There was no need to point it out since your choice of examples made it obvious. I was pointing out that your rhetoric is more than a little ridiculous: you used a straight-out-of-1980 complaint about criminals roaming the streets when crime keeps going down and sentences keep getting harsher, and your statements about intrusive government should perhaps be tempered when Republicans in a bunch of states have actually decided women who want abortions need to have ultrasounds.
What does that even mean? Compared to what? A worse-case scenario? In that event even I’d say we’re “moving” in the right direction. That question is too vague to have any significant meaning. Drill down and ask about things like jobs and the economy and schools and crime and I’ll bet you get an entirely different answer.
Nope, wasn’t talking about that either. Can’t imagine where you got that from, but I’m guessing you just wanted to brag that for once it wasn’t O 44, R 47. 
Okay, well, here, let me show you…:: hmm, could have sworn I said it was the congressional approval rating. Oh, wait, I did! It’s right up there in black and white! :: But guess what…it’s even worse than I thought! Now it’s down to 10%!
Like I said, the idea the populace is running the country is a fiction.
I agree it doesn’t mean much of anything, but if you’re going to bring up Congressional approval ratings and conflate them with “how the country is being run,” you can’t handwave away that cite.
I guess I should have bolded, so as to avoid any confusion or inherent problems with comprehension. That’s my mistake, I should have known better and I apologize for not taking all factors into account when I made my previous post.
You specifically stated that you have no recourse against government. Clearly, in the USA, you do; it’s a right that is specifically written into the first amendment.
Oh, please. Take a look at some current day crime shows like 48 Hours and take note of how many murders are committed by assholes with violent crimes, including rape and murder on occasion, who are legally out of prison and still relatively young men.
You guys love to claim the crime rate is down but I don’t know anyone who believes it. But just for shits and giggles, lets assume it is. Just think how much lower it would be if criminals weren’t being kicked loose at every opportunity. The reason sentences keep getting harsher is because it’s become almost impossible to keep people in jail.
Additionally, drug crime is worse than it was in the 80s; the quality of schooling and the idiotic practices therein are worse than they were in the 80s; and government is unquestionably intruding upon our lives and attempting to control our life choices than it did in the 80s.
So sorry, but I’m afraid your transparent Reagan-era dodge just doesn’t stand up to the reality of current day life in the U.S.
You didn’t. Here’s the post of yours that I was drawing the “14%” from and was legitimately confused about what you were talking about:
So after I read that comment of yours, I did some Googling to see what sort of polls had been done that show “only 14% of the populace…[are] at least satisfied with the way the country is being run.” I subsequently linked to a couple of polls that showed people’s approval of how things are either headed or what they thought of the president’s job. I linked to them to show that neither of them are at 14%. I’m sorry you didn’t understand that the reason behind my posting them was to show you that more than 14% *are *at least satisfied with the way the country is being run-- either because they either approve of the job the president is currently doing, or because they think it’s heading in the right direction. Clear?
But thank you for finally clarifying your initial “14%” as being about Congress.
Perhaps it has escaped your notice, but people have largely been singularly unable to do a friggin’ thing about it when a school refuses to take action against a bully and won’t discuss it with the press, when a school sends a kid home for wearing Rosary beads, when the police charge adolescent girls with distributing child porn for emailing pictures of their boobs to a friend, when kids who are graduating from high school are functionally illiterate and can’t perform the most basic math calculations, and, like I said to Marley, when violent criminals are being kicked loose on multiple convictions after serving a fraction of their sentences, etc., etc., etc.
I submit that if they think about it, people are not at all happy with “the direction” the country is going, and that they justifiably feel powerless to do anything about it.
YMOV.
I’d rather consult facts and crime statistics. You know, stuff that measures data rather than trying to produce dramatic television.
In part that’s because Republicans have been scaring the shit out of them with the same old nonsense about crime for several decades. (And to be fair, “tough on crime” works for most politicians and so does… :rolleyes: watching “48 Hours.”) There have been studies showing that people really believe the violent crime rate keeps going up even though the facts say it’s been going down for a couple of decades.
