Re: Heritage Foundation Senior Analyst on the deficit and Natoinal Debt
An unqualified PR flack on the radio says SS contributes to the deficit.
QED.
And as you yourself pointed out in Message 4828 about Faith's source, Justin Bogie (my emphasis added):
JonF writes:
quote:Before joining Heritage, he spent four years working as a policy advisor for the majority staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Budget under Chairman and now Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and former Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Price. He has prior experience in state budget issues as well.
Now, I remember Paul Ryan as being one of the most vocal proponents of destroying Social Security and Medicare. Why should we be surprised that Justin Bogie would be carrying on his old boss' misconceived crusade?
quote:"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Paul Ryan is famously obsessed with Ayn Rand and required his staffers to read one of her novels (I forget which one).
Ayn Rand in turn idolized William Edward Hickman, a psychopath who in late 1927 kidnapped and murdered Marion Parker, the 12-year-old daughter of a Los Angeles banker. For the ransom payment, he had dismembered her body leaving only her torso and head with eyes propped open so that it would look to her father that she was still alive. After first evading capture, he was finally arrested, tried and executed on the gallows about a year after the kidnapping. Ayn Rand idolized him and planned a novel in which the protagonist, a Nietschian "superman", was patterned after Hickman.
So she is the source of inspiration for "libertarians" and "conservatives"? No wonder so many of their ideas and positions seem so evil. And ironically she ended up on Social Security and Medicare.
Re: Heritage Foundation Senior Analyst on the deficit and Natoinal Debt
Everything we spend money on contributes to the deficit which then contributes to the National Debt.
We've been through all this before and you still have no clue how it works?
... he studies this stuff and I don't, ..
Then get off your lazy ass and start studying! Sheesh! What's wrong with you? If you were to study then you would be able to understand what Bogie's talking about and be able to tell if it actually rings true and, if he is indeed lying (which we don't doubt) then you won't be deceived by him.
But as long as you refuse to even try to learn anything, you will continue to be easy prey for him and his ilk.
quote:As any good scientist will tell you, the Sun burns half of its mass every year. If you multiply the Sun's mass by millions (even though science says it is in the billions) the Sun will be so incredibly huge it will stretch out past Pluto. And if you say that the planets would stay close to the Sun as it shrank, then why don't the planets still move closer?
No scientist would tell us such a thing, because that claim is complete and utter nonsense. The actual facts are that half the sun's mass is concentrated at the core which occupies 1.5% of its volume and it is in the core that the sun is losing mass through fusion. Some creationist at some point saw or heard that half the sun's mass is involved in mass loss through fusion and misunderstood what he was reading or hearing. He repeated that to some other creationist who misunderstood it even worse until that claim degraded to its final ludicrous form. And BTW, as the sun loses mass, its gravity decreases and the planets end up moving farther out, not closer in as per this claim.
The object lesson here is that if anybody who had even the most basic understanding of the sun had heard that claim, he would have immediately recognized it for the complete trash that it is and he would not be fooled by it. But instead, abjectly ignrant creationists accepted it uncritically and repeated it to other abjectly ignrant creationists created a long chain of deceived fools.
If you were to gain even the most basic understanding of anything that you pontificate about, then you would be able to tell what complete trash your sources are feeding you and be able to break their chain of deceived fools.
Different pots of money being filled from different sources being used to pay for different things. Is that beyond your ability to comprehend? Yes, we are using the plural in English, but don't let that frighten you.
So let's use an example of running a household budget based on how we used to do it with some additions. My wife and I both worked and made about the same amount and in addition I had a second income from the reserves. We did not co-mingle our money, but rather we both had our own checking and savings accounts -- I had two sets of accounts which I kept separate (and still do). That means that we had three pots of money to work with. Each pot of money had its own separate source of income and each pot of money was used to pay for very specific expenses:
My reserve pay went into my K account, where that money would accumulate and be used for our annual "balloon payments" of insurance (both auto and homeowners) and property tax.
My civilian pay went into my C account, which was used for:
The mortgage, including a little extra every month towards the principal.
Utilities.
Fuel for my car.
Car payments (negotiable with T).
