j_b

Liar. TARP was a Bush program, and the stimulus was to alleviate the crisis of catastrophic proportion you guys engineered. Everyone but morons know Obama was handed a shit sandwich you confectioned with love. Cretin.

as if I needed to give examples of the vile commentary you graced us with over the years. Let's face it, everyone here knows you are a racist knuckle dragger.

I see 2006, we funded Egypt $1,795,000,000 while Israel got slightly more at $2,520,000,000. Jordon less. Egypt gets less due to military funding being less than Israel. Strange as they have so little oil? For all that I know of no one who even got so much as a Camel ride or a thank you note. [/url] Joseph said 'compare', not cherry pick. Israel's aid officially amounts to ~3 billions per year but it gets another 3 billions per year in indirect aid. From 1949 to 2001, Israel got ~100 billions in aid. By comparison, Egypt gets about $2 billion per year (1/3 Israel's total). Egypt has no oil but sustaining the Mubarak dictatorship is critical to keeping in check pan-arab nationalism in oil rich regions. Big oil hates it when arabs want to control the resource under their sand.

Taxpayers spent around a trillion so far, but it'll be at least twice as much once we are done paying the interest on the debt and done caring for those folks now wandering without arms, legs, faces, etc .. Money we could have spent retooling the economy out of fossil fuels, but noooo, the dinos had to have their war.

For someone with a long history of vile racist comments like you do, you certainly play the victim a lot.

It shows they are trolling for the lowest common denominator, which isn't much of a surprise considering their targets: dimwits and the elderly cut off from the real world.

Well, they did regain control of the 2nd largest oil reserve on the planet (and won't let go, for sure) but beside mercernaries and oil majors, I don't see many Americans who won anything. Sucker thinks he did.

Over 50% of regressives believe that Obama sympathisizes with islamic fundamentalists who want to impose sharia over the entire world. AND, we are asked to believe that such crazy nonsense isn't fueled by the racist and islamophobic propaganda spewed by Fox 24/7.

the retard is now playing the semantic card AND he doesn't want to be insulted to boot, after he did exactly that for years on end. Laughably pathetic.

Liberals brought up that muslims shouldn't be able to build a cultural center near ground 0 and made national news for weeks on end out of it? You are a really, really bad liar or a first class moron, probably both.

Neo-Supremacy Chic: Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s Tea-Scalding of MLK by Pierre Tristam They don’t call it white supremacy for nothing. One of the ways this country’s reactionaries have made racism and neo-segregation chic is by co-opting the language of emancipation, equality and civil rights. The “tea party” broods—the richest, most pampered, most welfared generation in the history of mankind—portray themselves as the put-upon victims of high taxes, disenfranchisement and debt, though this is the same generation that since 1981, and more so since 2001, has benefited from the lowest taxes this country has known going back to the 1920s, contributed to the greatest debt it’s known, and is now profiting from the richest retirement benefits this or any other country has ever known. Rich enough, that is, to give rise to sprawls like Palm Coast, which was created to suck on that hog. Almost exclusively white, Catholic, Protestant and old, this most selfish generation discovered in 2008 that it was no longer the swing vote. It was outrun by younger, certainly more colored, more colorful, voters. It rebelled. It declared itself disenfranchised. Already self-segregated in communities physically gated or deed-restricted from the rabble, it was not a leap to self-segregate politically and turn imaginary disenfranchisement into discrimination. The minor genius of the “tea party” movement is to do so by adopting the language and methods of rebellion, albeit in slogans only: reactionaries don’t make rebellions. They crush them. By co-opting the mythology of the original tea party, today’s “tea party” broods have managed to make their over-representation at almost every level of government look like no representation because the man at the helm doesn’t look like them. They go as far as using the language of disenfranchisement, and the protest words of the 1960s. It is supremacy by rhetoric, the sort of supremacy that, in its cruder form, enables some fools to claim that a National Association for the Advancement of White People is no more (or no less, for good measure) racist than the NAACP. It is the supremacy of a Glenn Beck or a Sarah Palin who, as they did Aug. 28, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, posed as the nation’s new civil rights pioneers, “taking back” America and “restoring” its honor. Taking it back from whom? Restoring it from what? Don’t ask, though it isn’t the fifth-grade speech-contest skills of a Beck or a Palin that would obscure what they mean: “For too long,” Beck said today, “this country has wandered in darkness, and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning.” Darkness. The darkies, in other words, are back. You don’t need to call the president a * to get your point across in this era of “darkness.” Especially not to a sea of whites joined on the Washington Mall by the single resentment of being led by a darkie president, and there to pay homage to Beck, who called America under Obama “The Planet of the Apes.” Some of Beck’s best friends, obviously, are black. “If we hadn’t elected a black president, do you think they would be doing this today?” the poetically named Joyce White asked a Washington Post reporter covering the event. The answer was all around, punctuated by the lie at the heart of the neo-supremacists’ movement: where the old civil rights wars were about inclusion, these “tea party” reactions are about exclusion. Where the old civil rights movement was about overcoming blood-soaked oppression, the “tea party” broods (which have no Bull Connor dogs chasing after them that I know of) are about keeping tax rates on the richest 5 percent among them from going up a few points. In the “fair and balanced” reasoning behind neo-supremacy, the old master is the new victim, using the old victim’s language. The suffering and disenfranchisement of one has been replaced by the suffering and disenfranchisement of the other. It doesn’t matter that there’s no relationship between the two, that the mere suggestion of white suffering or disenfranchisement in this country, this retiree generation especially, is a supreme offense to those who have genuinely suffered and lived through decades of disenfranchisement until relatively recently. This is the United States of Amnesia, where historical memory is slight and the latest snappy slogan as good as scripture, especially when it’s cloaked in the language of god, as Beck—like a pimp wearing his obligatory crucifix and flag pin as his visas to credibility—did: “We are a country of God. As I look at the problems in our country quite honestly I think the hot breath of destruction is breathing on our necks and to fix it politically is a figure that I don’t see anywhere.” Supposedly, the rally on the mall was not about politics but about the revival of religious virtue. But that, too, was a conceit as transparent as Beck’s camera tears. The country isn’t lacking in religious virtue, religious fervor or religious fixations. It’s drowning in it all, to its detriment: faith-based fanaticism is replacing rational analysis. It’s the sweetener of “tea party” brews: the rational and the analytical is to those brews what daylight is to Dracula. So the rally was a seizure by a master marketer of god as branding, god as divine legitimacy for what was otherwise a slow-motion stampede on the day’s iconic place in the nation’s historic calendar. It turned into the biggest “tea party” rally yet, signaling the arrival of the neo-supremacist political movement in god’s clothing. The day’s nightmare, of course, the supreme act of white supremacy, was the co-opting of King’s day on the Mall to the “tea party”’s uses, and abuses, under the banner of restoration, religious or otherwise. Charles Blow, a columnist for The Times, put it simply in a piece entitled “I Had a Nightmare.” Calling Beck “the anti-King,” in a wordplay too subtle for most tea drunkards to detect, he writes: “I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.” “In fact,” Blow continued, “to even insinuate that the president’s policies are in any way equivalent to the brutality of the Jim Crow South at the time of the civil rights movement is the highest order of insult, particularly to those who lived and suffered through it, as well as to those who live with its legacy. If Beck truly thinks these movements are comparable, I have some pictures of “strange fruit” I’d like for him to see. more at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/29

