But anyway, as regards to employers telling their employees that if Obama's policies go through they may lose their jobs, if were related to party affiliation (i.e., "Vote Republican or you're fired"), I would agree that it is fucked up--and possibly illegal. However, the memos in question related to the policies themselves; in other words, the boss is saying something along the lines of "I don't appreciate having the money that the government borrows from us simply given to those who do nothing to earn it, with no limit in sight. If these policies are put in place I may have to downsize my force as a result."

For the sake of argument, let's say that your suggestion of raising taxes worked. Let's say that everyone making over $500K paid roughly a 60% tax rate, which gave us a surplus in taxes. What happens when congress starts spending BEYOND the surplus, and we have a deficit again (as happened in 2001)? Are we going to raise taxes again? Should there be an upper limit for taxation? Why is your first concern not instead to reduce spending? Surely there is waste in the government we can cut, or programs that can be lessened, or things that the government owns that can be sold and privatized (Amtrak, public schools, etc.)? Why do you see government as the end-all for prosperity?

Furthermore, you touched on alleged GOP voter fraud. First, three of the links you posted there relate to the same event---no need to post multiple links of the same story. Second, are you just going to ignore the fact that Democrats have publicly admitted that voter fraud is a common political strategy? And it's not just the one either. It's a pretty big problem, despite what Eric Holder publicly tells us. And then there are the flippant excuses the Democrats make about Voter ID, among them that minorities would be disenfranchised because they can't get IDs like White people can. Well, why not? After all, you don't need to be able to drive to get a photo ID, you just have to be able to ride the bus and walk a few hundred feet, fill out a form and wait a little while. And if they're so concerned about it, why can't they, as their elected representatives, start a fundraiser or effort to get them IDs? They could get everyone an ID in the span of a week or two and have them mailed to their place of residence. Why don't they? Answer: Because they don't really care and they want people to be able to vote without any accountability.

One more thing: Here's something surprising that I found just a few minutes ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skw-0jv9kts

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Does anyone else get the feeling that when the GOP was still picking its candidate they thought "this is still going to be years of recession, so let the democrat stay in charge and then once the country starts turning back we go back in and take the credit", and so picked Romney and Ryan as another "fail team" after McCain and Palin failed as a "somewhat try to win team"? (Because I don't think they actually believed that they could win by appealing to the complete extreme of the right political spectrum). And then once they realised that the USA has a predicted GDP growth to reach back into about 3% in the next years (which is the best among all the developed western countries) they suddenly got scared they wouldn't get to have the credit for it and launched a massive all-front panic attack on the Obama campaign to try and save their asses? Because I really did feel like in the previous months they haven't even been trying up until like one, or one and a half of month ago.

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That's an interesting perspective, however let me ask you this, in all seriousness:

What is the difference between the start of Obama's term and now?

Granted, we're back to having an unemployment rate of "bad," down from "worse," so that sn't it. We still have bad education, health care and corruption on both sides--none of those provokes have really been fixed, and only one of them has been bandaged--so that's not it either. The only real difference I can see is the added 5-6 trillion dollars. And he's been running off the same message of Change from his first campaign and making all the same promises too, so nothing else has really changed.

You might think of it as more of a longshot, but from my perspective, the choice is between a known successful businessman that you hate for little reason besides that he is a businessman and a Republican, and a well-spoken politician that you like because he promises free stuff at the expense of those who have more stuff. In other words, the real question at hand is: which option is best for the country as a whole?

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Nah, pretty sure it's that only the shitty ones ran in the primaries since defeating an incumbent is a bitch, and you only get one shot.

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You forget, I also think Romney is an idiot. That's important.

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Escape will make me God.

My god that link with the guy that made the effort of collecting all of the lies romney has said was just a glorious example of the intensity of journalism.

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Then, do you also consider Obama to be an intellectual? How do you measure the two levels of intellect? After all, Romney and Obama have equally or near-equally as impressive college records. They simply chose different paths. Furthermore, don't they both make really bizarre statements all the time?

Is it at all possible that you consider him an idiot merely because he says things you disagree with? Other than the gaffes, I mean; people can say stupid things and still be smart.

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Of course, I say stupid things all the time. I just look at his action within Bain Capital and a lot of the political moves he's done this election and none of it strikes me as particularly smart. Next, you'll be asking for proof, and I really don't feel like finding it so let's go with the pussy-shit non-backed assertion.

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Escape will make me God.

