Wow, what a moron. And his site won’t let you e-mail him unless you’re a citizen of Idaho. Well, this’ll be 37 cents I’m going to regret…
Last time I checked, the FDA was under Health and Human Services. Now go read my post again, carefully this time, and you will see that I said Department of Agriculture. Ever lived on a farm? Ever owned a farm? Ever dealt with the bureaucratic jungle that is the USDA? I have. Fire every other person in the department, then slash the remaining budget by 2/3. That will be a good start.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/pdf/hist.pdf
You think you can balance the budget through spending cuts? Be my guest; tell us what you’re going to cut. Be reasonably specific, 'kay?
Cite on that, please? I’ve refuted this one before, IIRC, but since it’s your assertion, I think you need to be the one to back it up.
First, I didn’t mention the FDA in my post. Munch did. (As if that error completely undermined the main point of our postings.)
Second, the USDA is responsible for ensuring that meat, eggs, and dairy products are safe for human consumption. The cuts that were made more than 20 years ago by the Reagan Administration have already seriously weakened the consumer’s line of defense against food poisoning. Reducing the USDA to a mere shell of itself as you propose would result in forcing me to play a game of Russian Roulette with my health whenever I bought meat or dairy products.
[Hands silenus a copy of The Jungle.]
Certainly. We all know what a wonderful job the free market was doing about 100 years ago before that meddlesome government got in the way.
[Hands ivylass another copy of The Jungle.]
Happy reading!
Hey, gotta fight ignorance where you can, no? My breadth of knowledge is so thin, I have to exercise it whenever I get the chance. An excerpt:
NDP
Good Lord. The blind faith you put into bureaucrats in lab coats hired by career politicians with a vested interest in seizing your liquid assets, and whose studies are funded chiefly by the industries who lobby their bosses is frankly inspirational for people everywhere who might sometimes have lapses of faith. The false dichotomy that you draw, suggesting that either government must regulate the life out of industry or else that industry must be given free reign by government to defraud the public is ridiculous. Why don’t you put down your hundred-year-old hysteria novel and read some modern academic articles. Here are some Cato Institute Regulatory Studies.
http://www.cato.org/research/reglt-st.html
Munch
Bravo! 
Thanks for that link, Lib. Tell you what: I’ll take that “hundred-year-old hysteria novel” and Cato’s more recent hysteria “articles” and split the difference as usual.
(No offense, my friend, but Cato? There’s gotta be something from a group with a less-transparent axe to grind, no?)
RTFirefly, do you have a link for the entire thread?
Here you go: Ronald Reagan is GOD
Top left corner of the linked page.
Damn I’m lagged today.
NDP–
Be careful handing out those copies of The Jungle, that’s pornography to conservative nutjobs. They get so exited by the idea of unfettered capitalism they come just by glancing at the cover! You realize, don’t you, that those people WANT the world to be like it was in The Jungle.
Ohh for the Good Old Days! Let The Almighty Market Reign! (besides, ground-up human fingers adds that special *je ne c’est quois * that makes sausage ohhh sooo tastee!)
Memo to Mr. Kerry:
Please pick HRC as your running mate. Thank you.
Whaddaya mean, “look like”?
Anyone willing to trot out that dated “Why do you hate America?” canard in this day and age deserves to be mocked by the rest of the world as being clearly deficient in brains.
Lib, don’t you know anything? Hillary’s just OPEN and HONEST, which is GOOD! And Bushco is DISHONEST and CLOSED, which is BAD! Why, Hillary even said that she wants to murder puppies and children, which is honest, which is a GOOD thing!
Maybe I’m crazy, Rjung - a distinct possibility - but my hazy recollection is that things were going pretty good until a handful of nutcases tried to blow up New York.
But maybe that was a coincidence. No wait! I forgot! That was all the Republicans’ fault, too, wasn’t it?
OK, this is the last straw. I have to ask:
Have conservatives all gone nuts? Seriously, what the fuck?
One of the things I used to credit conservatives with was sensible financial policy, which would occasionally serve as a useful check on over-zealous Democratic social programs. These conservatives from yesteryear would have said “oh, the economy is in recession and we’re gonna have to pay for an invasion all by ourselves? Well, perhaps we can’t have all these tax cuts that were planned during boom times. It’s too bad, but when the country is in danger we all have to make sacrifices.”
No one is blaming Republicans for the recession happening. We’re blaming them for being fiscally irresponsible during a recession and a war, with long-term tax cuts which predominantly favor the rich. What I can’t figure out is how you all are suddenly in favor of the government spending way more than it takes in.
SPOOFE, dude, cut down on the caffeine.
Thanks.
The buget is the buget, but the money gets spent in the appropration bills. I’ll go through that thread, but I’ve already read RTFirefly’s post, and checked his cite, but I’m at a loss as to how it makes anything I’ve posted in this thread is inaccurate.