How's it going?

[AEA]

To keep this somewhat gun related, consider that online auction/purchase sites are trying (and in a lot of cases successful) in selling used guns for OVER the price of the same gun/model new!

So, with that, what other changes are you seeing in your own personal life?

In other words.....
How's the "Change" & "Yes We Can" working out for you?

[Pawpaw]

This pretty much sums it up...

[The Mad Moderate]

This pretty much sums it up...

That sums up Bush's Administration too. Also Obama has cut taxes.

[Excaliber]

This pretty much sums it up...

That sums up Bush's Administration too. Also Obama has cut taxes.

Those of us who can still do old style math where results are determined by performing established mathematical operations on true figures (like we have to do with our own incomes and expenses) instead of buying the lying on television are alarmed beyond words at what we're seeing from the present administration.

For me, Bush was a very mixed bag as a president. Obama is not - he's a pure disaster both fiscally and constitutionally.

He kept his promise - disaster is indeed change, and he told us where he would take us before the election, so our citizens have only themselves to blame. These 4 years are a tough lesson in the fact that elections have consequences.

I'm hoping for recovery through a much better president in 2013.

[chasfm11]

For me, personally, Fast and Furious scares the pants off me. It isn't just that an agency of the US government was directly involved in supporting the sale of US guns to Mexican drug cartels. It was that they then lost all track of those guns when the whole purpose of the program was supposedly to track those guns. Lastly, it is the lack of accountability by anyone since the fiasco was uncovered.

For me, it is exactly the same as the subprime mortgage crises. Government programs and government sponsored entities (Fannie and Freddie) caused the mess and tanked not just the US economy but the world one as well. There has never been an investigation and there are no corrections to the process. The guilty have never been identified. While I don't blame the Bush administration for it, if I did, where is the change and transparency that was supposed to result from the 2008 election? There has been a lot of bad mouthing of Wall Street because of the derivatives and the pseudo Ponzi scheme that Wall-Street created to push the problem to investors but that is the extent of consequences for taking trillions of dollars of value out of the US economy. The high road would have been to address the mortgage mess. Instead, we are further bolstering those who cannot pay their mortgages and kicking that can down the road even further.

In summary, it is not going well for me. The Fed is manipulating our currency and interest rates and I cannot even make .5% on the little money that I have. My company has shipped a whole division's worth of jobs to India and is importing Indian citizens to assume the few of those jobs that must be performed in the US. Why? Because the regulatory climate on business makes it more profitable to do things that way - and that problem started for me after 2008. I'm paying double at the pump what I was and with the pending EPA changes on electric generation, I may be trading my days a the shooting range for the extra money that I'll going to be paying to keep our house cool enough in the oppressive heat.

Wanna ask me how I really feel?

[The Annoyed Man]

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan famously asked, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" The electorate resoundingly answered, "Heck NO!" By the end of election day that year, Reagan had amassed 489 electoral college votes to Jimmie Carter's 49; and he won the popular vote 43,903,230 to 35,480,115 (50.7% to 41.0%), with independent John B. Anderson taking the remainder with 0 electoral college votes.

I believe that we are again at that point in our nation's political history. Given the current state of affairs, it is inconceivable to me that even a semi-conservative challenger wouldn't take Obama to the woodshed. Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

I think the question answers itself, and there is going to be a thorough repudiation of Obama and his policies come 2012.

[apostate]

For me, personally, Fast and Furious scares the pants off me. It isn't just that an agency of the US government was directly involved in supporting the sale of US guns to Mexican drug cartels. It was that they then lost all track of those guns when the whole purpose of the program was supposedly to track those guns. Lastly, it is the lack of accountability by anyone since the fiasco was uncovered.