Not only will they not let go of the empire but they'll make sure the profiteers cash in the process, all the while they spew propaganda about the needs to decrease the deficit. How about these $900 hammers (i.e. mercenaries costing several times what a soldier earns), reaganite jackasses?

Right, they were especially guilty of not wanting to be tortured and killed for opposing their US propped dictator.

Can you remember the last time that regressive neanderthals didn't go into an election campaigning on race/religion? I can't remember it. Fearmongering is all they have to keep the peons in line.

Despite the lofty rhetoric, killing 100,000's of innocents during a war of convenience is no more "advanced" (less barbaric) than stoning adulterers. Spare us the drivel.

Right, but this time no bitching by the usual hypocrites about contractors' inflated wages and benefits compared to that of public sector workers (the military). Go figure, there is a chance of reducing the deficit but the fuckwits don't want to take it.

Zakaria is a corporate media pundit who supported attacking Iraq, among other things. His opinions never stray too far from the interests of whoever signs his paycheck.

You wish. On the contrary, the number of military contractors in Iraq is going up as the number of "combat troops" is coming down. Never ending war is alive and well. Another False Ending: Contracting out the Iraq Occupation by Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond Another false ending to the Iraq war is being declared. Nearly seven years after George Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Obama has just given a major address to mark the withdrawal of all but 50,000 combat troops from Iraq. But, while thousands of US troops are marching out, thousands of additional private military contractors (PMCs) are marching in. The number of armed security contractors in Iraq will more than double in the coming months. While the mainstream media is debating whether Iraq can be declared a victory or not there is virtually no discussion regarding this surge in contractors. Meanwhile, serious questions about the accountability of private military contractors remain. In the past decade the United States has dramatically shifted the way in which it wages war – fewer soldiers and more contractors. Last month, the Congressional Research Service reported that the Department of Defense (DoD) workforce has 19% more contractors (207,600) than uniformed personnel (175,000) in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the wars in these two countries the most outsourced and privatized in U.S. history. According to a recent State Department briefing to Congress’s Commission on Wartime Contracting, from now on, instead of soldiers, private military contractors will be disposing of improvised explosive devices, recovering killed and wounded personnel, downed aircraft and damaged vehicles, policing Baghdad’s International Zone, providing convoy security, and clearing travel routes, among other security-related duties. Worse, the oversight of contractors will rest with other contractors. As has been the case in Afghanistan, contractors will be sought to provide “operations-center monitoring of private security contractors (PSCs)” as well as “PSC inspection and accountability services.” more: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/01-0

More fear mongering about muslims/terorrists by right wing neanderthals before the mid-term elections. Big surprise. The cab driver's fate was "collateral damage" to regressive politics.

Anyone who fathomed that attacking Iraq was a good idea cannot be "genuinely concerned with making the world a better place" or is a fucking idiot. That should take care of 99.5% of right wingers. So your criteria are not only wanting for that kind of reason but even if any of you met both these criteria, it still wouldn't make you necessarily civil. Civility also demands a methodology of discussion, like for example addressing all relevant arguments.

99% of "libertarians" are reaganites.

Typical knuckle dragger gibberish. Global warming is a matter of life and death for 100,000's yearly, and a matter of welfare for 100's of millions by the end of this century. The economic crisis your clowns created is a matter of welfare for 100's of millions today.

Right, a knuckle dragger like yourself is mocking me. BWAHAHAHAHA!

what were you listening to?

true enough. That is the sensible position, but there are many more pressing issues today like the economic crisis of catastrophic proportion created by regressives and this mosque at ground 0 is a minor topic. Right wingers would much rather talk about muslims and terrorists while heading in to the mid-term elections. Typical scumbag move.