JerrySeinfeld

Fine - I'll drop the gun registry if you'll drop the 20 highest paid CEOs in the countr, which as well isn't a good representation of the efficiency of capitalism, since it represents a fraction of a percenage of the revenues / jobs of capitlist america. But at least when CEOs of corporations f*ck up and companies die, they don't go on and on ad infinitum. Enron and Worldcom are dead. Name me one government program that hasn't only lived on and on and on since it's creation, but in fac has grown throughout it's existence, constantly sucking more private citizens' dollars out of their own pockets. Corporations don't confiscate your money. If you don't fell like giving it to them, you don't buy their product. Government, on the other hand, confiscates your money, then creates these wasteful programs.

If you ad up the TOP 20 CEOs' COMPENSATION (including stock options) in all of the United states it adds up to just over $1 billion. Now think of the jobs, and in some cases, entire CITIES these companies create. Now take that $1 billion. It makes up the only HALF the cost of one teensy tiny government program - the gun registry in CANADA, which happens to be ten times smaller than the united states. I think this makes the point loud and clear about the wastefulness of bloated government programs when stacked up against private enterprise corporations. When Obama is done, we'll be taxing those efficient corporations and creating super-mega-sized versions of the gun registry for everything from education to STD transmission to the preservation of the arctic krill. Look out america: you're about to get a super sized version of Pierre Trudeau stuffed right into your bum - all on the tab of your grandchilderen. OUCH!

What do you mean by "better"? War, when fought against thugs who don't play by the rules, isn't about moral superiority. It's about winning.

I certainly agree with the waterboarding of Terrorists (the topic of this thread). But where's your cite of where I called for the annhilation of Arabs? oh gosh I forgot. for the left, it's not about debate. It's about running out of logical arguments and quickly turning to calling people racists and bigots at every chance. Good one.

I take issue with this point. There are a very select group of individuals on this planet who can run a major corporation with all that it entails (and trust me, if you think they're all hanging around playing golf and drinking scotch all day, then you've obviously never met one of these people). Granted some of them have either 1. made incorrect decisions or 2. done poorly by the shareholders or 3. even worse - stolen or lied. But this is BY FAR the exception, not the rule. Most CEOs are some of the most incredible people you'll ever meet. They handle more in a day than most people do in a year. Plus, CEOs earn what the market will bear. There is nothing wrong with earning what the market is willing to pay. Perhaps some unions should learn more about that concept while they're trying to run GM and Chrysler into the ground with crippling labour costs. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not the millions the CEO of GM or Chrysler gets in stock that's crippling the company; it's the BILLIONS in pension liabilities to unions, exhorbanent wages being peid to uneducated screwdriver-wielders, health care costs of unions, benefits of unions etc. etc. If the CEO agreed to take zero dollars as compensation for the ACTUAL WORK that he does, it still wouldn't save those companies from Chapter 11 being forced on them by greedy autowotrkers who think they deserv $80K a year to snap a brake light into place.

Moral authority? Give me a break. We're talking about an enemy that hides behind women and childeren and that doesn't present itself wearing a uniform ready to fight fair. So don't talk to me about "moral authority" when we're fighting with one hand tied behind our back in the mid-east while our "citizens" (and I use the term loosely) back home protest how we fight. The geneva conventions were established during a time when enemies fought eachother and agreed upon a set of "rules of war". Since our enemy chooses to "fight" by hiding in schools and hospitals, chop people's heads off for snuff films and intentionally blow up civilian targets, I would say that from a moral standpoint, the geneva conventions are no longer worth the paper upon which they're written. The geneva conventions and torture guidlines are meant to be applied to enemy "soldiers" who fight as a unit, wear uniforms and have a country to which they are loyal. These f*ckers have only one loyalty: allah. And they don't fight by the rules. Therefore, in my mind they are exempt from said rules. Drown 'em.

First of all, people only spend money if they have money, and hey only have money if they have jobs - which they get by working for people who invest capital and create businesses. Second, the economy in the US never "collapsed" as the alrmists would say. It went into recession and conracted about 5% because of an overheated US housing market, not because free born citizens were allowed to keep more of their own money. The growth of the US economy over the century has come from free born citizens keeping and investing their hard earned capital. If you're going to argue that confiscating 90% of people's income would have done a better job of growing the economy over the past century, then you're not worth talking to. Move to cuba - where I'm sure you'll be glad to see your system operating while driving cars that were made in the 1950's.

No I wouldn't because 1. By and large, excess capital held by the rich is used to invest - which creates employment and stimulates the economy and 2. There has never...EVER been evidence provided that says the government knows how to handle money better than private citizens. In fact, the evidence is largely to the contrary - namely that governments create wasteful, bloated bureaucracies of little of no value - unlike the private sector.

