Bloodless Coup

Two thoughts:

I'm now starting to wonder if it's like the dog who chased cars forever and finally caught one -- the work of getting the job will pale next to the work needed to do it right now. I'm sure that dawned on everyone who matters on his staff weeks ago, but today is the day of confronting that reality.

If he retreats into his well-documented cautious-careful self now, and he very well might, he will not succeed in the way we'd all like. I think I'm kind of trusting Michelle to kick his ass. She is (and they are) so awesome.

Sorry your guy Hawkins lost for commissioner Baltar. That was a very close race.

So it looks like this Rahm for Chief of Staff thing may very well be real. I find that a strange choice.

And this morning the fights for leadership in the next Congress are coming into the open - including, apparently, a big one for House Democrats. From Politico: "House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry A. Waxman is calling senior Democrats to seek the top spot on Energy and Commerce, according to Democrats on and off Capitol Hill. This puts the Californian in a direct conflict with Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (Mich.), the dean of the House and a long-time Waxman rival, for the top spot of one of the most powerful committees in Congress."

I want to see the possible Harry Reid/ Joe Leiberman throwdown. Seriously, Joey L. needs to be punished.

On a much different note... what on earth was Michelle wearing last night?? If it was all red or all black, it would have looked nice. The combo of the two colors? Hmm. And sigh, more Momma Biden. Love it!

Its a remarkable and I'm not letting it spoil my mood, but at the end of the day, I'll have a bitter taste in my mouth over Prop 8.

Yeah! Found at Joe My God.

And of course, this.

Wow. So Obama's got someone as articulate as George W. Bush for Vice President, and someone who uses the f- word more than Cheney for Chief of Staff, an ex-Fannie Mae director to boot. The hits just keep on coming. Hope. It's real. At least until Obama's civilian national security force comes knocking on my door.

Just to pre-empt Morris and Drudge here... we're all clear that the market's reaction to Obama was positive (hence the big rally right before and on Election Day) and that this selloff is just everyone coming back to (grim) reality and NOT a global financial referendum on a development that has been priced in for weeks, right?

Morris, it'll be fun to have you in opposition here. Just try to get your facts and invective from somewhere decent this time around, okay? The Free Republic and World Net Daily don't pass the snicker test. Thanks!

Jacflash, I'm prepared for four years of "There's only so much Obama can do," and that it starts the very day after he gets elected says more than you realize. According to Bloomberg, this is the biggest post election drop in history. And according to your NPR, the certainty of knowing who is going to be President should have given the markets an upward nudge, not a 5% decline. I know the big O is actually licking his lips, because the more the market declines before he gets elected, the more he and his Democrat cronies get to take off the top of people's investments when they rebound.

But your lovelies at MSNBC never bothered to explain the consequences of a capital gains tax hike in the wake of a market sell off any more than they bothered to ask Obama why he needs a civilian military in addition to a foreign military, federal law enforcement, national guard, and local police/sheriffs, nor did they ask him how such an idea doesn't violate , something with which you'd think a professor of law would know, nor did they ask him what he would use his own private army for. But Bush is the one who can't be trusted because he wants to listen in on terrorists' phone calls.

Let me know if having Obama on video passes the snicker test any more than having Barney Frank and fellow House Democrats on video protecting Fannie Mae from regulations they called a "political lynching" "trying to fix something that isn't broke," an agency under the "outstanding leadership of [Obama advisor] Mr. Frank Reins." But it's talk radio that needs regulating, that's the priority.

Mo - 1) The markets expected Obama to win - so is he also responsible for all those days it went up in the weeks prior to the election? And 2) pile on as you will, but it might be good to keep in mind that he's not president for another 2 and a half months. So yes, what he can do between now and then will be limited.

NPR's not mine, Morris. And if it were mine, speaking as someone who gets paid to opine on the markets, I'd fire whoever it is who said that acute market moves AFTER widely-anticipated events express the market's sentiments on those events. That's just laughable to anyone who's spent any time making a living with stocks. The market's dropping because the global economy is trashed, and as Q3 earnings come in this week the extent of the trashing is becoming more clear.

Meanwhile, please post links providing objective support for your assertion that Obama intends to raise a "civilian army" or "his own private army".

Jacflash,
"Meanwhile, please post links providing objective support for your assertion that Obama intends to raise a "civilian army" or "his own private army"."

So, it's not enough that he comes out and says in the Youtube link that he's going to create a civilian army, you need NYT to run a cover story before you believe it? I think they're busy worrying about what will be the first dog, but I'm sure they'll get to actually researching Obama's political beliefs eventually.