My credit card payments (paid off every month).
Personal groceries (mainly fixings for breakfast and lunch)
Personal medical costs (eg, co-pays, non-prescription meds)
Personal incidentals.
Conjugal and family activities (eg, going out for dinner, movies, etc)
Her pay went into her T account, which was used for:
Family groceries
Clothing
Medical expenses for her and the children
Fuel expenses for her car
Car payments (negotiable with C)
Her credit card payments (paid off every month)
Her own activities (eg, girls' night out)
Personal incidentals.
OK, we have three pots of money: K, C, and T. If a deficit were to arise, where would it be? Any one of the three accounts, of the three pots of money, could develop a deficit. And that deficit would be independent of the other accounts.
If one account were to develop a deficit, would cutting costs in the other accounts alleviate that deficit? No, of course not! Changing the spending in the other pots of money would have no effect on spending in the pot suffering from the deficit. The only thing that could possibly affect a pot's deficit would be to change the spending in that pot.
It's really that simple and straightforward. How could anybody not be able to understand it?
Social Security has its own pot of money, its trust fund which is dedicated to paying out SS benefits. That pot is fed by special payroll taxes which are labeled either "Social Security" or "FICA" (when combined with Medicare part A; I've seen both).
Medicare has its own pot of money, its trust fund which is dedicated to paying out Medicare benefits. Medicare A is fed by special payroll taxes which are labeled either "Medicare" or "FICA" (when combined with Social Security; I've seen both). Medicare B is fed by monthly insurance premiums paid by recipients. Parts C and D are private medical insurance and so do not involve any government spending. What I am not sure of is whether Parts A and B use the same pot of money or have their own separate pots, but that has no effect on the federal deficit.
What's left is a communal pot of money that is fed by all government revenues except for Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. Out of that communal pot of money come about half the mandatory spending and all of the discretionary spending. That is where the deficit comes from. And either Social Security nor Medicare have anything whatsoever to do with it, since they are paid for out of their own separate pots of money.
Back in mid-November in Dominant Force in West Today According to Dennis Prager is Fear of Left I replied to JonF's reply to you, Message 98, with my own Message 100. JonF presented two pie graphs showing what percentages of the outlays went to what in 2018. In my reply, I pointed out that his graphs don't separate out which outlays came from which pots of money and even that there was no mention that there actually are separate pots of money. I took data from a graphic for the 2018 Federal Budget from Wikipedia's United States Federal Budget:
Then I broke all the figures down:
DWise1 writes:
So we have mandatory spending and discretionary spending as you kind of broke out with your second graphic. From mine we have these groupings:
Outlays $4.1 trillion
Mandatory $2.523 trillion
Social Security $982 billion
Medicare $582 billion -- minus income from premiums and other offsetting receipts
Medicaid $389 billion
Other $570 billion -- Outlays for unemployment compensation, federal civilian and military retirement, some veterans' benefits, earned income tax credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assitance Program, and other mandatory programs minus income from offsetting receipts
Discretionary $1.262 trillion
Defense $623 billion
Nondefense $639 billion -- outlays for many programs related to transportation, education, veterans' benefits, health, housing assistance, and other activities
Net Interest $325 billion
But where are the revenues coming from that pay for that? This is the part the gets obscured:
Revenues $3.3 trillion
Dedicated to specific programs -- $1.2 trillion
Payroll Taxes $1.2 trillion -- fund social insurance programs primarily SS and Medicare A
General Fund -- $2.176 trillion
Individual Income Taxes $1.7 trillion
Corporate income taxes $205 billion
Other $271 billion -- excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, remittances from Federal Reserve, misc fees and fines
So any discussion of the deficit requires that we define specifically where the deficit comes from, namely what specific revenues and specific outlays go into calculating the deficit. That must be known in order to figure out which factors cause the deficit and therefore which factors could be adjusted to reduce or eliminate the deficit.
Both Social Security and Medicare Part A (Parts B, C, & D are insurance programs, two of them private insurance, funded by premiums paid by recipients) are funded by payroll taxes levied specially for them and which cannot be used for any other purpose. As such, they cannot and do no play any part in the deficit. Since they are not factors contributing to the deficit, adjusting them would have no effect on the deficit.