To be honest Ruff, I have no stake in american politics, so I'm not swayed by their promises and speeches. All I see are two bad choices, where the ridiculousness, stupidity, and outright disingenuousness of one of the candidates is more surreal than the others'.

As for the:

Keeps reminding me how unwilling you are to look at the trends instead of looking at the absolute numbers. Here's a visual representation of how I perceive your argument:



Same thing was with Clinton. He turned a deficit into a surplus. But that takes time. When you start with a downward trend, the amount which you're able to turn it upwards is what matters.
You see Ruff, if you're given a country by Clinton, which is doing a budget surplus, and as you leave you leave it with the same surplus, then you've done nothing good, and nothing bad, other than keep things as they were. If you're given a surplus government by Clinton and you manage to turn it into a massive deficit government in 2 cadencies, then you're a shit president. Like Bush was. Now if you get a country with a massive deficit and you even do as much as pulling it up to less deficit, you're already a good president. It's not about how things are, that matter always lags years behind the actual policies and works of the government. It's about what trend you first got, and which way you've turned it.

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Could I see verification for the "democrats don't want blacks to vote"? Because the article you linked stated it but never gave a source.

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One time when I was high, I thought I was in an ambulance dying. Turns out I was just eating sherbert.
-stufflikehearts-

I'm not big in american politics (been reading about them to try and have something to say here), but even i understand that people criticising Obama's presidency because he hasn't been able to instantly bring america back on it's feet after the previous president had sex with your country's colon for plenty of years is a bit douchebaggy.

I understand Obama's situation sorta like QU's graph, which i've seen represented in text in many other sites when discussion about that particular topic rises, and this is how i understand his position (and it will probably confuse you guys because i don't know how to say this in english, so sorry if i make any mistakes, but i will use Zero Punctuation-style visual aids), not sure if i'm in the wrong:

This is the state of things as i saw them at the beggining,



Then obama gets elected. Once Bush left, the country's problems didn't just freeze, they just got bigger. When Obama jumped in, the pool was already filled with piss, and it only filled up America, making it sink.



Obama jumped to the piss to try and save America from sinking to the bottom. The water represents the economic crisis and america is under it. When a heavy body hits the liquid it doesn't instantly pop out of it (with a few exceptions), the object's velocity is slowed down by the liquid's density, and then the air within our lungs help our buoyancy.



A president is not a magical entity that once that gets elected, every action of his has immediate consequences, like if it was Midas's Touch or something. During Obama's first period in his presidency, buoyancy hasn’t kicked in as his policies and efforts are the air in Obama’s lungs, and the density of Bush’s piss filled 'Muricah, making it heavy, and so it sank deeper while Obama was working on things, apparently some people believe America sinking during Obama's presidency is his fault.



Obama's actions start to cause an impact, 'Muricah slowly rises from the deep, which brings us to the present day.



If i could vote in your country, i'd vote for Obama because he feels like a better choice to me.

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That was a great visualisation aid Mir. Did you do it? If so do make it into a comic strip and share.

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Yeah i made it this morning instead of my signage class homework, but since this is sort of signage i think i'll give it to the prof what do you think? lol

By comic strip do you mean just join all the pics together or also include the text in my posts?
I'll do it no biggie.

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No, but I skimmed it at didn't see anything particularly alarming. Since getting back into the work force I've joined the ranks of my fellow over worked Americans and these 12 hour work days don't leave much time for studying politics with a fine tooth comb to spot the hidden lies. I'm stuck with only the obvious lies and snake oil promises to bicker over.

@Sentios: Glad to see you have found a job. It's pretty odd that you're complaining about the hours, however, during a time when something like 23 million people can't find a job.

I absolutely agree; Obama's so full of shit.
(lol.)

@Mir@k: That was pretty decently humorous, I have to admit. However, you kind of missed my point.

Health care: Still broken, and their plan is essentially 10 years of taxes to pay for about 5 years of health care. It doesn't do anything to control costs, which means that the prices stay high while giving people the illusion of being less expensive. That's not a fix. That just means people pay more taxes while receiving the same level of health care.

Education: There has been nothing done about this. Charter schools and Private schools still outperform Public schools with less funding, and Public schools are asking for more funding from the government. Meanwhile, test scores are still pretty terrible. He keeps talking about it, but he hasn't done anything to fix it.

