I imagine you’re also puzzled by shoelaces and those drinking bird toys.
Since the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, what could possibly limit its power except itself? And if it grants Congress the power to spend, then obviously Congress must exercise that power by appropriation before it can spend. I’m sure it’s very confusing to you. You should focus on more liberal topics to calm yourself. Have your chakras been aligned? Is your living room Fung Shui’ed? Have you checked your privilege lately? Those things may help.
I hope you realize that by your own standard of “going to respond from now on only to decent argument”, you would refuse to answer even one of your recent posts. Hell, you’d probably put yourself on ignore, or however that’s done around here.
Perhaps you should consider calming the fuck down. And perhaps not defending a position when it turns out that it is, in fact, indefensible.
You are correct that the tax cut is not a gift. A gift is something that is given without payment, and these wealthy individuals paid their dues. They paid millions of dollars to the politicians to get billions back.
So, good job, you got one right. They are not a gift, they are a product, bought and paid for by the .01%.
Choosing to only address the post that you can nitpick little point on to try to derail the discussion isn’t running, you are correct, running is when you catch yourself making a declarative statement like that we could never do anything to prevent another OKC bombing. Instead, you are doing your best to threadshit and distract.
Hey I agree with you there.
Liberals sometimes need to define vocabulary do describe reality as it changes. The republican idea that reality can be changed just by refusing to believe entertains me.
At least you are amused that hate and intolerance is winning the day. I’ll be amused at some point, I suppose, when the hateful people that you support come after you and yours, with your ethnicity and your fancy lawyerin’, and leave me alone, because I’m a (very) white guy without a college degree. That will be a day of reckoning for myself, I suppose, do I stand up to defend you, putting myself in the way of the purge that is directed at you, or do I just shrug, and figure I may as well join the winning team, because that would be more amusing.
Nope, not at all. You conservatives with your redefining of words. Triggering someone is when you invoke PTSD type symptoms in people by exposing them to similar circumstances as a trauma that they endured. Rape victims, veterans of wars, stuff like that. Triggering is not when you threadshit and act like an ass on a messageboard, no matter how much you believe it to be. My only reaction to that is to see you acting like an ass on a message board, but, while at first I was surprised by how much of an ass you are, I’ve gotten pretty used to it, and you could never be such an ass that I would not forgive you, and would not come to your aid when the fascists that you justified and helped in getting into power come for you and yours.
But it would be nice, if you would stop being such an ass. Wouldn’t you feel better about yourself, even?
Somehow, this sentiment always makes an appearance. “Gee, Bricker, what makes you act so unpleasantly with no provocation whatsoever in this thread that started with a claim that Republicans are evil, huh?”
Hah. This from the guy who argued that the Bush Administration wasn’t torturing people because the Bush Administration re-defined the word torture so as not to include the Bush Administration’s preferred method of torture.
“First we assume that the liberal-approved definition of a word is the only possible correct one. Then we prove that the liberal claim is correct. By citing to the liberal-approved definition.”
Not a lot of heavy lifting in your debate circles, eh?
More precisely you were initially annoyed at republicans being called “The Party Of Evil”. This would be annoying because you’re a republican who did not personally participate in allowing the expiration of CHIP and you don’t like being painted with the same brush just because your elected representatives did this thing.
Honestly though - do you really think it’s not at least a little evil to let children suffer and die? And to have attitudes that are totally cool with letting children suffer and die? Ain’t that at least a little bit naughty? Objectively speaking?
And if you say “no - the children don’t have jobs by which to pay for insurance themselves, and thus they deserve to die horribly of the most horrible diseases possible because they’re slothful drains on the government monies”, then, er, well.
And I imagine you get really involved in the individual steps of paying a bill by check, too. Important distinctions!
Exactly. It must write the check before putting it in the mail. Important distinctions!
But just like I enable myself to put the check in the mail by writing it, the government enables itself to spend the money by appropriating it. Describing the Constitutional mechanism by which the government enables itself to spend money isn’t a Constitutional limitation on the spending power.
Article I, Section 9 doesn’t restrict what the government can spend its money on, nor how much it can spend. Those would be limitations, but the Constitution doesn’t have anything like that.
Now that you’ve had your Civics lesson, you can spend the next fifteen minutes reviewing your vocabulary words, then we’ll have our spelling test.
First, I don’t know why you’re whining about liberals when it was your fellow Republicans doing the red-pen reshaping of reality you hypocritically claim to eschew.
Second, I didn’t say what you’ve put in quotation marks. No one has. Those words are a product of your own imagination. There are words for such a technique: “straw-man argument” comes to mind, as does “bullshit”.
Third, I do not refer to the “liberal-approved” definition of torture, I don’t know if there is one. I refer to the legal definition. It can be found here. I imagine it was voted into law with the approval of both liberals and conservatives at the time.
RC, you bring about as much value to a conversation as a case of jock rot. I cleared my ignore list a while back, but I’m putting you back on it simply because you are a sorry asshole.
If “we must do this because it says so in the Bible” is a valid argument for one thing, then it’s a valid argument for other things. That’s a theocracy. But we reject the argument that “we must do X because the Bible tells us so”, specifically because we are not a theocracy. (Not to mention that The Bible doesn’t tell us to do “X” in this case.)
I think it’s worse to to cheat in debate like that.
Sure, it’s evil to let children suffer and die, if their suffering and death can be alleviated without some other sacrifice. But that was never the option.
There’s a scene in the movie “Dave,” where Dave, impersonating the President, derails a Cabinet meeting in order to “find $650 million,” to save a homeless shelter. He asks one Cabinet secretary about some item in his budget, and the man protests that this item is important. “I’m sure that’s important,” Dave says. “But I don’t want to tell some eight year old kid he’s got to sleep in the street because we want people to feel better about their car. . . do you?” Defeated, the secretary agrees that he doesn’t either.
That scene was presumably meant to highlight how simple these kinds of things really are, and if not for entrenched Washington interests, we’d be funding homeless shelters and CHIP programs right and left.
What that scene actually does, though, is highlight the fundamentally simple understanding that the writers seem to have about programming federal expenditures, just as the above assertion from you reveals a similar simplistic view.
Tell me: do YOU want children to die? Because I bet you’re not contributing your disposable income to St Jude Hospital or the Ronald McDonald House or the NIH Children’s Inn. I guess you’re also a heartless bastard?
Or do you recognize that decisions about support don’t exist in a vacuum when it’s your money at stake?
I can’t for begbert2, but in the society I’d prefer to live in, that would be what my taxes are for. Some of us believe that it’s our collective responsibility as a civilized society to provide for the general welfare – and ensure life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness – of all our citizens, most especially the most vulnerable among them.
