hardly a liberal idea. I’d never have created it in the first place, as simple communication between existing agencies would accomplish the same thing, likely better. If the agencies don’t like it, get new heads of the agencies.
As for Medicare and Medicaid, I thought a lot of liberals wanted to eliminate them completely, as Universal Healthcare would cover them both. Medicaid is also a state budgetary item, if I recall correctly, and doesn’t have a great impact on balancing the federal budget.
Aid to states? A lot of that is covered in the other items you mentioned, such as agricultural subsidies and AFDC.
I’m sure you’re aware that not a single one of these programs, even the broadly sweeping “Aid to States” has a budget as high as the DoD, correct? You think liberals are lining up to grant the DoD even more money?
I’d personally shoot for a budget surplus, make major changes in the amount of money spent in various places, pay down the debt significantly, then cut taxes in the future to reflect the lowered interest bill.
If you want to look at big government, you don’t have to wait for a liberal administration to take over the White House. We currently have a bigger government than we’ve ever had. You may or may not like Bush, but he’s not a liberal.
One more thing, you used the term “most liberals” and then switched to “Congressional liberals”.
To be honest, I think I can count the number of liberals in Congress on two hands.
Johnathan Chance you barely made the list that I sent to the proper authorities. Don’t worry, you are only marginally liberal.
Below is the paragraph that put you on the “black list”.
“Like it or not…some form of a National Health Service is coming to the United States in the next 50 years or so. The only real choice is how we get there and can we decide fast enough to manage the choice as opposed to letting it be imposed upon us by circumstance.”
See… your passive acceptance of the inevitability of a** National Health Service** without even a nod to busting up the doctors union that has us held hostage for the last hundred years.
Geez! What robbery! Good Doctors in Cuba make $67 a month.
Anyway, tow the line and I’ll try and get you off the list. 
Yeah, I’m a real conservative. I advocate repealing all laws of prohibition, opening our borders to allow people to travel freely, allowing homosexuals to enter full-fledged marriage contracts, and elminating the federal legislature. That’s how you can tell.