Also, these figures are for the 2018 Budget. We need to see the figures for the 2019 Budget, which I believe was the first one based on the GOP's tax scam and which greatly increased defense spending from $623 billion to something like $800 billion (as I recall). And when we crunch those numbers, we will need to keep straight where specific sources of revenue are going (eg, payroll taxes going to Social Security and to Medicare A).
Also keep in mind that Fiscal Year 2019 ended a couple weeks ago and that we are currently in FY 2020 and hence under the 2020 Budget.
We can also learn about how much federal spending is going where from economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich's video, "Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go":
I had prepared a list of the percentages he presents for discretionary spending, but haven't posted them on this forum yet ... until now:
discretionary spending 4% Foreign Aid - International 3% Science, Space, Technology 3% Natural Resources, Environment 3% Transportation 2% Community & Regional Development 5% Administration of Justice 5% Health, CDC, NIH 6% Income Security (including Food Stamps) 7% Education and Training 7% Veteran Benefits 1% All other, including energy, agriculture, and commerce That's only 46%. Remaining 54% goes to the military, most of which goes to contractors
Faith, I do realize that this is casting pearls before swine yet again. At least others can learn something even if you are a lost cause.
Re: Heritage Foundation Senior Analyst on the deficit and Natoinal Debt
Then fuck you, you Black Hole of Sthupidity.
But what did I write?
If you were to study then you would be able to understand what Bogie's talking about and be able to tell if it actually rings true and, if he is indeed lying (which we don't doubt) then you won't be deceived by him.
IF
Your grasp of English is so abysmal that you have no comprehension of a conditional?
If you do find that he is lying to you, then why wouldn't you call him a liar? That's yet another conditional that I just used. Because you're a fucking lying hypocrite yourself?
Re: Heritage Foundation Senior Analyst on the deficit and Natoinal Debt
Are you drinking again, David?
Cold sober for more than a week.
Let's try not to get personal with Faith.
It's factual. Faith is a f*cking liar. Just now, she deliberately lied in order to fake an excuse to avoid the facts and reality yet again!
She repeats the same sick and demented pattern over and over and over and f*cking over again. She spouts her liies. Everybody corrects her and she ignores them and just repeats her liies. When she does "engage", she does so by lying about what we tell her, citing sources who are lying, citing valid sources whom she then misrepresents and lies about, and/or by spouting a new set of liies. Then when she finally finds her position untenable, she concocts some lame excuse to fun away, including her eyesight (which just conveniently happens to go out at that point), somebody looked at her wrong so now she's too upset, she arbitrarily decides to ignore the facts because of some dreamed up offense, whatever other lie she can dream up as an excuse. Then later she comes back with the same old liies and starts the cycle all over again. And she does it all deliberately!
She is a f*cking liar. She is a deliberate deceiver. She is a willing and willful accomplice to traitors to America. She is an abomination. And she is the very model of a creationist and a "true Christian."
{It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis} was an assigned reading back when I was in the 8th or 9th grade IIRC. About the same time 1984 and Animal Farm and Words in Thought and Action were mandatory reading.
In 1969, my senior high school English teacher told us about it, which is why I read it. He also told us about Mark Twain's Letters From the Earth, which got me reading that anthology and other Mark Twain books (Roughing It was very enjoyable).
I worked as a software engineer from 1982 until I aged out and retired in 2018. I was lucky to be able to stay with the same company for 27 years to the end of my career.
I got that last job in 1995 when I was still married. She worked as a public school teacher and at our Date of Separation in 2004 we made about the same amount (she made slightly more, so I was waiting for her to start talking about alimony so that I could ask how much I was going to get -- but it never came up). 14 years later I was making about $90,000 a year; I forget how much it was in 1995.