Jobs: Sure, the "official" unemployment rate has gone back down. But as we all know, that number does not account for people who were previously counted but stopped looking for work, and so are no longer counted. I prefer to use the U6 unemployment rate when I discuss these things, which usually paints a much more accurate picture. Also, economists say that we could be seeing another recession, which could compound an already bad problem. He's been doing next to nothing to actually solve anything, and the stimulus package was supposed to help but apparently didn't. Not fixed. Patched. The wound is still bleeding and it might get infected.

Immigration: It's still a problem. I know this is a soft spot for you, but if either of our countries are going to be better off in the long run, we must be prepared to discuss it honestly. Your country sucks, so you want to move to America. Maybe the solution is not so much to let thousands of people cross the border every year as it is to work towards improving living conditions, etc. back there? I would very much like to see a time when people in Mexico are not slave to crime and the cartels, and actually take back their land from those who just want power. They should be able to love their country and not even want to move elsewhere.

I can already feel people glaring at me (more fiercely than normal) for that last bit, even if I am trying to help. I think this is a good place to stop for now.

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I am not sure what you mean to be honest, Are you saying that the solution is to let your country intervene? Because if so, that is a pretty good idea! I give you my blessing. If what you said was instead just the equivalent of "maybe you guys should go back and 'solve your problems' ", then i don't know what to say to you. I really doubt whatever efforts may be applied to stop inmigrants will be succesful. If anything they'll only get more violent and bloody, all courtesy of people like the self proclaimed border patrols that love to yell America is the bestest place in the whole wide world to live, and then wonder why other humans want in on a piece of that glory.

But i concede you that that particular topic should stop because you don't really know anything about mexico.

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Not really complaining, rather I was pointing out a contributing factor as to why so many people are ill informed when it comes voting time.

Though you should know me well enough to know I'd be all for defining a maximum work week in the law in order to spread the work out more evenly to counter unemployment.

But wouldn't that mean that people who have full-time, low wage jobs would be forced by the government to work less and by extension earn less to solve a problem that they did not cause, when they've presumably got a family to feed?

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Wages would have to adjust to the new norm, I'm not suggesting that it would work with current wages.

Even I think that is too much government intervention, and isn't likely to really 'fix' the problem. I think raising capital gains taxes and other taxes to encourage the rich to invest in people rather than 'short term' investments like securities and bonds would work best at improving our economy.

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Escape will make me God.

Currently, a significant fraction of full-time employee compensation is non-monetary benefits like health insurance. This distorts the labor market, making it cheaper to overwork full-time employees while making do with no-benefit part-time workers wherever possible (even if it decreases performance a bit) than to have the balance between part- full- and overtime employees that best matches skill sets to their demand. How to fix this? Decouple health insurance from employment with a national system like in the rest of the developed world. Not only would it remove that distortion from the labor market, it would improve labor mobility because people's health would no longer be tied to a particular job (the Obamacare mandate reduces but does not eliminate this problem).

Why is it 'too much' more than any other law put in place telling an employer what they may and may not demand of their employees? It would work on in the sense that if the employer doesn't want to lose productivity they'll train and hire unemployed people to make up the difference. It's not something they could escape by moving their money around the world either.

The only people who really lose out in the short term are people who are basing their lifestyle on overtime pay, which is about as responsible as people who base their lifestyle on availability of credit.

There are actually business environments where the value of capital is so high that employers will pay whatever it takes to get it up and running ASAP. In such cases, the workers are typically highly skilled and in short supply, and their numbers are the limiting factor. They often work a lot more than "full time" and make a lot of money. Also, many medical professionals work more than sixty hours per week to meed their fields' demand. Capping work hours for these people would harm employees, employers, and those served by the businesses involved. And in normal situations, capping work hours would introduce a lot of scheduling hassle whenever unforeseen situations impact workers' availability. Overtime exists to discourage employers from forcing employees to work excessive hours, but the availability of overtime labor lets things run more smoothly than a hard cap. Keep in mind that a cap on work hours would also be a cap on how much employees can work and earn. This is different from (say) the minimum wage situation because a work hour cap would restrict economic freedom that helps society in many ways, while minimum wage laws restrict economic freedom to prevent wage slavery, which is rather bad for society. It's a question of costs, benefits, and reasonable regulation.

Just wanted to touch on this real quick:

I had in mind a sort of 75/25 combination of the two, where our government and yours deliberates on possible solutions; we do most of the planning and execution; and the citizenry assists with rebuilding their society in the post-nuclear apocalyptic endgame--the latter might also provide some well-paying jobs.