My brother makes an interesting point about the whether the markets have been sliding all along because of coming taxes to stifle the very businesses which create jobs. I don't think we can rule that out, but the banking mess is in it too. Any other business that had bundled together batches of questionable loans would be busy unbundling them right now, but it seems that "too big to fail" is Washington's way of saying they don't have to. This is a mess, and until we allow some to fail, there's really no reason for them to get busy.

I do think it's telling that the media's been telling us for years we're heading into a recession or depression, but the media blitz only came a couple months before the election. And do you expect people to go out and spend money when they're hearing from Obama and the media that we should expect a great depression? Even $4 gas didn't hurt the economy this bad, and this sudden turndown is a foreseeable consequence of using fear which (unlike loneliness) stifles economic activity. The media is the message.

Armand,
I know he was only elected Tuesday and hasn't taken office, but that didn't stop the Russians from announcing their move of short range missiles next to Poland immediately after he won. Biden the pontificator was right about the world perceiving Obama as untested and testing him sooner rather than later. Given Obama's reticence to respond to whether he was given pause by what he heard in intelligence briefings, I would guess there's more than that going on. And Obama may have to use force as soon as he takes office to back off our enemies abroad.

But that still doesn't answer why he wants to create an unconstitutional civilian army larger than our military. I know you're going to call Godwin's law, but didn't we see this with the brownshirts?

Maybe that Russia move is a response to Bush's weakness (as long as we are throwing about theories)? And why do you think McCain wouldn't be "tested" too? If the idea is that another country is going to slap at a new leader to see what s/he does, why are they unlikely to slap McCain? Though, again, thinking that this is some sort of "test" is off here because if Russia really wanted to learn what Obama would do they'd wait until he could actually respond - which he can't do for another 2 months and 12 days.

Um... the reference in the video is about restoring funding for cops and fire departments and EMTs and whatnot, Morris, not a "private army". It's all spelled out in his platform.

I reiterate my request to you to provide objective support for your "private army" assertions. Or do you seriously think that his remark in that video was some sort of huge gaffe about some sort of huge secret plan that NOBODY but a few low-credibility high-excitability farright bloggers caught on to?

We can rule out the idea that the GLOBAL market slide has anything to do with the nuances of what might or might not be future US tax policy. We can rule that out quite quickly and quite conclusively, I assure you.

"According to Bloomberg, this is the biggest post election drop in history." And according to the New York Times, October was the most volatile month, as a function of daily moves of greater than 4%, than any month in history, including during the Great Depression. If I remember correctly, there were eleven such days, in October's 20+ trading days. That's a lot. That the market may have the temerity to continue to be terribly volatile, perhaps even as bad in November than it was in October, is something even a lay person such as myself can recognize is something that was likely to happen regardless of who won the election. The fact remains, this week brought terrible news across the board, objective news regarding past and current performance across many many indicators of fiscal health or the lack thereof, all of which can be as readily traced to a quarter century of make-the-rich-richer-and-it-will-lift-all-boats madness, the most irrational of which has occurred in the past eight years, as it can be to the election of Obama. The bottom line is trickle down economics fails when it's time for the rich to let it trickle down: turns out they use their money and influence to plug every seam through which the trickle might occur, because, well, every trickle means they have a little less of their wealth, and it turns out people are pretty bitchy about parting with their money for any reason whatsoever, including the long-term fiscal health of their nation. Note, for example, how opposed the middle-class is to permitting their less careful neighbors to benefit from a bailout, even though sucking up some handouts along these lines would result in stabilized and ultimately elevated property values for everyone. Better to punish their neighbors than to help themselves. Good stuff.

Anyway, I'll stop here and echo the sentiments that precede this regarding enjoying you being not only marginal in your use of "evidence" and your espousal of the most repugnant aspects of Bush liberalism-used-to-nefarious-means governance, which has rendered all Republicans who pretend to support him and pretend to be conservative intellectually bankrupt; but also marginal insofar as you now speak for an almost certainly moribund wing of the Party-Formerly-Rumored-to-Be-Conservative. Like Jac said, it doesn't take the New York Times, but TheNazisAreComing.com is not a viable source, and you rely on far too many of the latter, and virtually nothing, on the right or left, that warrants comparison to the New York Times.

