Ok, good bye. I don't care if you don't like my style. Get off the porch now.

You mean if I have no clear interest in agreeing with your false notions. You are right about that. Discussion is not agreement with your failed premises. It is not an ad hominem attack, it is disagreement. Don't try to twist it to make yourself feel better about bailing...

Compassionate conservatism?

On a more serious note, I think it was Warren Buffet, in explaining why the US system of progressive taxation is best for the country, who said (paraphrasing) that the wealthy like himself who benefited from the system that provides for the common good have a moral obligation to sustain it and support it so others have the opportunity to do the same (not to get even richer at the expense of the worker poor and middle class)

Or maybe it was Jimmy Buffet or Warren G Harding.

But in any case, I hope you stick around!

Is this where you cry or call me a racist?

You don't know jack shit about me or where I started, which was at the bottom. So stop playing your class warfare card.

I don't owe you or anyone else anything. And you are not entitled to a damm thing, other than your ability to "Pursue happiness", but it is not a Right.

Or, as I quoted quite extensively above (and which our friend TheMercenary conveniently ignored), Theodore Roosevelt (Republican).

Of course I'll stick around. Thanks! :)

HAAAAAA! Oh yea, Republickins during the time of TR were just like they are today!

What a tool. :lol:

Pssst: use the ignore list. You'll enjoy the Cellar more.:blush:

Every president and Congress since TR, both R and D, have supported progressive taxation; the only difference being the rates.

Ford introduced the Earned Income Tax Credit and that conservative icon Reagan expanded it, recognizing that squeezing more money out of those at or near the poverty level is bad public policy except in the minds of the most extremists elements on the right.

He'll have to get a LOT worse for me to hide all of his posts from view. I like knowing what arguments are being put forward by those on the other side of the political spectrum me. What I don't like is being cussed at and called names. For that reason, I won't engage him in debate because I know he's incapable of being reasonable. I might occasionally see fit to post a reply in order to debunk some crap he's posted, but beyond that, he won't get my ongoing attention, as I now know what it will devolve into.

At what point do extremists know more than the rest of us?

Jill - he will reply only when he has insults. Apparently he has a problem with "Truths that are self-evident" when truths contradict a political agenda.

There are only moderates and extremists. Latter driven by a political agenda. So he would rewrite a fundamental American document to promote what?

How dare we seek Happiness. We must be liberals.

It's quite stunning how many of these extremists know so little of our nation's laws and so little about our nation's history, yet bloviate as if not only are they (and only they) right, but that we must be stupid and unpatriotic.

Did you catch Michele Bachman's latest, wherein she attributed to Abraham Lincoln, a (paraphrased) quote actually made by John F. Kennedy?

Michele Bachman: "Will this latest generation, as Abraham Lincoln so famously said, will this latest generation hand that torch of liberty to the next generation?"

John F. Kennedy (in his 1961 Inaugural Address): "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans."

Abraham Lincoln: ". . ." Nothing remotely like that.

And the nutjobs eat this shit up! I mean, c'mon! It's not as if Kennedy's Inauguration speech isn't, you know, famous, or anything. "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." How do you get that speech mixed up with Abraham Lincoln?

By not bothering to bone up on facts, that's how. And a large portion of our population will hear her speak that quote and will forever more believe that those were the words of Abraham Lincoln, just because Michele -- "[New Hampshire] is where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington and Concord" -- Bachmann said that they were. It's stupidity run amok.

This administration has constantly found ways to simultaneously show up their critiques from both the extreme left & right. They have left one side in tentative support and the other flat-footed without a reasonable response.
It continues to remind the country that ''Hey, we're the adults in the room'' in the midst of the silliness of political rhetoric.

That's the thing. You don't have to read merc to know what foolishness he's posted. It's all the same anti-everything, name-calling, irrationational drivel.

Just when you thought it was safe...more drivel arrives on the scene.

How far down do you have to bury drivel to keep it from coming back up?

Bury it? No, you have to rocket it to the sun, thats your best chance.

Very simply put, and cutting through all the verbiage and felgercarb:

Do not increase taxation. Instead reduce the spending, including and in especial the entitlement programs. Without entitlements, we'd retire the entire national debt in five to ten years. Not too different from what we did after World War Two in retiring the war debt.

What is "irrationational?" The portmanteau does not seem quite to close. "Chauvinism" is already a word.