Comment from Gary
Time: October 18, 2008, 10:22 pm

I’d call taking from the have-nots and giving to the haves like with the 700 billion dollar bailout bonanza a key component to the neo-con agenda. We’ve had 8 years of that and it hasn’t created jobs nor stimulated economic growth…so we want 4 more years of it? I don’t, sorry.

Comment from Phil Ayres
Time: October 19, 2008, 8:15 am

Gary, THAT is not part of the conservative agenda. This bailout was wrong. It was handled so poorly. So, no, I am not in support of what “so called conservatives” did in this bailout. No true conservative would have done this.

Comment from Gary
Time: October 20, 2008, 12:08 am

Yeah the bailout didn’t get passed until they added “sweetener” aka pork. Fancy a cup of coffee? Yes, with creamer and bacon fat. When policy and ideology mixes badly with pure politics it’s quite a site to see. My congressman reckons he’s a conservative but he was able to fill two pages explaining why he supported the bill. After reading it I wrote on the back of his form letter a handwritten explanation why I’ve sent him a photocopy of a check that I wrote to his opponent.

But I digress. So no true conservative would ever support anything like the bailout. So McCain isn’t a true conservative? Well I guess we just don’t know who McCain is. He’s even said he probably wouldn’t appoint someone like Alito because he wears his conservatism on his sleeve.

Christ, there’s no one for you to vote for this November. I guess you could always write in Pat Buchanan.

And if McCain wants to paint Obama as the “Manchurian candidate” who might be muslim or could be a socialist that would appoint jesse jackson, al sharpton, and fat albert to his cabinet, McCain should stop explicitly saying it. After all, the greatest disinfectant is sunlight.

“The last time I checked, taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots is a key component to the socialist agenda.”

The last time I checked, after the Republican Great Depression, FDR put this nation back to work, in part by raising taxes on income above $3 to $4 million a year (in today’s dollars) to 91 percent, and corporate taxes to over 50% of profits. The revenue from those income taxes built dams, roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, schools, hospitals, train stations, railways, an interstate highway system, and airports. It educated a generation returning from World War II. It acted as a cap on the rare but occasional obsessively greedy person taking so much out of the economy that it impoverished the rest of us.

Through the 1950s more and more loopholes for the rich were built into the tax code. JFK even observed in his second debate with Richard Nixon that dropping the top tax rate to 70% but tightening up the loopholes would actually be a tax increase.

JFK pushed through that tax increase to take us back toward FDR-Truman-Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon.

But thanks to Reagan the have-nots were convinced that supporting severe tax cuts for the super rich was a good idea because if they would just pull themselves up by their bootstraps they could be super wealthy too and they wouldn’t have to pay the crazy tax rates they are paying right now as a poor person.

Next thing you know, you’re driving over a bridge in Minnesota and then it just collapses underneath you. Why should we tax the haves to pay to maintain bridges when only poor people drive on bridges?

And the last time I checked there were 3 branches of government so pretending that everything a candidate proposes is going to go into effect immediately after he is inaugurated is just plain retarded and/or disingenuous. And if dems take majority of the house and senate well, this IS a democracy. It’s not like they were appointed there, that’s just an indication of how the majority of the citizenry want the country to go. If it turns out they screw up the country then the repubs will get voted in and they’ll get to screw it up a different way; rinse and repeat every four years.