That didn't take long.

I guess Herman has really made it obvious what a great leader he would be.

This view is like, super important to posters in this forum. Y'all are constantly on watch for any perceived broad brush smears. I wonder if you guys apply the same bizarre principles to every day life.

"Oh man I love 5 Guys' cheeseburgers, it's just they are so bad for you"
"OMG ARE YOU SAYING LETTUCE IS UNHEALTHY? THAT'S SO UNFAIR!"

"Man the Red Sox's pitching is crap, they should get some more arms"
"LOL BUT CLAY BUCHOLZ HAD A 2.3 ERA, IS HE A BAD PITCHER?"


Though also you're wrong. There are not a significant number of exceptions. Which prominent Republicans/conservatives are you referencing here? Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes run the movement these days. The National Review publishes Andy McCarthy and Jonah Goldberg and K-Lo.


Yeah, but you also decided to lecture us about how we think Huntsman is "reasonable" because he has the "liberal" views on global warming and evolution. (you cry about my tone because of the swears and the sarcasms, but your tone in this tangent has varied between patronizing and arrogant):

It's not a silly presumption. It might be an uncomfortable truth for you, but that's not my problem. Conservative populism has been banging the anti-intellectual drum for the past 50+ years. Blame McCarthy and Reagan and Palin, not me.

When we come into this thread to LOL about the ****** fruit of that anti-intellectual tree saying they'd ban Muslims from the military, you chiming in that it's "unfair" and "wrong" (for apparently self-evident reasons) just seems like you're unsettled by how many of your beliefs are shared by absolute ****ing morons.

The latest Magellan Strategies poll in New Hampshire:

Mit Romney: 29%
Newt Gingrich: 27%
Ron Paul: 16%
Herman Cain: 10%


http://nhjournal.com/2011/11/18/poll...d-heat-in-n-h/

of course it costs money. in this scenario, it would also bring in money. it's an investment.

the purpose of the new grocery store wouldn't be "to cater to a ... minority." it would obviously cater to everyone who walked through the door. even the most +EV investments generally carry some level of risk, but in this hypothetical, you would be overwhelmingly likely to succeed. you'd be getting the minority group's business by default.

i don't think you know what the word "freedom" means.

hint: it means a person is free to be racist if he wants to, as long as he doesn't act on it via violence/theft/fraud.

i'm not an ACist. this -- not the point where a racist business owner declares that his business won't cater to X/Y/Z -- is where the gov't should step in. the gov't's role should be to protect people, not force them to do things they don't want to do.

Lol, you forgot to add Spain and Italy and Ireland.

For starters I never said anything about prominent Republicans; I'm saying that a number of people in this thread take the uneducated rednecks of the deep south or wherever to be representative of the entire base. I'm not defending those yokels. I'm saying that I see plenty of really awful subsets of the liberal ideology and I don't stoop to the point of saying that they either (1) represent liberalism as a whole or (2) are actually proof of weakness at the core of liberal arguments. After all, even idiots aren't wrong all the time.

Okay, you've misrepresented what I said now. I said he was one of the more liberals in the Republican race. I was not the one who brought up global warming and evolution. Others brought that up and forced me to speak to that for whatever reason. Now you've gotten confused and attributed it to me as if that was either something I said or even the reason that I said what I did (it absolutely wasn't, and I did name issues Huntsman goes left on that had nothing to do with those).

You essentially gave me no choice but to eventually condescend to your tone, because I engaged you with civil discourse and it doesn't seem that you're capable of it. At least you don't display that capability if it's there. Eventually it became apparent that simply staying the course as the adult in the conversation wasn't going to get me far, so I had to take a more active approach in pointing out how cancerous your method of argumentation is.

Do you genuinely believe that your way of expressing yourself leads to good, productive discussion? Or is it purely done for the sake of trying to assert yourself into a circle jerk with people who agree with you? Because the tone you establish does hurt this forum as a whole. I long stayed out simply because I thought that posters like you would make it more frustration than it was worth, a view that gets validated frequently now that I'm here. And I know I'm far from alone on this and that other people stay away because of the inability of some to discuss matters reasonably. Now that I'm here, on balance I'm enjoying it, but it certainly could be better.

And again you've brought up a specific example (banning Muslims from the military) that I neither broached nor disputed. You're cherry-picking things that my less reasonable counterparts might put forth and then projecting them onto me. And of course that gets to the root of the problem...you can't be bothered to differentiate amongst conservatives and prefer to act like we're all basically the same. That, of course, is nonsense.

For what it's worth, of course I'm a bit unsettled by how many of my beliefs are shared by morons. I would hope that any intelligent liberal would feel the same about the morons on that side of the aisle. And then, given their starting point of intelligence, I would hope that they would correctly dismiss the notion that the existence of those people actually proves them wrong in any way. It doesn't. I guess the alternative is that you could convince yourself that the entire liberal base is comprised of people who arrived at their views through intelligent, rational, enlightened reasons...but I'm giving you more credit than that, at least.

This.

The rich have a hell of a lot more to tax than the 47% (which is actually more like 16% if you take out people with no income and seniors on SS) who don't pay income taxes. So charging a small amount of income tax to 16% of the population who are living near the poverty line. Why does your side keep acting like getting blood from that turnip will do anything?