For me, it is exactly the same as the subprime mortgage crises. Government programs and government sponsored entities (Fannie and Freddie) caused the mess and tanked not just the US economy but the world one as well. There has never been an investigation and there are no corrections to the process. The guilty have never been identified. While I don't blame the Bush administration for it, if I did, where is the change and transparency that was supposed to result from the 2008 election? There has been a lot of bad mouthing of Wall Street because of the derivatives and the pseudo Ponzi scheme that Wall-Street created to push the problem to investors but that is the extent of consequences for taking trillions of dollars of value out of the US economy. The high road would have been to address the mortgage mess. Instead, we are further bolstering those who cannot pay their mortgages and kicking that can down the road even further.

In summary, it is not going well for me. The Fed is manipulating our currency and interest rates and I cannot even make .5% on the little money that I have. My company has shipped a whole division's worth of jobs to India and is importing Indian citizens to assume the few of those jobs that must be performed in the US. Why? Because the regulatory climate on business makes it more profitable to do things that way - and that problem started for me after 2008. I'm paying double at the pump what I was and with the pending EPA changes on electric generation, I may be trading my days a the shooting range for the extra money that I'll going to be paying to keep our house cool enough in the oppressive heat.

Wanna ask me how I really feel?

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=6ixNPplo-SU[/youtube]

[The Mad Moderate]

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan famously asked, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" The electorate resoundingly answered, "Heck NO!" By the end of election day that year, Reagan had amassed 489 electoral college votes to Jimmie Carter's 49; and he won the popular vote 43,903,230 to 35,480,115 (50.7% to 41.0%), with independent John B. Anderson taking the remainder with 0 electoral college votes.

I believe that we are again at that point in our nation's political history. Given the current state of affairs, it is inconceivable to me that even a semi-conservative challenger wouldn't take Obama to the woodshed. Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

I think the question answers itself, and there is going to be a thorough repudiation of Obama and his policies come 2012.

I think this election is the Republican to lose as long as they don have a repeat of 1964 and Barry Goldwater I think almost any candidate stands a good chance, where I think they will shoot themselves in the foot is they are going to nominate someone like Michelle Bachmann who is a nut and unelectable on a national stage. If they were to nominate someone like Ron Paul (not Ron Paul but along his like of thinking) or Gary Johnson who doesn't make social issues the cornerstone of their campaign I think they will do well.

[Tallinthesaddle]

What do you call a liberal in California, New York, or Illinois?

an unloaded liberal !

[G26ster]

I think they will shoot themselves in the foot is they are going to nominate someone like Michelle Bachmann who is a nut.

Just because you disagree with her on social issues, that makes her a "nut?" Please list all the positions that make her a nut. Be specific. I'm all ears.

[The Mad Moderate]

I think they will shoot themselves in the foot is they are going to nominate someone like Michelle Bachmann who is a nut.

Just because you disagree with her on social issues, that makes her a "nut?" Please list all the positions that make her a nut. Be specific. I'm all ears.

I give to you quote from Michelle Bachmann from Politfact that earned a "Pants on Fire" rating

ACORN will be a paid partner with the Census Bureau and "they will be in charge of going door-to-door and collecting data from the American public."

In the 1970s, "the swine flu broke out . . . under another Democrat, President Jimmy Carter."

"One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office."

And some that have earned a "false" rating

"Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table" of abandoning the dollar for a multinational currency.

"The president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day."

"The president released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve."

And of course let's not forget a 2008 interview with Chris Matthews where she said some in congress were un-American.

She lies habitually, and does not answer question that are asked by reporters (her message control is amazing but there is a limit) and she said she did not marry her husband for love but because "god told her to". There is also the social issues saying gays need to be "cured" not to mention that crazy pledge she signed.

[stroo]

I just took a driving trip to visit relatives in Michigan. It became pretty obvious to me where all the stimulus dollars went. Every highway we were on in a Democrat state or Democrat portion of a state had road construction going on. There was almost no road construction going on in Republican states or Republican portions of Democrat states. And Illinois had by far the most road construction. We tried to plan to avoid road construction and every highway in Illinois had construction going on.