Oh, and regarding the civilian national security force, Obama doesn't quite have the heft to do away with Posse Comitatus, so, while I'm surely as disturbed by the thought of Brownshirts as you, in real life I'm less than worried because I know that Obama's civilian corps won't be nearly as scary or as damaging to American freedoms as twenty people at the top of the Bush administration pissing their names across the Bill of Rights has been for the past eight years. Watch the cascade of ineffective and contemptuous-of-American-freedoms executive orders come crashing down in the first few weeks of the administration, and then tell me again how conservative Bush was, and how liberal Obama is. Obame loves the constitution and our freedoms more than anyone at the top of the GOP associated with Bush can even pretend to, and the proof of that will be in the pudding, you watch. Obama will make time for that even though his first two years, at least, will mostly be spent making all the hard-knock choices that Bush and Co. lacked the class and the courage to enact during their tenures, preferring to sweep all of the ugly consequences of their mis- and malfeasance under the Oval Office carpet for the next occupant to clean up.

"Note, for example, how opposed the middle-class is to permitting their less careful neighbors to benefit from a bailout, even though sucking up some handouts along these lines would result in stabilized and ultimately elevated property values for everyone."

So, you agree that people shouldn't have to be careful in their finances, and people who aren't careful should be judged as just as worthy of a credit risk based loan as people who are careful? No income, no job, no assets, no problem? Are you bucking for a director's position at Fannie Mae?

"The bottom line is trickle down economics fails when it's time for the rich to let it trickle down"

I wonder to what you'd credit the success of our economy over the last thirty years. The poor should be getting poorer because we've cut down (even Clinton) social welfare programs, but I can't walk downtown without seeing a "homeless" person with a cell phone on his way to the new hundred bed shelter facility at which he'll get a free meal, or on their way to the bus stop so they can go to another city with a shelter facility after they've worn out their welcome here. I actually ask myself if I'm not crazy for, you know, working and stuff.

If you want to see real poverty, you don't go to the ninth ward where everybody's got a tv, where residents tear the pipes out of public housing to sell, you go to other countries where people are actually, you know, thin and stuff. But just because residents of the ninth ward aren't as careful, we shouldn't "punish them" by letting the rich "make them" live in a facility without pipes to provide clean water which they can (because of their hopeless situation) tear out of their building and sell to buy things like the rich have, a product of the rich who are "making them" be consumers and the victims of an evil capitalist society.

Again, it's not true economic liberalism with which I have a problem, it is the nefarious hijackers of the economic liberal movement who do not believe in equality of opportunity but instead are consumed with disparity of effect, the necessary negation of individual circumstance based on individual wants and needs in favor of as much and as good which always ends up putting more power in the hands of government apparatchiks.

And I love how you attempt to disparage all conservatives as intellectually bankrupt then resort to illustrating Bush cronies pissing on the Bill of Rights, that's another classic mooninite moment. I'm sure Obama loves American freedoms, that's why he thinks that individual cities can determine things like, whether or not individual liberties like the 2nd ammendment apply, just as he said about Washington DC's gun ban. That's why his lengthy agenda calling for compulsory service, etc., has been "changed" into a single paragraph on his change.gov website.

And what are these hard choices you describe Obama having to make in his first two years? I thought he already had a detailed plan on how to tackle the economy. That's what he said. But now suddenly he has to put a team together, to pay back special interest groups.

And apparently he does love freedom of the press, because just a couple days after his secret briefing on intelligence we find out Bush has an executive order saying we can go after AQ anywhere, any time. He must love his press, because they're sure more concerned about where his kids are going to school than what he's actually going to do in office. As they said last week, "there's a lot about Barack Obama we don't know." I wonder whose job they think it is to find out.

Your comments on the homeless -- all of them, including the disgusting implied claim that no one starves in this country -- are so ignorant as to defy description, and surely require no response that isn't scrawled in crayon. Your contempt for your fellow man is pathetic, and makes me realize how little I care to feign any interest in persuading you of anything, at least today. Tilt at whatever windmills you want, Morris. I refuse to care.

So Mo, do you moonlight writing blather for Bill O and Dobbs? That is, when you are not pondering how great it is to be poor and wondering if that should be the life for you?

I'm sorry that you find a focus on "disparity of effect" to be so off-putting or unseemly. Some of us are worried about the situation of others (and in turn, our community and society).

As to your last paragraph - wtf? Are you saying (with no evidence whatsoever) that President-elect Obama is leaking classified information? And, secondly, errr, what's your point? As you are no doubt aware, we don't think much of the national press either.