Real world example: Precision drilling. It is an oil drilling company based in Alberta with approximately 7,500 employees working for it. In the late 1980's the Alberta oil patch experienced a massive recession, partly because of a drop in oil prices, but extended for many years because the western Canacidna sedimentary basin was becomeing depleted by world standards (ie. the Major oil producers left town for greener, more profitable pastures in the British North Sea, Sudan, and other places). To encourage new drilling activity (an hence, jobs) the government implemented a tax credit scheme called the Exploration Tax Credit designed to provide investors with a tax incentive to invest in junior oil companies drilling for oil in Canada. As a result, many new investment funds were created which provided for two results: 1. A 100% tax write down for investors in oil and gas tax flow through shares 2. Investment dollars for oil companies driling for oil in Canada. When oil companies drill for oil they wouldn't otherwise have drilled for, because a favorable tax regime (ie. a big tax cut), they need to hire a drilling contractor to punch the hole in the ground. Enter Precision drilling, which employs 7,500 Canadian citizens and pays them handsomely, I would add. WIthout the CEE exploration tax deduction, many (and arguably MOST) of the drilling projects wouldn't have commenced and these people wouldn't have jobs. Now certainly in the age of $150 oil which we saw briefly last year, some of these projects would still have been economically feasible. But there is no question of denying that the exploration tax credit has provided for LOTS of jobs in mining and oil& gas throughout the past couple of decades. And if you want, you could ad Trinidad Drilling, Noble Drilling, Akita Drilling, Beaver Drilling, NABORS DRILLING and many others and their employees to the list of beneficiaries from lower taxes. Would you like another real world example? Would be happy to provide as many as you'd like.

So did Bush plan the London tube bombings, too? How about the Madrid train attacks? What about the Bali nightclub bombing? Or the fatwa (price on the head) of Salman Rushdie? Or how about the attacks on the USS Cole? Or what about the nun who was shot in the back in Somalia as reaction to Danish cartoons? Or the "protests" in Manchester demending "Death to the Jews"? Ya. I'm sure Bush was behind alll of it and global Islamofascism is a figment of our imagination, conjured up by Dick Cheney and Rummy over a bottle of scotch and a couple of cigars. hahahaha. I love lefties. Or I would, if they didn't run our universities, media outlets and, now, the US government. Scary.

Business doesn't run off goodness of hearts. It runs off of tries to get bigger and more profitable. The Gates point is just one of millions of examples of small businessmen who invested their excess capital to become bigger and more profitable - not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they wanted to become bigger and more profitable. When companies get more profitable, they get bigger and grow, which means more jobs. Taking more debt onto your company's balance sheet is only one of many ways to expand a business my naive little friend. If the cost of capital is too high (as it is right now) or credit markets are unwilling to lend to overleveraged companies that are struggling to survive, then a tax increase is a VERY bad idea, and the best way to get that company hiring and expaning is to leave more money in their pockets. Private, efficient, profitable entities that invest their excess capital are the best place to allocate money. Taking it away (ie. increasing their taxes) then using the confiscated money to create a black hole government buraeucracy which will suck tax dollars out of the dynamic portions of the economy (Obama's plan) is a complete waste. Why don't you take a look out the window of your mother's basement long enough to look around and see all the businesses where people are working right now. How do you think they ended up with jobs? Did Obama give them a job? DId Jack layton hire them? No. A businessman did. Out of the "goodness of his heart"? Absolutely not. Because he wanted to make more profits? yes. That's where jobs come from: greedy business owners.

Wow. this is actually a very revealing (and actually a bit unbelievable) view of the world and I can tell you from my experience of working with small business owners for a living that it is complete and utter bullshit. Business owners, unlike burauetcrats, welfare moms and unionized pencil pushers (to name a few), understand that to become more successful, you don't take government cheques and put them under your mattress. They invest. If you own a parts manufacturer in, say Missouri and have a sales force of five people that covers the state, and have always wanted to expand to Kansas, a tax cut could allow you to add one or two additional salespeople in Kansas might work for you (depending of course upon your capital structure, current debt load, financing rates, equity position, current cashflow and many other factors). Of couse, adding a salesforce in Kansas increases order flow, which in turn increases production demands, which requires additional personel which means more jobs for people on the production floor. And of course, more profit for the business owner. If this principle didn't exist, neither would Microsoft or Apple (nor would any large company that exists today), both of which were started in someone's garage. In your dreamworld, Gates would have just taken the tax cut for small business and put it under his mattress and we'd all still be working on the commodore 64. Your perception of the world is uncanny. It's actually scary that people believe the world works the way you think it does.

The largest employer in the US is by far small business. You're probably taking the example of, say, an article about Nike in indonesia you read in some left wing rag and extrapolating if over vast swaths of the economy you know nothing about. It doesn't have to "kill" small business. But if you bump up the taxes on an already suffering small plastics manufacturer in suburban Detriot, the owner's gotta cut a few jobs to stay afloat (so that the rest of the people who work there will still have somewhere to go in the morning). Now multiply that 2-3 jobs across the already suffering small business sector across america's 4 million small businesses and all of a sudden you're talking about 8-12 million unemployed. Of course if you have more left wing simplified view of the world, then the "richest two percent" aren't the reality of economic drivers and job creators I have just described, but rather just a bunch of scrooge mcducks ploughing their gold coins back and forth with a tractor behind the walls of their estate. The sad part is, that fantastic view of the world is held by far too many and will end up destroying what is great about America to begin with.