During our marriage, we maintained separate checking accounts and assumed separate financial responsibilities. I was in charge of paying the mortgage, utilities, homeowners and auto insurance, etc, while she paid for food, clothing, our children's needs, etc. Car payments were negotiable, but we normally paid for our own cars unless it was not feasible. In our early years getting started we racked up about $15,000 in credit card debt for which I got a consolidation loan to pay off and which I in turn paid off. With my fairly good wages, I could just barely keep up on my responsibilities and at one point she had to take over my car payments (boy, did she not like that!). Also, the career of an engineer can be unstable (I've referred to it as being a high-tech migrant worker), so she put our children on her medical insurance and, since it cost no more to do so, also me.
The early 90's was a time of more rapid turn-over in jobs for me, mainly because small businesses would hire me for a project that then went away in two years or seven months. And then there's the work ethic idea that you should be willing to take any job that presents itself. An engineer cannot find another engineering job, so he doesn't work as he tries to find a job in engineering. He should be willing to work in a Kwik-E-Mart, right?
Well, while job hunting in 1995 I did the math (something that creationists and other professional liars really hate). If I were to go to work in a minimum wage job, how many hours a week would I need to put in to be able to pay for my household responsibilities? I forget the actual figures now, but it amounted to much more than 80 hours a week -- more than twice a normal work week. I would have been willing to take such minimum wage jobs if necessary, but I could also see how futile that would be.
And if (pardon my French) one wants to object to whether my situation should be applicable since I was dealing with a mortgage instead of paying rent, one currently pays as much if not more in rent than one would in a mortgage payment -- indeed, mortgage payments remain constant whereas rents continually increase.
So indeed, just counting who has a job and who doesn't (the unemployment statistics) does not tell the entire story. What are they earning and how do their earnings cover their basic expenses? Everybody working at Walmart in the USA has a job, but most of those jobs are structured so that they work too few hours to qualify for benefits, including medical. New hires at Walmart go through the usual orientation briefings, including (in the USA) instructions on how to apply to all kinds of welfare including food stamps. You know, those things that the Trump administration is stripping away. So Walmart has to deprive its employees of basic benefits in order to survive? In the meantime, the Walmarts across the border in Canada provide their employees full benefits and do just fine.
Having a job and being able to survive on your earnings are two entirely different things.
What I mean by "real news" is simple straightforward objective neutral reporting of the facts of any situation.
If you were telling us the truth, then you should love The Rachel Maddow Show. In her reporting, she takes the actual documentation (usually the courtroom transcript, also the actual letters, actual court briefs, etc) and reads it out loud while displaying it on the screen. Watching her show is like taking a college class in the subject matter. Do any Fake News Network talk shows (eg, Fakes and Friends) do the same? I didn't think so.
One example is her reporting last week on what we do know about Trump's finances: "Every Trump Financial Thread Pulled Results In Scandal" (No webpage found at provided URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEuOPcbWoKs). As I recall, she also covers his flagrant corruption including choosing his own resort (Doral) to host next year's G7 meeting and his extensive golf outings to his own resorts which result in federal money being funneled into his own pockets (though she didn't cover the inauguration finances (which last I heard still didn't account for $50 million; also, Ivanka arranged the inaugural ball at Trump's hotel which overcharged her) nor the Trump's campaign's use of Trump properties and services which results in campaign donation money flowing into Trump's pocket (no wonder he filed for re-election as early as possible so that he could keep that cash flow going into his pocket)).
For that matter, how much did Fake News Network cover the impeachment? MSNBC showed every minute of it, both the Democrats' very detailed presentation of their case and the Republicans' vacuous and fact-free (and downright lying; eg, repeating their false claim that Republicans were not allowed in the SCIF for the hearings) efforts. Every minute! What I heard is that on Fake News Network they only showed bits and pieces and talked over the videos of the Democrats. Those watching actual news saw and heard both sides, whereas those watching Fake News Network still never heard the actual case. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Fake News Network did not report on several Republican senators who were convinced by the Democrats' case that Trump had indeed broken laws and done wrong, but they still voted to acquit.
It would be a good idea to watch The Brainwashing of my Dad (website at No webpage found at provided URL: https://www.thebrainwashingofmydad.com/, also streaming on the Roku Channel, Pluto, Vudu, Amazon Prime). The revocation of the fairness doctrine gave rise to right-wing talk radio. The format of talk radio carried over into Fake News Network where the host raises his voice and becomes angry, thus inducing and feeding anger in his audience. No facts, just a lot of angry noise.
