Down To The Wire 2012 >>POLITICS<<

Mittens also came across as an idiot, thanks to some actual zingers from Obama:"This isn't a game of battleship."
"We also have fewer horses and bayonets."
"We have aircraft carriers, which actually have airplanes land on them, and ships that go underwater called nuclear submarines."Romney came across as absolutely clueless with regard to the military - his version of "STRONG MILITARY, RAR" is apparently "THROW MONEY AT IT," which is particularly ironic from the asshat who tries to center his campaign around lowering the national debt.

As long as Obama wins, I don't particularly care.I don't have a lot of faith in democracy - wolf/sheep metaphors aside, my opinion of the intelligence or ethical quality of by far the vast majority of Americans is piss poor.Democracy is a useful tool to limit violent revolution by emphasizing a system for popular change and gaining public "buy-in" through voting, but I'm unconvinced as to its qualities as a system of government. America has not prospered because it is a democracy - it has prospered because it happens to sit on top of ample natural resources and is bordered by oceans and friendly/impotent neighbors.I'm not terribly excited about Obama, I certainly don't like all of his policies.But I like him a hell of a lot better than Mitt Money, er, Romney. I don't want Romney to have a chance at nominating Supreme Court justices. And Romney's "budget" plan ("lower taxes" and then "close loopholes" to make the whole thing "budget neutral?" If it doesn't do anything to the budget then why bother enacting it?) only works for people who aren't paying attention, or who have an IQ below room temperature.

Not quite.Civil rights have had to go through the court system against popular public opinion before becoming endorsed by the majority.Miscegenation laws were not eliminated due to majority rule - they were ruled unconstitutional by the courts.Anti-homosexuality laws and anti-sodomy laws were not eliminated due to majority rule - they were ruled unconstitutional by the courts.School segregation...well, you get the picture. Sometimes majority rule works - but the "two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner" metaphor is accurate: majority rule leads to the persecution of minorities. That's why the US system isn't a straight democracy, and also why it's not just a representative republic - it's a constitutional representative republic, which means that there is a mechanism by which an oppressed minority can circumvent majority rule to force equal treatment. The key word being eventual. Only after the majority is first forced to give way to the oppressed minority, and then gets to stew for a while and notices that not only did the sky not fall, but those minority folks aren't so bad.The pattern is that the courts force the majority to bend knee...and the forced equal treatment, over a generation or two, causes a greater social integration whereby the newer generations have grown up thinking that equality is the natural order (which it should have been all along), and become the majority as their bigot elders die off.Forgive me if this does not cause me to cheer the glories of democracy.

That depends entirely on the taxes. A tax increase on profits over $100 million will not affect a new start-up business, for instance. Not even a little.Not all tax policy changes are equal. It's rather difficult to talk about "higher taxes" as a generalized entity when modern tax policy is clearly separated into income brackets and various targeted subsidies and incentives.

It could...but I don't think that lowering taxes is particularly appropriate anyway, even if closing loopholes would be worthwhile. If we're talking about lowering the deficit, we don't need budget-neutral, we need budget-positive.

Was it? Do you have data to support that? I'm asking because this challenges my existing understanding of popular opinion at that time, and that keeping races segregated was not something the majority endorsed. Remember that sending in the National Guard was simply the result of enforcing the ruling of the court - you don't vote on where to send the Guard; they go to enforce the law, protect public order, and to reinforce the mainline military. Apologies for any misunderstanding, but when I use the term "minorities," I am in fact referring to any subgroup distinct from the "majority," particularly when persecuted by the majority. This at various points in time would apply to the Irish, to Jews, to blacks, to Catholics, to Atheists, to Scientologists, and so on. Indeed...but the fact that it is "natural" does not make it ethically acceptable. The pack will always instinctively try to identify and exclude the "other," but if establishing a just and fair society is actually as important to us as we collectively tend to say that it is, there is no place for acting upon that instinct.

...no.The "majority" when we're talking about things like "majority rule" and "democracy" is popular opinion. Average guy on the street.The President and Supreme Court go against popular opinion all the time. In which case we may agree.As I said in a previous post, this is why the US is not a pure democracy, or even a pure representative republic - because true "majority rule" results in tyranny. Indeed...but opinions can still define a majority or minority, and color/ethnicity is one of the possible targets of an unjust majority.Minorities don't stay separate. They overlap. When enough people of groups x y and z get together and decide they don't like group c, we have a case of persecution of the minority, even if groups x y and z are themselves different minorities. Combined, they can still constitute a plurality or majority. That's what tends to happen in real life - popular opinion is a series of layers of Venn diagrams, and sometimes one group (which inevitably encompasses many smaller groups) gangs up on a single small group that's outside of their majority group. That depends. Some base urges are easily curtailed - most people, for example, are not violent felons, rapists, thieves, etc. Racism and other forms of bigotry are diminishing, slowly - progress has been made on multiple civil rights fronts over the past several decades that would suggest that we can learn to accept the "other" as part of the greater whole. Not all of those clashes are the same. Nobody is suggesting that we all need to hold hands and sing under a rainbow, but modern "culture clashes" involve lynch mobs a lot less frequently than they did a few decades ago. Edited by Rahvin, : Spelling...