"I'm sorry that you find a focus on 'disparity of effect' to be so off-putting or unseemly. Some of us are worried about the situation of others (and in turn, our community and society)."

Disparity of effect is the reason the Clinton Justice Department sued banks who did not provide loans to people with no income, no job, and no assets, forcing them to make these loans that caused our economic crisis. And honestly, do you not see a great coincidence in the timing of this leak. Don't worry, I'm sure Harry Reid and Miss America have nothing more on their minds than finding out if a newly elected Democratic President should be impeached.

Moon,
The homeless people I meet know how to get fed, just like the poor people I meet know how to get money to pay their bills. There are plenty of churches perfectly willing to open their pantries and their collection plates to a new face in town. There's disability and Medicaid for people who can't work for a host of physical and mental reasons, WIC for people who can't work for other reasons, and there's emergency health care for everyone to boot. What a horribly selfish country these Republicans have created!

Ah, yes, the Lord will provide, just not in my backyard, or with my money.

Starvation in America isn't just about homeless people, Morris, and is about inadequate nutrition and access thereto as much as it is about the absence of nutrition. It's about raising children on sub-poverty wages (i.e., in most places, anything less than the $10/hr that you won't find any Republican amounts to anything but a confiscatory, market-ruining minimum wage). And if the churches will provide, Morris, does that mean we can kill school breakfasts? Lunches? After all, doesn't this just teach our poor children dependency?

Anyway, I know better than to expect you to acknowledge complexity where it spoils your reliance on the cliches and stereotypes that give a patina of legitimacy to your simplistic, formulaic "solutions."

First, let me "ditto" Moon. Your lack of concern for your fellow man is creepy.

Second, the Republicans created all these programs for the poor and infirmed? Who knew!

Third, your tin-foil hat assertion about that New York Times story remains thoroughly baseless.

Fourth, Pelosi and Reid are protecting Obama from impeachment? It is to laugh. First, he's not president. And second, they've strongly opposed impeachment and similar measures being brought up against current Republican office holders. If they are protecting anyone, it's the current administration.

Regarding your ignorant ideas about American starvation, Morris, read it and weep. And by weep, I mean make some shit up about Bill Clinton and turn this into a referendum on how his right of center Welfare reform was actually an attempt to murder the 50 most prominent Republican operators, all of whom turned up in the submerged shell of a long-missing Russian missile sub that was actually en route to Cuba during the Bay of Pigs . . . or, you know, something Morrisian.

A propos starvation and facile cliches, this is the real stuff. If you want to keep lord knows how many people hungry to punish a few freeloaders who's lives, even freeloading, are pretty much punishment enough, have fun. But I honestly don't know how you sleep at night.

Wow, Moon, you sound like Pelosi! But wait, the 2006 Congress was according to her the Congress for the children. And you're telling me than 50% more children were starving after the Congress for the children took over? Are you telling me that policies aimed to punish Big Oil for existing raised the price of corn that now had to be used for ethanol? Are you telling me that minimum wage hikes raised the price of food that now has to be picked by people making a third more than they did two years ago? Wait, you're saying the greedy Big Farm didn't eat the cost as their own moral punishment, and they passed their cost along to consumers? Well, it's a good thing they won't do that when Obama raises their taxes.

Look at the first question off the survey:
"1. “We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to
buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12
months?

Now, if I'm about 12 years old, and my family takes me to McDonald's every week, and every few weeks I ask my parents for more money to go back and get a milkshake after I've finished my supersized, and my parents say, "Sorry, son, don't have enough money with me," I truthfully answer yes to this question. Now my parents could be smoking crack with their extra money, gambling it away, or saving it for a six pack and a pack of smokes, or they could just not want me to develop obsesity but this instrument reads that response as a measure of starvation.

And, again, if you'd actually read the report and not just the media's shoddy reporting, it lists programs dealing with actual starvation that already exist: $33 billion on The Food Stamp Program, 31 million free or reduced price lunches served every day by schools, and 8.3 million children served by WIC, as well as 340 million pounds of food supplied by the USDA to local food pantries, which was only 14 percent of the food supplied by them. Food pantries provide 239 million pounds of food each month, and households which use them receive almost forty pounds of food per visit. Soup kitchens serve an average of 474,000 meals per day.

And the sweetest part is, if a family actually used a food pantry or soup kitchen, that increases their level of "food insecurity." How does actually getting a meal increase their level of "food insecurity"? We like to think we're so different from Somali warlords, but the fact is Democrats play politics with starvation just like those warlords did, they benefit off favors and votes by promising more than is necessary.