If you were telling the truth about wanting straightforward objective reporting of the facts, then you would follow my suggestions above. But of course, you were just lying to us. Yet again. As you always do.
Of course. It's SOP to blame the good guy pointing out what the evil one is doing.
In my divorce, I was the honest one while she was the lying, cheating (in both senses), thieving, malicious one who broke her promises in the divorce agreement (especially regarding my access to the family photos). So whenever I bring any of that up, I am the "asshole". Go figure.
Maybe an Irish saying will do:
quote:Ms mian leat cineadh ps, ms in leat moladh faigh bs. (If it's abuse you want, marry. If it's praise you want, die.)
{ABE: Cartoon someone posted on Facebook. In Heaven someone asks God what the meaning of the Universe is. God replies, "Well if I explain it, then that ruins the joke."}
Edited by dwise1, : Added "It's SOP ..." for clarification. Also {ABE}
Like Bernie, you don't seem to know the definition of socialism.
Time to post this again:
YouTube: "The Difference Between Socialism, Communism, and Marxism Explained by a Marxist" (azureScapegoat, a Swedish Marxist though borderline Norwegian (lives near the border with Norway) )
In an earlier message, you opined that "socialism" is an over-charged word. While that is true, a better description would be overloaded as in function overloading and operator overloading -- from the article on function overloading:
quote:In some programming languages, function overloading or method overloading is the ability to create multiple functions of the same name with different implementations. Calls to an overloaded function will run a specific implementation of that function appropriate to the context of the call, allowing one function call to perform different tasks depending on context.
For example, doTask() and doTask(object O) are overloaded functions. To call the latter, an object must be passed as a parameter, whereas the former does not require a parameter, and is called with an empty parameter field. A common error would be to assign a default value to the object in the second function, which would result in an ambiguous call error, as the compiler wouldn't know which of the two methods to use.
Another example is a Print(object O) function that executes different actions based on whether it's printing text or photos. The two different functions may be overloaded as Print(text_object T); Print(image_object P). If we write the overloaded print functions for all objects our program will "print", we never have to worry about the type of the object, and the correct function call again, the call is always: Print(something).
I used overloading all the time in C++. Without overloading, for every possible data type that you would want to pass to a (e.g.) Print function, you would have to create a unique function name and then, when you'd want to call it, you'd have to write a clunky series of conditional statements that test the data type of the parameter(s) you want to pass in order to know which function to call -- not to mention the errors and warnings you would get for trying to pass the wrong data type to the other functions (there was a technique I picked up from straight-C sockets functions involving void pointers). IOW, without overloading you will have a mess that you must try to circumvent in some manner. With overloading, you simply call the function passing it the variable(s) as the parameter(s) and the compiler, knowing what data type(s) those variable(s) is/are will know which overloaded function to call. The same applies for overloaded operators (eg, + - * /) such that you can create a complex object and then define what it means to add them together. Cool, huh?
The application here is that the "s-word" has many different meanings and consequences depending on context and other qualifiers, so those contexts and qualifiers must be kept in mind all the time. The "s-word" is not monolithic nor is it confined to just one meaning. Indeed, even though it can be used strictly in a dichotomy between capitalism and socialism, the aspect of it being promoted and practiced in many West European countries (eg, Denmark) is firmly on the capitalist side of the dichotomy. Watch the video!
My peeve with Bernie and everybody commenting on him is that they have confused terminology between democratic socialism and social democracy. Those are two different systems -- please, please, please follow those links in order to educate yourselves.
The basic capitalism vs socialism dichotomy is over private ownership of the means of production versus government. That seems to be what most objecting to the "s-word" are thinking of, especially when they call it "communism" which it is not (communism is just a subset). But certain context-driven meanings of the "s-word" do align with either side of that overall dichotomy.
What Bernie's camp calls itself is "democratic socialist". But if you were to follow that link I provided you above (SECOND ADMONITION!), you would see that democratic socialism is a system in which the economy and means of production is owned and controlled by the state, but the people are able to vote and have a say in what the government does. That is definitely on the Socialist side of the basic capitalism-socialism dichotomy (again, watch the video).