They aren’t. Do some reading about mandatory sentencing laws.
I believe arrests for drug crimes is up, nevermind how counterproductive that is. I’d need a cite that actual crime is up.
I wonder if that’s at all related to cuts in government revenue and unfunded mandates. Nah, that’s probably a coincidence.
Which is why Republicans have been pushing for more and more liberal social poilcies over the last couple of decades: they don’t want the government legislating issues like abortion or gay marriage.
I didn’t “finally” clarify it. I stated it clearly and unequivocally in post 85. To wit:
Sorry you missed it. 
And now I’m out of here for a while. It’s been fun, but I got other threads to look at and other chit to do.
Aw, gee whiz, just when things were getting really tiresome…
Oh, so Congress has a 14% approval rating. The obstructionist, quarreling, divisive, hostage-taking, lunatic Tea Party Congress. Yes, I can certainly see that with a 14% approval rating.
Here’s some cites to back up what Marley23 was saying about crime rates:
A table showing crime rates and frequencies from 1960 to 2010. You can see the increase, and then the decline, in crime rates of all sorts.
FBI table showing change between 2010 and 2011 for those same categories. The decline continues.
In most categories (including murder, which is the crime that has always been most reliably reported), crime rates are down to levels not seen since the mid-1960s. And in the remaining categories, we’re down to 1970s rates.
They’ve done studies of what happens to crime rates in different countries in the decades after lead is removed from gasoline. I’m not saying it’s the cause, but our experience is consistent with what’s happened in other countries.
Wake me up when the increases in after-tax incomes in our society are not much higher for the very rich than for everyone else. Then I might think that you have a point.
Heck, wake me up when the tax burden is actually shifted more to the rich because we tax them more severely (rather than it shifting more to the rich simply because their income share grows and grows).
Finally, how high does the reward for “risk-taking, accomplishment and innovation that we all benefit from” have to go before we can actually consider actually implementing policies that might make it smaller? How about, we hold a contest each year and give all of society’s income to those who are voted as the top 100 best innovators and then the rest get nothing. Is that good enough for you? Seriously, how far do you want this “winner take all” society to go?
48 Hours is not “dramatic television.” It’s real life and it simply follows homicide detectives as they attempt to solve murders. The perps and their records are real.
Define violent crime. For example (not saying it’s so) it’s entirely possible that schoolyard fights and neighborhood/barroom assualts and rapes have gone down, while drive-by shootings and drug-related violence and murders have gone up. And even if rates are down, think how much lower they’d be if these newer types of violent crime weren’t so widespread and prevalent. People aren’t fearful of violent crime because of Republicans, they’re fearful of it because for the most part it’s touched their lives or the lives of someone they know.
No, it’s the result of idiotic notions such as to fail kids harms their self-esteem so pass them regardless. And of teacher’s unions that make it impossible to get rid of bad teachers. And the breakdown of family coherence, where kids grow up without proper adult supervision and proper values and anyone to make sure they do their schoolwork.
With regard to abortion, many conservatives regard it as murder. And even worse, as the murder of innocent creatures who may very well experience pain and had no say in their creation. This is a tad more significant an issue for government than whether or not people should be allowed to put salt on their food.
With regard to gay rights, conservatives, being the party of look before you leap, are sometimes reticent in ways they shouldn’t be as well as in those where they should. Many have been taught all their lives that homosexuality was perverse if not evil, and people don’t change longheld beliefs that they were taught when they were young overnight. So it will take time. Still, many conservatives are less opposed to homosexual rights than before and many others aren’t opposed to them at all. Witness Clint Eastwood and…me, for example. It isn’t like homosexuality hasn’t been repressed all over the world for most of the last several millenia. Conservatives are hardly unique in their opposition to it, and in fact American conservatives are among the vanguard, relatively speaking, of those in the world in coming to accept it. Regardless though, I doubt you’re going to find much acceptance for government intrusion as to what foods we’re allowed to eat, what exercise we have to take and how much weight we have to lose (and we are very definitely headed that way) because Republicans have been slow to embrace gay rights.
