Conservatrolling Topic

[Deleted]

Because a Democrat started it, it has to be bad!

[Tails82]

What we have here is a failure to apply fallacies properly.

[Deleted]

According to you, a republican must oppose the ACA simply because they are Republican, rather than supporting it and support Democrats.
Said comment falling under the "genetic" fallacy because you are opposing or supporting on the "party line" rather than on the ACA's own merits.

"We can't support that, it has Democrat cooties!"

[Tails82]

I am calling McCain a RINO because he is not helping the Republican party by supporting a law that was passed entirely by Democrats. Precisely because it gets people like you confused about what the party stands for.

[Tails82]

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/05/list-obama-closures-for-shutdown

14. Obama Forces Residents Out of Private Homes - "The government shutdown is being felt close to home for some locals. They say they're being forced out of private homes on Lake Mead because they sit on federal land."

The GOP have agreed to fund the parks. Obama has threatened a veto.

15. Acadia Park In Maine Shut Down - The GOP have agreed to fund the parks. Obama said he will veto.

16. Historic Restaurant Open During Last Shutdown Forced to Close - The restaurant is part of the federal park system, which the GOP have agreed to fund. Obama said he will veto the funding.

17. Obama Shuts Down a Road That Goes Through CO Park - The GOP have agreed to fund the parks. Obama said he will veto that compromise funding.

19. Obama Blocks People From LOOKING at Mt. Rushmore - "Blocking access to trails and programs at South Dakota’s most popular attraction was one thing, but state officials didn’t expect Congress’ budget stalemate to shut down a view of Mount Rushmore.

"The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument.

20. Crucial USDA Websites Taken Down - "The U.S. Department of Agriculture has turned off its entire website in response to the government shutdown, leaving farmers, reporters and others with no way to access any of the agency's information online.

"USDA's total website shutdown goes far beyond the response of other federal agencies, and seems to be part of an effort to make people feel the effects of the shutdown. Thursday morning calls to USDA's press office seeking an explanation were not answered."

This website is down and yet the ObamaCare and White House websites are up.

21. St. Louis Gateway Arch Closed - The GOP have agreed to compromise legislation funding the parks. Obama has threatened a veto.

22. Park Shutdown Bounces Rowers from Potomac - The GOP have agreed to compromise funding opening the parks. Obama has threatened a veto.

23. Thompson Boat Center Closed In DC - The GOP have agreed to fund the parks. Obama said he will veto.

24. Obama Closes Military Commissary - "Military members, veterans and families who shop at local tax-free store are shocked to discover the store's doors locked; no progress to end stalemate in Washington."

Obama's golf course on the base remains open, though.

While the government has deemed the White House chefs "essential," working class military personnel have lost their tax-free store privileges.

Military personnel and their families tell me that they have never lost these privileges in previous shutdowns.

25. Arizona Offers to Fund Grand Canyon, Obama Says 'Drop Dead' - "Obama has ordered the Grand Canyon to stay closed, even after the state of Arizona and local businesses have offered to cover the costs necessary to keep it open. In other words, the shutdown isn’t about the money — it’s about hurting the American people just because he can."

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/05/Feds-Try-to-Close-the-OCEAN-Because-of-Shutdown

Feds Try to Close the OCEAN Because of Shutdown

Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was "closed" due to the shutdown...The Park Service will also have rangers on duty to police the ban... of access to an ocean. The government will probably use more personnel and spend more resources to attempt to close the ocean, than it would in its normal course of business.

This is governing by temper-tantrum. It is on par with the government's ham-fisted attempts to close the DC WWII Memorial, an open-air public monument that is normally accessible 24 hours a day...At least that Memorial is an actual structure, with some kind of perimeter that can be fenced off. Florida Bay is the ocean. How, pray tell, do you "close" 1,100 square miles of ocean? Why would one even need to do so?

Apparently, according to an anonymous Park Service ranger, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

Centuries ago, King Canute famously failed to command the ocean tide to stop. His display was actually a means to educate his subjects on the limits of royal power. Today, however, our President actually believes he has the power to control the oceans.

washingtonexaminer.com/chuck-hagel-admits-most-pentagon-furloughs-were-unnecessary/article/2536865

Chuck Hagel admits most Pentagon furloughs were unnecessary

House Republicans passed the Pay Our Military Act to the Senate on the eve of the government shutdown in order to insulate the Pentagon from the effects of the lapse in government appropriations.

The Senate passed and President Obama signed the measure, but the Pentagon furloughed about 400,000 civilians anyway.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/10/05/House-Passes-Resolution-To-Allow-Mass-On-Military-Bases-During-Shutdown

The House of Representatives on Saturday voted 400-1 to pass HCR 58 which calls on Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to allow continued religious services on military bases during the government shutdown.