But is that actually what Bernie is talking about or advocating? No.
In the video (WHAT?!?!?!?!? You haven't watched it yet?), at about 7:30 he gets into Revisionist Marxism, which overlaps the captialism/socialism dichotomy. That's where social democracy comes into the picture.
If you were to follow that link I provided above (technically SECOND ADMONITION, but I'm going to count it as THIRD ADMONITION), social democracy is very strongly on the capitalist side of that overall dichotomy:
quote:Social democracy is a political, social and economic philosophy that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and social welfare provisions.
Some have called it "Capitalism Plus". The benefits of capitalism with a security net for the workers and general population. That is what social democracy is.
But Marx was definitely right about one thing (see "Genius of the Modern World" on Netflix). Capitalism left to itself will devour everything, including itself. Evolutionarily, that death spiral is inevitable.
But what about social democracy? That is what everybody's actually talking about, but they're using the wrong name for it. When they point to European countries like Denmark, that's social democracy, not democratic socialism. They're two different things altogether.
C++ / Java
Java doesn't have operator overloading? That's a bummer. I didn't use it much in C++, but it really came in handy when I did. When you define a class, you can use overloading to define how to compare two objects of that class or how to output it or input it using iostreams.
Java's portability is nothing new. When I learned Pascal in 1980 (one of the computer (IBM S/370) operators went up to the university in Winnipeg and smuggled a Pascal compiler back), we were told about p-code, an intermediate compiler output which was executable code for a fictional computer. The idea was that, since standard Pascal was stripped down then the creation of extended versions (eg, Turbo Pascal) would be inevitable. With p-code, all those different extended versions, each different from the others, would generate p-code output when you could then take to any computer and run that program with that computer's p-code interpreter.
That should sound familiar, because that's what Java bytecode does. Pascal p-code didn't catch on, but Java came along at the right time and filled a niche on the Internet.
Another plus for Java is its extensive class library. For C++, you need to create your own classes for special tasks or buy them from a third party. Java comes with its class library so you do not need to reinvent the wheel. You need to do sockets programming? Java has a class for that. You need to do Base-64 encoding and decoding? There's a class for that.
Still, I lean more towards C++. All those Java classes are nice, but the documentation is very unwieldy. And back when I started learning C++, it was the first time I got really excited about a programming language and what I could do in it.
Though I never did like iostreams. What had really won me over to C was formatted output (*printf()). In one single statement, I could create a string or output containing the values of any number of variables. In Turbo Pascal, I had to write a separate Write() for each variable as well as a separate Write() for each and every constant string between each variable. But then C++'s iostreams has you stringing variables and operators and modifiers together in a long cumbersome line. Iostreams felt like a giant step backwards to Turbo Pascal. I only used iostreams once outside of the classroom and that was with an overloaded output operator for a class.
ABE:
A bit of computer lore. I forget exact dates, but in the 90's Microsoft got into a legal battle with Sun over its Java license. As I recall, something about Microsoft changing something in its interpreter. Threatened with not being allowed to support Java in its browser, Microsoft started working on a replacement for Java. Even though the legal issues were finally resolved, Microsoft continued working on that replacement, which became C# and .NET. Just as with Java, .NET provides an enormous class library filled with very non-trivial objects.
Also, Java being based on a virtual machine (VM) can have some unexpected results. See my page, Evaluating (x + x * ++x). One night in class our Java instructor ran a program to demonstrate that that kind of expression would give an unexpected answer. First he had us figure what it should be; having been trained in reverse Polish and in evaluating on a stack, that is the approach I took. The program came up with the same answer that I did, but not what the instructor had expected. So during the week I rewrote the program in every C-ish language I could (plus on multiple compilers) and almost all of them came up with the same answer the instructor had. So I generated assembly output of the C program and found the reason. In a native code compiler, every reference to x is to that variable's memory location, so the ++ is executed first and changes the value of x for the other operations. In a p-code compiler (eg, Java), evaluation is on a stack. My page lists all the programs I tested as well as the assembly listing.