And now I’m out of here. (Hi, Ruby, if you’re there. ;))
How is the statement you’re making substantially different from the one the President said?
I know what 48 Hours is, and intentionally or not, you’ve missed my point completely. A show about individual crimes does not provide any evidence about crime on a societal level. The facts are entirely against you here.
Not only Republicans, no - there’s 48 Hours, for example. But Republicans do their damndest.
Many of those things could contribute - and so could the factors I mentioned. But I think putting all the blame on liberal notions like these evinces a greater concern with blaming than with solving the problems.
Right. It’s very easy for Republicans to justify exception after exception to your stated small-government agenda, of course. What’s tougher is convincing people that they believe the agenda when you make so many exceptions.
When people who think like you and Clint have positions of actual power in the Republican Party on a national level, we’ll talk. Meanwhile, the party is just about unified in its opposition to gay rights on a national level.
We can’t even agree on facts as simple as crime rates anymore? What next, the color of the sky? It has a Democratic bias, donchaknow.
Its not taht he doesn’t care about teh 1%, its that he doesn’t care about the 1% to teh exclusion of the other 99%.
You’re assuming that there won’t be something else in taht three day period. I thought his ridiculous statements about the Egyptian embassy was going last longer than it did, after all, its still going on but that royal screw up got trumped by this new royal screwup.
At some point I hope people get back to focusing on his tax returns.
Pffft. Thats why he offered a 3 to 1 spending cut to revenue increase deal.
So it doesn’t bother you that we are at historically low revenues?
Frankly I don’t think the deficit should be a focus until we get our economy back on track but some people seem to think that the only way to get the economy back on track is to balance the budget (I don’t know a single economist that believes this and I live in an area that has more economists per capita than any other major metropolitan area in the country).
Spending cuts have been on the table since day 1. We’ve had several rounds of spending cuts. What haven’t been on the table at all are revenue increases.
You make it sound like that interview shows that Obama didn’t have any idea of the genearl size of the debt. Pffft.
There is a difference between intentionally putting yourself into a deficit situation because you wanted to give people tax cuts and finding yourself in a severe recession where sound fiscal policy is to run HUMONGOUS deficits to soak up the slack in aggregate demand.
The empirical evidence disagrees with you. There is a consensus among economists that the stimulus did its job. There is consensus among economists that the auto bailouts resulted in a much better economy than we would have had without them.
You do realize that our debt is denom inated in US dollars,right?
Wait, WHAT!?!?!!11!
So what happened when Republicans held the house (AND THE SENATE) for most of George Bush’s adminstration?
The record is clear that we have run much larger net deficits under Democratic Presidents than Republican presidents. It is largely under Democratic congresses (and Presidents) that our war debt shrank as a percentage of our economy.
It wasn’t until Reagan that this trend reversed itself as a result of huge tax cuts that were not accompanied by spending cuts.
I realize that you true believers support the spending cuts but your politicians are happy to take the tax cuts without teh spending cuts and the huge deficits that it creates.
Explain a large tax cut for the rich in the midst of increased war spending.
Are youa felon? Aren’t you allowed to vote?
Because no true scottsman…
Bloomberg is the only sort of Republican that you will find in the Northeast. You used to find them in DC all the time now they’re all like Rick Santorum.
The Republican congress has a 14% approval rate. Its not government generally.
The last 60 years of tax history tells us that it is a lot easier to cut taxes than raise taxes. A LOT. In fact you can win elections based on this one position alone.
You act like thats gonna matter.
The rest of us live in a sad world where facts trump our pet preconceptions. A world where a cite demonstrating a fallacy in our belief structure causes us to re-examine our assumptions. In **SA’s **world, not so much. In his world, when faced with a contradiction between fact and opinion, he can support his own mistaken contention by saying “For example (not saying it’s so) it’s entirely possible that…” (post 115)
I wish I lived in a world like that!