How about just taxing the top 2% at pre-Bush tax cut levels? That buys us $700B over 10 years? Then we look at raising the upper middle class too. I fall in there (I think) and I'm totally fine with that.

And you just cut out all the cuts I mentioned. Why can't we be reasonable and combine tax hikes with significant cuts? Why does it have to be either or? Why does your side continue to pretend we can solve any of our debt problem by broadening the tax base?

Everyone complains about gridlock in congress. Can you see how refusing to even consider raising taxes back to pre-Bush levels is *the* contributing factor in that gridlock (Obama has put SS/Medicare reform on the table)?

Pretty amazing the way every candidate (except Huntsman and frothy lol) seem to have their day in the sun, then quickly fade: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/th...=synd_facebook

I can't remember, is it always like this?

Well, Fred Thompson was last cycle's Perry, huge poll numbers to start that dropped off a cliff quickly. Then Huckabee had a Cain-like surge to the top until people got a closer look and thought "WTF no." But even then it isn't a great comparison since Huckabee won Iowa and remained a factor for a while...it would be somewhat surprising if Cain took any primaries this time.

Otherwise that cycle really didn't reflect this wide-open of a race. And on the Dem side only the two candidates ever had a real shot. This is an especially weird one.

"Broadening the base" means something different to me then you. I remember the term being prominent after the deficit commission's report that recommended lower marginal tax rates combined with a reduction/elimination of deductions (thereby broadening the base). It seems to have taken on the meaning of "tax the poor."

Well, Paul never really had a day in the sun either. He's kind of been just partly cloudy the whole time.

I haven't been around nearly long enough to answer the question, but I don't really think 2000/2008 were like this. Before my time, Goldwater/Reagan was definitely like this to a much smaller degree. The younger generation of the republican party wanted a much more conservative candidate and fought hard against the establishment candidate.

I think that's what you're seeing now - the problem is that pretty much every non-Romney candidate is a joke (barring my own personal choice of Paul, of course just my opinion). It takes a month of being a "front-runner" and then people are like "oh wow, he/she is *that* bad???" and move on to a new shiny object.

That's one of the reasons I still think Paul has a shot. We're running out of non-Romney candidates that aren't complete bumbling buffoons and Paul may be the person they turn to.

If Huntsman runs in 2016, I'll probably support him over pretty much any other candidate since I can't really imagine who would run that I'm aware of that would convince me otherwise.

edit: When I say I think Paul has a shot, I really mean that I'm just hopeful and I'm hardly holding my breath.

What else could it possibly mean?

It will be interesting to see how the German economy performs when the deficit spending of the rest of Europe stops (as it clearly must).

Did you read my post?

So how about Norway? Highest taxes on earth, most social services, supposedly the happiest country on earth, and doing fine financially.

No, we aren't. We're cherry picking funny examples of just how far gone you're still allowed to be in today's GOP and laughing at those candidates and the scooter-bound racists they are pandering to. The projection is on your end.

Yes? I produce amusing content for this forum. I sometimes get PMs from lurkers about that ****. FWIW, I(along with Phone Booth) did convince a former reg, DrModern, to switch away from anarchocapitalism. I'm not really invested in changing people's minds, though.


Anyway, here's the score:

Libtard: "LOL Republicans are such maroons, check out X/Y/Z/AA/BB/CC objectively awful things they said"
You: "That's not fair, Republicans aren't ALL dumb, I believe the opposite of all those things."

OK, fine, so you're not being called dumb. Also, you're not really being called a Republican. Literally. This thread, in this page, pretty clearly clarifies you as a RINO. Gay marriage? Muslim toleration? Evolution? We've barely scratched the surface of wedge issues and you're already getting booed off stage.

The only people who don't pay taxes now are the poor. How could broadening the base not mean taxing the poor more? Please describe what deductions you are talking about and who they affect.

This doesn't broaden anything. It may even some things out, but it doesn't broaden. "Broadening the tax base" is accompanied by chants of "making sure everyone has some skin in the game," i.e., tax the poor.

they worked. Shouldn't they get paid?

My cousin is a very politically knowledgeable fiscal conservative who stays up on things and actually holds republicans accountable when they claim to be for small govt and do the opposite. I remember when he replied to one of my uncles' rant emails blasting the 2005-2006 republican congress for being the big orgy of pork and un-paid-for spending that they were. He also watches the Daily Show. Huntsman is the only guy he likes in the current field.

It's good to have oil.

The 2008 GOP nomination race was much different. There were four very credible candidates in Giuliani, Thompson, McCain, and Romney who never dropped below 10% nationally. Huckabee emerged late in the cycle to be the fifth man above 10%. Giuliani led national polling all of 2007, and while Thompson peaked on arrival, he didn't peak as high or plummet as fast as Rick Perry.

The 2012 GOP nomination race has seen Romney never drop below 16% the entire race, but every other candidate has dipped into single digits. Perry, Cain, and Gingrich have all eclipsed Romney in polling, but none have lasted. Romney led Iowa until December when Huckabee overtook him, but this year, Romney, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and now Gingrich have led.

So do we.