So on the return trip we stuck to Republican states, other than going through a little portion of Illinois and were not delayed by any road construction.

[G26ster]

I think they will shoot themselves in the foot is they are going to nominate someone like Michelle Bachmann who is a nut.

Just because you disagree with her on social issues, that makes her a "nut?" Please list all the positions that make her a nut. Be specific. I'm all ears.

I give to you quote from Michelle Bachmann from Politfact that earned a "Pants on Fire" rating

ACORN will be a paid partner with the Census Bureau and "they will be in charge of going door-to-door and collecting data from the American public."

In the 1970s, "the swine flu broke out . . . under another Democrat, President Jimmy Carter."

"One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office."

And some that have earned a "false" rating

"Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table" of abandoning the dollar for a multinational currency.

"The president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day."

"The president released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve."

And of course let's not forget a 2008 interview with Chris Matthews where she said some in congress were un-American.

She lies habitually, and does not answer question that are asked by reporters (her message control is amazing but there is a limit) and she said she did not marry her husband for love but because "god told her to". There is also the social issues saying gays need to be "cured" not to mention that crazy pledge she signed.

So, Politifacts, which has come under fire by some as biased, has rated her statements. Here's another look at Politifacts.

" PolitiFact assigns “Pants on Fire” or “False” ratings to 39 percent of Republican statements compared to just 12percent of Democrats since January 2010 …

But although PolitiFact provides a blueprint as to how statements are rated, it does not detail how statements are selected.

For while there is no doubt members of both political parties make numerous factual as well as inaccurate statements – and everything in between – there remains a fundamental question of which statements (by which politicians) are targeted for analysis in the first place.

A Smart Politics content analysis of more than 500 PolitiFact stories from January 2010 through January 2011 finds that current and former Republican officeholders have been assigned substantially harsher grades by the news organization than their Democratic counterparts.

In total, 74 of the 98 statements by political figures judged “false” or “pants on fire” over the last 13 months were given to Republicans, or 76 percent, compared to just 22 statements for Democrats (22 percent).


So, being a "politician" makes her a "nut." We all know that the current and past administrations never make/made false or misleading statements. Politicians never make comments that are later proved to be false, only her. Having a view of social issues different than yours does not qualify someone as a "nut." And, as for members of congress that are "un-American," that depends on what you believe this country was founded on, and where it is being taken. As for the "God told me to" comment. I'm not a religious person, but if someone believes they are guided by God, that's fine with me. Our founders were.

[G26ster]

I just took a driving trip to visit relatives in Michigan. It became pretty obvious to me where all the stimulus dollars went. Every highway we were on in a Democrat state or Democrat portion of a state had road construction going on. There was almost no road construction going on in Republican states or Republican portions of Democrat states. And Illinois had by far the most road construction. We tried to plan to avoid road construction and every highway in Illinois had construction going on.

So on the return trip we stuck to Republican states, other than going through a little portion of Illinois and were not delayed by any road construction.

Being from the DFW area, did you miss all the road construction here? I can barely get around the mid-cities highways (183, 820), and forget the mess in Grapevine (114, 121). Didn't know I lived in a blue state Here's the question of the day: Name the year that there was no construction on any portion of I-45. Answer - Never!

[SewTexas]

soooo, Politifact (which I've never heard of btw) is aiming to grow up and become HuffPo? yay, that's what we need! I guess they aren't happy because HuffPo has started posting a few main street articles? only a few but apparently they are there that's what I hear, I don't go there, they scared me off long ago.

I'm not sure about Bachman, I haven't made a final determination about her I was kinda excited about her at first, but I'm learning more about her and either what I'm hearing is wrong or she's made a bunch of naive mistakes or misteps or something...I'm just not sure what's going to end up happening. Honestly, I'm hoping Perry gets in. I think he has the best chance and would be the strongest, but he needs to do it soon.