Huh? The richest 2% are the ones who invest capital and create manufacturing jobs. Obama's tax increases directly penalize small business owners who earn over $250,000 per year, which in turn discourages investment and the commensurate jobs it creates. And instead what we get in place is a huge increase in government spending (an unprecedented $12 TRILLION - with a "T"), and it's commensurate bloated buraeucracies and their useless unproductive inefficient employees. Great. Annex the economy as a government program, crowd out efficient private allocation of capital and turn the USA (the world's greatest economic engine) into Scotland, where 75% of the GDP is government spending and suckling government teet is a national pastime. Meantime we'll apologize to theocratic holocaust deniers and shake hands with communist dictators. YAY Obama!

Some of Ahmedinjad's thoughts from the past: And this is the kind of guy Obama wants to have coffee with. Well, at the very least this kind of recent speech is giving even less credence to Obama's campaign pledge that, hey if we could only all sing "cumbaya" together, everything will be ok.

Yea Khadr's a real prince. I say have at 'em. If our nations can be made safe from suicidal death-cult thugs by scaring the bejeezus out of said thugs, then by all means waterboard. Of course, maybe it shouldn't be "official" documented business, but rather something that just kind of, well, happens when no one is looking. The waterboarding is particularly good, however, because dude thinks he's soon gonna die and get his 76 virgins, but of course it never actually happens for him and he keeps drinkin' the "koolaid" so to speak. hahahaa.

What the hell are you smoking? 10,000 new yorkers pay for over 70% of that city's budget. The richest 2 percent of the US pays for virtually the entire federal budget.

So apparently Ahmedinijad shows up to give a speech at a UN conference and it turns into a massive anti-Israel rant. Meanwhile, a female Iranian-American journalist is held in an Iranian jail for "espionage". And Obama wants to drop by for tea? My prediction is that these kinds of things will keep happening as Iran becomes ever closer to it's nuke, and that Iran will actually become even more emboldened with it's fast approaching nuclear status and Obama's new approach to "diplomacy" which seems entirely based around "jedi-mind tricking" bad guys into being good guys. "Talks" - a famous european term used to describe doing nothing while a rogue nation developes nukes. "Talks" - a famous persian term used to describe what you do to distract and keep busy the Europeans - and now the Americans - while you pursue nukes. Today's events seem to be early indications that, despite the Obamatrons' assertions that "hey, if we're just nice to everyone, everything will be ok", in fact it's a nasty world out there and perhaps the strategy is Naive at best and dangerous at worst. Hey Obama, you can sit in the Oval office and listen to "Imagine" all you want. But he reality clearly isn't changing on the ground. If I'm Israel right now listening to your "hey let's all disarm" John Lennon schtick while Iran develops nukes and their President hurls angry venomous comments about my very existence at every opportunity, or while North Korea tests rockets/missiles, I'm worried for my life. One famous President used to say "walk softly and carry a big stick" Apparently Obama's mantra is "walk softly and carry no stick" The early signs are that this strategy may not be panning out as the college kids had expected. "Imagine" eh? Keep on listening, kids. It ain't helpin'.

Excuse me? What vid were YOU watching? She asked him a question and then when he tried to answer it, she interrupted him and shouted HIM down. She refused to let him answer the question.

I think it's funny that the vast majority of the "news" sources out there report the news with a slant to the left, with some "sort of" attempting objectivity but still the left wing bias of the reporter finds it way through somehow (CNN for example), and other much more blatant and unapologetic such as the CBC (which recently had the gall to air a full report on why the pirates are justified in their actions) or the New York Times (which doesn't even pretend to be objective). And then one - just one - major network comes along that, for a change, slant's it's reporting to the right and the socialists can't stand it. I mean, GIVE US BREAK. The entire news / media complex is pushing YOUR agenda and you want to shut up any alternative viewpoints? Sheesh. Talk about tyranny of the left. FIGHT THE POWER! FOX YOU ROCK!

What's wrong with people gathering publicly to protest confiscatory taxation, unprecedented government annexing of the economy and over 6 trillion dollars (more than 6 times the amount spent on a 6 year war) spent in just under 3 months? Free born citizens who value individual liberty and self-reliance over government largess are angry, and rightfully so. That reporter Susan Roesgen is so mired in her belief that the only way to live is by sucking government teet that she can't even fathom why someone wouldn't want a $400 "credit" from Obama. That's how far gone most people are - she could easil have come straight from Canada.

Yea. And there're also reams of Jewish Orthodox people rioting in the streets about cartoons. Good comparison.

Since the US has won in Iraq, I'm not sure the point of this thread.

That's pretty accurate Bach - if a little shocking... I actually saw an environmentalist in England stating that she's not having childeren because humans ae the scourge of the earth. I guess that's Left wing thinking coming full circle: I suck, so I shouldn't be alive. Nice.

Totally. But remember, the chick they're gonna behead was in town to make a film empathizing with these thugs.