The Goat Pen

Not really gold, but just other currencies in general.

10ac wrote:Yeah, he doesn't have half the experience Obama had when he was elected.

Heh, every newly elected President is the same. That's not what I'm saying...but I figure you know that.

eCat wrote:I can't find what Mitt said other than saying Obama's response was disgraceful.

Did he say more?

"I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi," Romney said in the statement. "It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/1 ... 75906.html

The general rule is, if you want to quickly get up to speed on what Romney has done wrong, go to HuffPost. If you want to see what Obama has screwed up on, go to Drudge.

PetroDollars

I thought it was all about safe-haven currency. The middle eastern countries were looking to use a basket of currencies instead of solely USD and they couched it as a risk reduction play. It was really playing politics, I know, but it was floated out as a risk issue. China was actually flirting with that proposal, too.

Then all of Europe shat the bed and it's not really a viable discussion anymore.

I guess my point is should we, as an official statement, deplore something that we constitutionally allow?

Allowance is not equivalent to approval. Would any president say he approved of anti-semitic speech? Racist speech? Nazi speech?

Free speech is protected under the Constitution, but it doesn't mean all free speech has to be embraced lovingly by the country. I think the administration is free to deplore hate speech.

...or, I could have just said "what hedge said."

I doubt any president would say he heartily approved of pornography (although he would get my vote on that statement alone)...

The last 10 years haven't been a great argument for the exporting of democracy. You kinda wonder if Russia is right when it comes to Syria.

It's a hard question to answer. I think the Neocons were onto something with regard to the things that would occur when dictators began to fall. The thing that many people were not prepared for was what Democracy would look like when it got there.

we'd better enjoy the next 20-30 years because after that the US will likely be in shambles. there are far too many dumbasses roaming around here for this country to have much more of a future.

We've always had a tremendous number of dumbasses in our country (maybe moreso, in the past, in percentage terms). It's just that too many of them are making it into office now and the news cycle won't allow pols to get things done the way they used to get done (which was with a lot of boozing and women and brokered deals and lying to constituents while compromising on sweeping legislation).

Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill were 100times more close than Obama is to Harry Reid, that's how much Washington has changed.

I also think many engineers and scientists are going into Finance for the money and its hurting other professional areas of our workforce.

I still say give a green card to every engineer/scientists/math major that gradates from an American University stapled to their diploma.

However our core issue is our wage earning of the middle class - or more specifically, people that should be middle class.

This country has to get past the stigma that working at Wal-Mart or pushing a mop is a job that designates you as poor.

Poor in this country means a cycle of relying on government for assistance. We need to address living wage and what constitutes poverty line.

increase the middle class , you increase the tax base, you stabilize housing prices, you revive the auto industry, you remove millions from the welfare rolls and add them to the tax rolls, you alleviate the immediate health insurance crisis, you fund social security and medicare, you provide money for imperialism

but as long we allow this stigma to exist about high school educated service industry workers - that being that they don't deserve to make a living wage - we're going to continually find ourselves in an underfunded and unbalanced society that threatens our long term democracy and standing in the world.

Until we reconcile that working a full time job demands a wage that support the basic living requirements in this country (and I'm not hearing all that horseshit about poverty level people having a wide screen TV and an iPhone) then we're going to continually move backward as a nation as the global economy forces financial equilibrium between nations

Simply said, the minimum wage should be tied to the poverty line in this country. As a result millions of people would be removed from taxpayer provided income stability programs. The efficiencies in our economy would absorb the increased costs to a point that the impact to the consumer would be minimal.

At the same time billions of dollars would be added to our tax revenues at both the federal, state and city levels

Bklyn wrote:We've always had a tremendous number of dumbasses in our country (maybe moreso, in the past, in percentage terms). It's just that too many of them are making it into office now and the news cycle won't allow pols to get things done the way they used to get done (which was with a lot of boozing and women and brokered deals and lying to constituents while compromising on sweeping legislation).

Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill were 100times more close than Obama is to Harry Reid, that's how much Washington has changed.

I also think many engineers and scientists are going into Finance for the money and its hurting other professional areas of our workforce.

yeah, but now our dumbassery has a major impact on the world's resources. how many dirty diapers left in Walmart parking lots can the planet stand before it retaliates?

"This country has to get past the stigma that working at Wal-Mart or pushing a mop is a job that designates you as poor. "

Stigmata!

Wha's wrong wit che eye? I got a STTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE een eet!!

our priorities are all fucked up. we spend nothing on education and expect to have results. If we focused on education, we'd see a more capable work force within a few years that didn't have to worry about their green cards.

my kid's been in kindergarten for 2 weeks and I can already see how the education system has been reduced to gimmicks, sloganeering and jingoism. they're so proud to announce to us parents that they are teaching the philosophy behind 7 secrets of successful people and that we shouldn't be surprised to hear our 5-year-olds come home talking about being proactive and having synergy and being in win-win situations. on top of the corporate dog-and-pony show they are enamored with, the new impetus is on creating a team structure and doing away with accelerated classes in elem. school so the smarter kids can help teach the dumber kids. fuck a goddamn team concept. the world doesn't work that way unless you're in the military or playing professional team sports. and the corporate world certainly doesn't make its top performers slow down and make sure the bottom feeders are getting their work done. you fucking do your shit or you get shown the door and then you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and if that means licking dick and shoving shit up you on camera, that's what you do.

Time to start teaching basics and stop with all the clever acronyms posted on signs. Quit worrying about whether kids' shirttails are tucked in and fucking teach. and for crying out loud, quit serving junk food and sodas in the cafeterias.

funny how having children makes you grow up isn't it

I don't think grown up really is a good description of me.

Grown out?