Re: Barr Criticized About Mueller Handling by Federal Judge
The specific concerns he expressed:
Barr lacked candor in announcing his decision to exonerate Trump based on information he was keeping from the public through the redactions.
There are "grave concerns" that the redactions lacked "objectivity" and are tainted by "Barr's actions and representation."
There is evidence that Barr's announcement was timed to influence public opinion before the release of the redacted report.
Barr's summary memo lacked "credibility" and was even challenged by Mueller personally.
A hyena can't change its stripes.
In 1989, Barr wrote a legal document justifying the invasion of Panama and the arrest of Noriega. Invading a country and arresting its head of state violates international law, but Barr said he found a legal basis for that operation. He also refused to let anybody read it, but instead just told them what it meant. Taking him at his word, Bush I invaded Panama and arrested Noriega. It wasn't until a few years later that Barr's document was finally released. Guess what. That document did not even begin to do what Barr had said. IOW, Barr lied! Just as he's been doing now.
I wasn't clear what is meant by "Red baiting" so I looked it up. Seems to me it's just a way of saying all criticism of Communism or Marxism and the like is invalid. No point in ever discussing or debating it, you're just wrong before you start if you dare to criticize any of it. So if you point out that all Communist regimes have been murderous oppressive totalitarian systems, that's "red baiting."
Could you please cite your source on that? We would want to see what it actually says. That way, we could tell whether your source is completely wrong (and/or right-wingnut) or whether you completely misunderstood and misconstrued what it actually says.
quote:Red-baiting, also referred to as reductio ad Stalinum (/stln’m/), is an informal logical fallacy that intends to discredit the validity of a political opponent and the opponent's logical argument by accusing, denouncing, attacking, or persecuting the target individual or group as anarchist, communist, Marxist, socialist, Stalinist, or sympathetic towards these ideologies. In the United States, the term red-baiting dates to as far back as 1927. In 1928, blacklisting by the Daughters of the American Revolution was characterized as a "red-baiting relic". A term commonly used in the United States, red-baiting in the US history is most famously associated with McCarthyism, a term which itself originated in the two historic Red Scare periods during the 1920s (First Red Scare) and 50s (Second Red Scare). In the 21st century, red-baiting does not have quite the same effect it previously did due to the fall of Communism, but some pundits have argued that notable events in current American politics indicate a resurgence of red-baiting consistent with the Cold War era . The word red in the phrase refers to the color that traditionally symbolized left-wing politics worldwide since the 19th century. The word baiting refers to persecution, torment or harassment as in dog-baiting.
So then red-baiting has absolutely nothing to do with invalidating "all criticism of Communism or Marxism and the like" (as you falsely claim), but rather it is basically denouncing and discrediting your opponent by denouncing him as a Communist. Like you do constantly against anyone who is not a Trumpista.
BTW, there's also Reductio ad Hitlerum in which you agreeing with anything that Hitler or Nazis believed (eg, being a vegetarian, being against tobacco smoking, liking dogs) effectively makes you a Nazi too.
Both the reductio ad Stalinum and reductio ad Hitlerum fallacies are commonly used in bogus attacks against evolution and against atheism.
Also, in 1790 cities were nowhere near as large as they are today. Back then the population of the country was more than a hundred times that of its largest city (New York), while today it's only 38 times.
Before WWII, most of the US population was rural. After WWII, most of the US population has been urban and has been increasingly urban. Interestingly, many other countries have experienced a similar shifting of their populations from the countryside into the cities.
Re: As Reagan said it would, Fascism is coming from the Left these days
You accused the left of holding "utopian idealisms" when they only believe that a compassionate government cares about its people and provides things like retirement income and healthcare and disaster relief and competent management of public health threats. This isn't hard to understand. Bush II understood it when he coined the term "compassionate conservatism."
Confucius said (literally; ie, this is not one of those standard "Confucius say" jokes -- watch that episode of Genius of the Ancient World on Netflix):
quote:In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
It is very obvious which kind of country we are under the GOP (now rebranded as "Guardians of Putin").
Confucius was all about social duty and proper governance, so he would definitely not approve of Trump and his toadies (including the entire GOP). So of course Faith would denounce him as a Leftist and Communist.
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