The resolution, introduced by Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) came in response to an October 3rd op-ed by John Schlageter, General Counsel of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA (AMS). A news release on the website of AMS states that Schlageter had disclosed that non-active duty Catholic priests had been ordered not to work – or even volunteer – on military installations during the shutdown, making it impossible for men and women in the service at various locations to attend Mass this weekend.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/06/Veterans-at-the-Memorial-Showing-Us-What-it-Means-to-be-American

A question Americans should answer for themselves is the one I am thinking through while standing at the National World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall this week. What kind of president doesn't do everything he can to ensure that the elderly American men in wheelchairs I see before me have access to "their" memorial — even during a government shutdown?

And when I say "their" memorial, I am not only referring to their World War II veteran status. This memorial cost $182 million to build; $197 million was raised privately (the extra money remains in a memorial fund). This non-government money came not only from corporations and wealthy individuals, but also from a long list of veterans groups...So, again, what kind of commander-in-chief permits government barricades to go up around the privately-funded World War II Memorial, even as he is informed that long-scheduled and privately-funded Honor Flights of these aged veterans are arriving to visit their memorial?

To "shut" this open plaza for the first time, National Park Service employees actually had to assemble barricades (the ones that look like bike racks) and yellow police tape to block access around it. "What are they going to do next?" asked Rep. Gohmert. "Hang a drapery over Mount Rushmore?"

Yeah pretty much...see above

Once upon a lifetime ago, these seniors were "the boys of Pointe du Hoc." They took Iwo Jima, yard by bloody yard. They were Screaming Eagles, Pathfinders, Hellcats, all-American G.I.s who came by the hundreds, by the tens of thousands, from every farm town and big city in America to fight Nazism in Europe and Imperial Japan in the Pacific. Once, they could scale cliffs, jump from planes, and earn medals. Now, seven decades later, they walk slowly or need wheelchairs, their navy-blue ball caps emblazoned with the name of their naval ships or battle. Long ago, they earned our eternal gratitude and respect, and no government of any political stripe or party should ever forget it.

But this is exactly what the Obama White House and the Democratic Party have done...It's unthinkable that any government would dishonor its veterans this way. It's not only that there was no need, no call to barricade the World War II Memorial. That a government would do such a thing shows it has no concept of what it means to be Americans with common bonds and a common past.

The way the Obama administration treats these men doesn't bode well for the rest of us. Meanwhile, who would have imagined that now, with their span nearly complete, these same men would have to stand for freedom one more time—but this time against their own government?

www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/10/05/Journalist-Obama-Administration-is-the-Most-Closed-Control-Freak-Administration-I-ve-Ever-Covered

Journalist: Obama Admin is 'Most Closed, Control-Freak Administration I've Ever Covered'

In a long piece revealing the current antagonistic climate between journalists and the Obama administration published in the Washington Post, Obama is called a "control-freak," as well as "secretive," and "manipulative," it is said he is fostering an atmosphere of fear both at home and abroad, and is delivering a "slap in the face" to reporters all over his increased use of electronic surveillance of reporters.

The piece is an excerpt of a paper by former executive editor of The Washington Post, Leonard Downie...Downie's piece is extraordinary in how it paints Obama as a paranoid, secretive, even vindictive president not to mention that it reveals that journalists have become afraid of their own shadows for fear that Obama is spying on them.

Downie notes that Obama has used the 1917 Espionage Act in cases for which no president has ever invoked it, he points out how Obama is using electronic surveillance without telling reporters or their news agencies that he's doing so, and he lists some of the many government officials that Obama has prosecuted or made to quit their jobs over what he calls "espionage" or "spying."...New York Times reporter Scott Shane, "whose e-mail traffic with the former CIA officer was seized, told me that the chilling lesson 'is that seemingly innocuous e-mails not containing classified information can be construed as a crime.'"

The piece also reveals that Obama is illegitimately characterizing leakers as "spies" but who are better thought of as whistleblowers about improper government practices or actions and, worse, Obama is prosecuting them as such.

Naturally, as is Obama's wont, his Department of Justice blames the Bush administration for all this over reacting, but Downie makes it clear in his piece that it is Obama's people who have ramped up the surveillance and prosecutions to a level never before seen...It all makes for a paranoid administration, Downie indicates.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303722604579113481450122544.html

The recent revelation that New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio supported Nicaragua's Sandinista military government in the 1980s is a reminder of the high cost Latin America pays for being the playground of the American left. It should also further enlighten New Yorkers as to the politics of the man who is the front runner in the race.