I'm just kidding about the nuclear thing, of course. But a resolution where we go to war with organized crime is probably not going to end well for a lot of people. After all, many of the people who work in the cartels have family members that are basically being held hostage; we would need a way to prevent collateral damage while still achieving a positive outcome.

The problem is in how one might go about it. If America wants to help take back Mexico from the crime lords, I can't see very many other courses of action than to kill them, suddenly and without warning. There would have to be a swift, concise, coordinated assault on them with the assistance of the Mexican government. I would have no problem with Obama, Romney, or any President sending drone strikes to--what do they have, mansions or something?--where these guys live and take them out in one go. I'm sure you guys would be happy if a few Crime Lords and their families ceased to exist all at once.

But even if you agree with me that this would be the best course of action, good luck getting such a resolution to pass the House and Senate. People are extremely squeamish about the subject of murder--even when said murder might involve saving saving thousands if not millions of lives, or even an entire nation. Congress does not make those decisions lightly. Plus, the ignorants on both side would just say we're pushing some Warmongering/Imperialist agenda--Make Love Not War, etc--or something along those lines, and then everyone would be afraid of pushing the issue. I doubt there are very many politicians who would ever go that far. Too bad I'm not in charge, right?

(canned laughter)

Realistically, you don't try to stop illegal immigration]. If you fix the root causes the problem basically resolves itself.

This is only something I've considered recently, by the way; you may recall that before I was hard anti-immigration. Having considered the issue, I'm still against illegal immigration, but I understand the root causes slightly better now and want to do something about it. I never really thanked you for that, did I? Thank you.

We Americans don't really get a strong taste of what you guys go through South of the border that makes you do what you do to come here. There's very little incentive (for lack of a better term) that makes us actively want to seek out bad information. We're much more easily placated by powerful figureheads and silver-tongued politicians and Will Smith movies, etc. to want to do that. If only there were some way of bringing it to widespread attention in the US that would make people actually give a rat's ass for Christ's sake, maybe something could be done, policy-wise.

I'm sorry I can't offer more to you, but dammit people are too fucking lazy and ignorant.

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I don't think you need a written explanation between the panels if you join them up. You would if they were poorly made, but I think they are clear and explicit enough. You might only want to make the background colour a bit darker so that the piss pool is more visible. Took me a moment to notice it the first time.


See, the problem with your country in my honest opinion is that you utilise the most trivial versions of FPTP (First Past The Post) system. Which has this nasty tendency (pure mathematics actually) that makes it always lead the politics into a two-party system eventually. That's just how it's designed. A two party system is ultimately bad for the country, because most of the people won't feel like they have a candidate/party that they can support who has a realistic chance of winning (vote 3rd party and change the USA? Good one mate), and these people lose interest in voting (hence the low voting attendance). And the rest of those that do vote, mostly vote strategically, rather than by favourites, more often voting against a candidate they dislike instead of supporting one that they do like. Which spells an utter failure for something claimed to be a democratic process. Not to mention how susceptible that system is to gerrymandering, disproportional representation, and the spoiler effect.


Now see, I consider that a short-sighted idea. The amount of organised crime in Mexico is mostly caused by the fact that normal average people can't get jobs and earn a living legally. Now sure, some of them are the scum of earth, but they would not be able to operate if most people had a better job alternative than smuggling drugs and weapons. And as long as there are willing people to recruit, no matter how many times you kill off the bosses, new bosses will take their place. You'd have to kill off all of the foot soldiers too, and that would make up for one nasty Mexican genocide. Americans are always so quick to shoot first, then think. You killed Bin Laden, congrats, did Al Qaeda fall apart yet? No? Then what are you doing wrong? Not killing enough people, clearly. You need more bombs, more drones, and more genocide until all those who might even think to fight against you are dead. Good luck with that. I prefer the more subtle methods of manipulating the demographics and economy of countries to discourage a certain behaviour. It's just like killing Somalian pirates. Yes, because all of them just want to be pirates so badly. See, even South Park figured that one out. These people are usually desperate, and striving to survive. Killing them is not fixing the problem. Give those Somalian pirates, or Mexican small-time criminals a proper job, and earnings, and they will gladly stop doing the kind of a job that is very likely to get them killed, not to mention morally questionable.


See? Here you have the right frame of mind. Go for the root problem, not the symptoms. High crime rate is not the root problem. Just as humans being evil deep down inside is not the problem. They aren't. There are driving forces that make them chose one path over the other. Change the driving forces and a whole new picture emerges.

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