j_b

Stoke!

I am curious to hear why anyone would expect me to ignore the constant verbal abuse I get from the usual suspects when it is fairly obvious that no appeal to reason is going to make it stop. Please, enlighten me ...

LOL. Irony. j_b is so above the fray. says the goon who offers nothing but demonizing.

I beg to differ: my insulting demonizing morons who have nothing but insults to offer isn't ironic. But who the fucks care, anyway?

ChestBeatBox

why is it that when I use "quick reply" I answer to kevbone?

here comes the NO-syllabic idiot! You are clearly regressing to the grunting stage.

Anybody actually surprised that Billcoe who spends most of his time in spray madly raving to the tune of "getting big gov off our back" has nothing to say about tea party extremists shoving big gov down our throats?

I am still waiting for a single explicit criticism of anything I said but all I get from you pathetic wankers are insults and demonizing. I guess, it's par for the course in spray but as long as the fuckwits are irritated, I'll assume that I am right on target.

The Big Government Bill was talking about? [video:youtube]gsblLLPX2r4

"Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry. After his 2008 victory, Obama won an award from the industry for the best marketing campaign of the year. Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms. The 2012 election is expected to cost $2 billion, mostly in corporate funding. Small wonder that Obama is selecting business leaders for top positions. The public is angry and frustrated, but as long as the Muasher principle prevails, that doesn't matter. While wealth and power have narrowly concentrated, for most of the population real incomes have stagnated and people have been getting by with increased work hours, debt, and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crises that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled starting in the 1980s. None of this is problematic for the very wealthy, who benefit from a government insurance policy called "too big to fail." The banks and investment firms can make risky transactions, with rich rewards, and when the system inevitably crashes, they can run to the nanny state for a taxpayer bailout, clutching their copies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. That has been the regular process since the Reagan years, each crisis more extreme than the last -- for the public population, that is. Right now, real unemployment is at Depression levels for much of the population, while Goldman Sachs, one of the main architects of the current crisis, is richer than ever. It has just quietly announced $17.5 billion in compensation for last year, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein receiving a $12.6 million bonus while his base salary more than triples. It wouldn't do to focus attention on such facts as these. Accordingly, propaganda must seek to blame others, in the past few months, public sector workers, their fat salaries, exorbitant pensions, and so on: all fantasy, on the model of Reaganite imagery of black mothers being driven in their limousines to pick up welfare checks -- and other models that need not be mentioned. We all must tighten our belts; almost all, that is. Teachers are a particularly good target, as part of the deliberate effort to destroy the public education system from kindergarten through the universities by privatization -- again, good for the wealthy, but a disaster for the population, as well as the long-term health of the economy, but that is one of the externalities that is put to the side insofar as market principles prevail. Another fine target, always, is immigrants. That has been true throughout U.S. history, even more so at times of economic crisis, exacerbated now by a sense that our country is being taken away from us: the white population will soon become a minority. One can understand the anger of aggrieved individuals, but the cruelty of the policy is shocking. Who are the immigrants targeted? In Eastern Massachusetts, where I live, many are Mayans fleeing genocide in the Guatemalan highlands carried out by Reagan's favorite killers. Others are Mexican victims of Clinton's NAFTA, one of those rare government agreements that managed to harm working people in all three of the participating countries. As NAFTA was rammed through Congress over popular objection in 1994, Clinton also initiated the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border, previously fairly open. It was understood that Mexican campesinos cannot compete with highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness, and that Mexican businesses would not survive competition with U.S. multinationals, which must be granted "national treatment" under the mislabeled free trade agreements, a privilege granted only to corporate persons, not those of flesh and blood. Not surprisingly, these measures led to a flood of desperate refugees, and to rising anti-immigrant hysteria by the victims of state-corporate policies at home." Is the World Too Big to Fail? by Noam Chomsky

if there were any period in your life your hair should be on fire, it is now.

it's the drums of the American Taliban and the ~75% of Republicans in congress who are openly anti-science.

another meathead on board!

Anytime that JayB seems to be pulling figures and facts out of his ass (no, the census bureau link isn't a link to the analysis) just assume it is Koch financed CATO propaganda and you'll be right about 99% of the time. Piketty and Saez already answered these talking points back in 2006, here

terrible logic. Not enforcing tax policy is not proof that taxation doesn't work to generate revenue. It only shows that having enemies of taxing the wealthy in control of government effectively results in not taxing the wealthy. JayB keeps using the effect of neoliberal policies, to justify neoliberalism but it doesn't work that way. Destroyed urban environments due to outsourcing isn't evidence that outsourcing works, nor is not enforcing regulations evidence that regulations don't work if that needed to be said.

especially puzzling because Bill appears to have finally realized that Reaganism was the cover to enable the largest upward redistribution of wealth ever, yet he still spews the "government is the problem" mantra.

i already posted data supporting my point. It's not my fault if you don't have the common decency to acknowledge it. As to your continued ad-hom about my calling you on your giving credibility to a patented bullshit artist, you know what what you can do with it.

are you talking to me? because I fail to see any direct answer to anything I said. You can keep shifting the goal posts as much as you wish by pretending neoliberal Europe is some kind of middle class paradise that would tax the wealthy if they only could but I am growing tired of your constant strawmwn and miss-directions. People may talk at one another without ever addressing any specific points in your world but not in mine. You are still on the hook for spewing regressive think tank propaganda about the effect of raising marginal tax rates on the federal revenue.

JayB spews outrageous horseshit about "hauser's law" and claims we only talked about raising marginal tax rates, and your response is that JayB has a point? wtf is wrong with you? Nobody claimed that simply raising taxes on the wealthy would solve the budget deficit as has already been said several times in this thread, as well as many times before.

Nicely done Dan. Your reports do change our psychology of the do-able, but beware the backlash because climbers are ambivalent about people skiing their lines.

As I said, I haven't read the Tillman book but I read everything he wrote up to that point and I didn't find any of it especially overstated or whatever you are inferring. Or are you saying that by definition a book/magazine writer can't be understated? Anyhow, I was talking about his personality years ago when I used to meet him on a regular basis and he struck me as a very low key, nice person.

Silly me. In this context, it is ironic that his book does point to the lame-ass posers who climb Everest and the attending circus around guiding the mountain. Krakauer used to strike me as a very understated, affable type so unless he has changed, I'd suggest to his critics that they are likely quite wrong about him.

I thought that Krakauer wrote what he saw, which happened to not show Boukreev in the best light but I wouldn't call it character assassination. Either one thinks he had an important story to tell, or not, in which later case describinging Boukreev's behavior wouldn't have been necessary. The book pretty much said what I always thought of high altitude guiding so I don't have a problem with the content. Good reads. Under the banner of heaven is good too but I haven't read his book about Tillman. I am not sure why you think I'd be critical of jk.

which he climbed for his job, not because he had an obsession with climbing something tall. His climbing resume is hardly that of a status symbol seeker.