The ideas of the hard left don't sell very well in the U.S., so collectivists take them south of the Rio Grande where they believe the ground is more fertile. Their arrogant paternalism ignores the rights of the people they pretend to redeem.

By 1988, when Mr. de Blasio went to Nicaragua to do social work in support of the Marxist revolutionary cause, the Sandinistas had been running the country for almost a decade. Their brutality was well-documented. Mr. de Blasio, who also did fundraising for supporters of the military government, either didn't know about Sandinista repression or he didn't care.

It's hard to believe it was the former. My requests for comment from his campaign went unanswered. In an interview with a New York radio station last month, however, some hints emerged when he was asked about his decision to honeymoon in Cuba in 1994. Mr. de Blasio said that he doesn't excuse the "undemocratic" regime, but he also argued that it has accomplished "some good things" like "in health care."

Let's pretend that's not generations-old Castro propaganda—even though every independent report from the island describes a health-care system that has completely collapsed and cannot even provide basics like bandages and aspirin. The larger problem is that Mr. de Blasio's remarks suggest that there is a trade-off between freedom and doctor visits. Should jailing and torturing dissidents, stealing property and terrorizing generations of Cubans be considered less horrific because they have annual physicals? Apparently.

Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza was toppled in 1979. Many had fought to rid their country of his one-man rule, and a broad-based ruling directorate was set up after Somoza was banished. It was supposed to organize elections. Daniel Ortega, a leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front that overthrew Somoza, had other ideas. He wanted to remake Castro's Cuba in Central America.

Mr. Ortega's first step was to cleanse the Sandinista directorate of moderate elements, using fear and intimidation. In 1980, his security thugs assassinated Jorge Salazar, a popular and charismatic Nicaraguan businessman who had opposed Somoza's dictatorship but also opposed the effort to install a Marxist-Leninist military government. It worked. Members of the directorate, who had naively believed that they were part of a new democratic Nicaragua, were terrified. They resigned and the ruling junta became totally Castroite.

The crackdown that followed was ruthless. Cuban enforcers were brought in to help. Houses, farms, ranches and businesses were confiscated, and the independent media were muzzled. Central planning meant price controls for everyone. Even rural women carrying produce to market were arrested as speculators.

Highland peasants who had fought to remove Somoza rebelled. They didn't want to be ruled by a left-wing dictator any more than by the right-wing variety. They organized themselves into "Contras." The Miskito Indians also fought back. In retribution the army burned their villages and carried out executions. Thousands fled to Honduras to live in refugee camps.

In the Sandinista nation some pigs were more equal than others. Property seized by the state somehow never made it into the hands of the poor, but comandantes got rich. When a decade of economic decline forced an internationally monitored election in 1990, opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro won the presidency. But the heavily armed comandantes refused to return their loot to its rightful owners. Critics dubbed it "la piñata." Mr. Ortega has since returned to power.

It is possible that Mr. de Blasio wasn't well-informed when he got mixed up with the Sandinistas. After all, he had only completed graduate studies of the region at an American university (Columbia), an experience that has produced more than its share of self-righteous gringos eager to reverse injustices in faraway places. It is harder to believe that he didn't know that they were Soviet- backed, which might have offered a clue to where things were going.

The more likely explanation for why Mr. de Blasio supported the Sandinista military government is that he believed the brutality could be explained away with good outcomes. Indeed, Mr. de Blasio still romanticizes his gun-toting chums, as the New York Times reported on Sept. 23, after reviewing a series of interviews with the mayoral candidate. "To this day," the Times reported, "he speaks admiringly of the Sandinistas' campaign, noting advances in literacy and health care."

That Mr. de Blasio's comrades turned out to be greedy totalitarians who stole the spoils of the war for themselves doesn't seem to matter.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579070813264002126.html

Honk if You Love the Mass-Produced Automobile

Critics note: Cars will soon use less energy and emit less pollution than public transit.

Monday, Oct. 7, will mark the 100th anniversary of the opening of Henry Ford's moving assembly line for producing the Model T. This innovative production system allowed Ford to double worker pay while cutting the price of his cars in half, making it possible, for the first time, for auto workers to buy the cars they built.

Time magazine lists the Model T among its "50 worst cars of all time" because "the consequences of putting every living soul on gas-powered wheels" were (supposedly) so negative. The Obama administration seems to agree with that bleak summation. Its recent strategic plan for the Department of Transportation focuses exclusively on such negative consequences, which allegedly include the high dollar cost of driving, poorly designed cities, greenhouse gases and obesity. The "Livable Communities" section of the plan, for instance, says that Americans drive too much because cities are designed to make us "auto dependent," and the plan's goal is to rebuild cities to induce people to drive less.

In fact, many of the supposed negative costs of cars are purely imaginary, while others are rapidly declining. Each year's crop of new cars is safer, more fuel-efficient and less polluting than before. Department of Energy data show that in 1970 cars used twice as much energy per passenger mile as did mass transit. Today, they are practically tied, and in a few years driving will use less energy and emit less pollution than public transit.

By tripling urban travel speeds, autos gave workers access to better jobs and employers access to a wider pool of workers, contributing to a huge increase in worker productivity. Per-capita GDP has increased by nearly nine times in the last century, and autos are responsible for a large share of that increase.

Automobiles relieved people of the need to live in cramped tenements that were within walking distance of their jobs. By giving workers access to cheap, unregulated land at the urban periphery, cars contributed to a 50% rise in homeownership rates since 1940. Cars also gave everyone access to a huge variety of low-cost consumer goods. In 1913, the average grocery store had fewer than 500 products for sale; today, the average is more than 20,000. Without cars, modern retailers from Krogers to Whole Foods, Wal-Mart to Costco, and Tru-Value to Restoration Hardware simply could not exist.

Although cars are often blamed for urban sprawl, in fact they have preserved far more productive farm and forest land than urban areas have consumed. Before cars, trucks and tractors replaced animal power, farmers devoted close to a third of their land to relatively unproductive pasture. Since 1913, close to 200 million acres of that pasture has been converted to productive crop or forest land. By comparison, all the low-density suburbs in America occupy well under 100 million acres.

Mass-produced automobiles gave low- and moderate-income people access to forms of recreation previously available only to the rich...Autos greatly contributed to human health and safety. Thanks to paved streets and automotive technology, fire departments and paramedics save hundreds of thousands of homes and thousands of lives each year.

[Deleted]

Regardless of what you want to call McCain, you are attacking him rather than his argument.

[Tails82]

I'm not against McCain as a person, just the "maverick" in his actions.

So what's up with all these misapplied links? It's not like they're paying you or something.

[Deleted]

Congratulations of going full circle, then.

Oct 6, 2013 0:48:55 GMT -5 @zetta said:

This country is a democracy for better or worse, and the prez man can certainly say "dude, I like this law" and make things harder to reverse, but he is never the final say.
Simply enough, no attempt at repealing it has carried enough weight to do so. Ergo, they resort to trying underhanded tricks like forcing a budget shutdown to try and pressure people into butchering the bill.

My point that the shutdown is entirely the fault of Republicans playing chicken with the ACA stands.

[Tails82]

Democrats did the shutdown, Republicans are the ones passing things, Dems say no

[Deleted]

Oct 5, 2013 19:23:11 GMT -5 Tails82 said:

Republicans have been passing funding measures. Democrats keep saying no because they would rather do political games.

Oct 5, 2013 20:44:38 GMT -5 @zetta said:

Democrats have been protecting the right to affordable health care. Republicans keep saying no because they would rather keep us in the dark ages.

Circle, full, etc.

[Tails82]

So you're like a program that spits out the same results

[Deleted]

And you're the bad user that thinks entering the same data will get you anything different.

[Laharls_Wrath]

Just going to say this, I'm fed up with seeing the exact same posts in this topic over and over
It isn't even an argument, you're both saying the same shit repeatedly, it's insanity
come up with something new, agree to disagree, I don't give a fuck
just stop with the repetition or I'm nuking the thread
kthx

[Tails82]

You can only do so much with broken equipment. I can only do so much with a closed-minded fool who sticks to 2009 talking points and refuses to upgrade to reality.

[Deleted]

There's only so much of his constant reassurance I can skim over before it's time to prod him and hope he tries attacking something about the actual issue at hand instead of the party/people behind it.

So far it's been:

1. Claiming the Democrats are the ones to blame for the shutdown, despite all evidence pointing to the Republicans trying to pressure people into trashing the ACA.
2. Claiming you do not have a right to health care, which even if you ignore how obviously offensive that is, is blatantly untrue considering the ACA has not been repealed.
3. Claiming costs for health care rise, despite the fact that you can:
   
   1. Keep your old coverage.
   2. Get more comprehensive and cheaper federal coverage.
   3. Get exemption from needing healthcare entirely.
4. Claiming that Obama's obstruction alone is the reason the ACA has not been repealed, despite the fact that he may only veto and his veto can be overridden with enough support.
5. Claiming the ACA will not work, while providing absolutely no citations or reasoning as to why that would be.
6. Claiming that Republicans must vote against the ACA simply because they can't be seen to support anything Democratic. (in both senses of the word)
7. Repeatedly attacking either myself or others rather than the arguments presented by the same.

Not much in the way of an actual argument from him so far.