If you go to emedicine.net, you would see that "Fewer than 1% of all children in the United States have chronic malnutrition." Even for those living in shelters, the incidence of any malnutrition is less than 10%. This is compared to rates of 17% malnutrition in the general population of developing countries, and 50% of chidren's deaths in these countries worldwide. It is only more disgusting Democratic BS from BO and your media that tells you starvation is a big problem here.

So malnutrition is fine, unless it's chronic; the survey is inaccurate because it asked a question that, if asked of the imaginary poor person cliche you have in your head might have returned what you imagine would be a false positive; I sound like Pelosi(!!!); that the 2006 Congress failed to fix a chronic national problem is proof that the Dems are horrible on starvation; and hey, we're better than Rwanda!

Does that pretty much cover it?

You painted a racist, classist, and offensive cliche of what starvation in America looks like. I pointed out to you that, by the numbers, your cliche, if it captures any real people in America, still says very little about the sorts of people who go hungry here.

I wanted to clarify my point about starvation in America, and I did that. You still want to convince me that I should buy into some bullshit covert social Darwinist agenda. I'm not interested; save your breath.

"So malnutrition is fine, unless it's chronic;"

Maybe you didn't cover reading comprehension on your LSAT. I said that even among children living in shelters, malnutrition is only 10%. According to Wiki's article on homelessness, no more than one in one thousand American children stayed in a homeless shelter in the last year. Even among that group, only 10% suffered any malnutrition whatsoever, so we're talking about one in ten thousand children.

Considering the prevalence rates of let's say, schizophrenia, there are 72 schizophrenics for every 10,000 people. That means that the children of roughly 71 in 72 schizophrenics (assuming equal distribution of children among them which wouldn't be a stretch because of its typically late onset) somehow connect with enough food to avoid malnutrion. Of course, there are many people with other debilitating mental and physical conditions out of every 10,000 people to add to that number of 72, which means that America does an astoundingly good job of feeding its children, about 1,700 times better than developing countries. Malnutrition is much more rare than politicians who manipulate tragedy.

"the survey is inaccurate because it asked a question that, if asked of the imaginary poor person cliche you have in your head might have returned what you imagine would be a false positive;"

No, not an imaginary poor persons, actual children.

"that the 2006 Congress failed to fix a chronic national problem is proof that the Dems are horrible on starvation"

Horrible manipulators of starvation who contributed to malnutrition by enacting policies that raised the price of food because the earth warmed a tenth of a degree ten years ago.

"and hey, we're better than Rwanda"

1700 times better, but go ahead and make all the efforts of faith based and people paying taxes that provide these services allowed this success sound insignificant, why don't you?

"You painted a racist, classist, and offensive cliche of what starvation in America looks like."

Hey, unless you're dealing with mind numbed robots, playing the race card only works when somebody is actually, you know, racist; so I guess that makes you the racist for assuming people who would be convinced by your goad will be blind to the whole of their experience except what a white man tells them it's supposed to mean.

"I pointed out to you that, by the numbers, your cliche, if it captures any real people in America, still says very little about the sorts of people who go hungry here."

You pointed to a media story summarizing government research that would benefit the same agency if the problem is overstated; do you also believe the Department of Energy about how much damage new coal plants will do? I pointed to the numbers in the research, and went beyond a single biased source.

"I wanted to clarify my point about starvation in America, and I did that. You still want to convince me that I should buy into some bullshit covert social Darwinist agenda. I'm not interested; save your breath."

You either can't accept the success of America against malnutrition or you can't accept that sometimes people die for stupid reasons, despite our best efforts. These people who've contributed to our success deserve a thank you, not an f- you.

I'm grateful to people who help without any agenda, without any missionary movies, etc., so that means some faith-based efforts are laudable. Nothing you say about our success is going to make me okay with anyone starving at all in the richest country on earth, any more than it will make me okay with a country that can't pay hard workers a real minimum wage, can't provide a meaningful and functional safety net for the 5+% unemployment and the many disabled people capitalism guarantees will exist, can't provide all of its citizens with adequate health care, etc.

That few people go hungry in shelters doesn't surprise me -- they're in shelters. And the quesiton might have been asked of real people, but your burger king supersize counterfactual was a cliche of the sort lurking in every claim you've made in this thread about who poor people are and how they live. The study illustrated that far more people than can or will go to the shelters struggle to put food on their table, a proposition you haven't refuted. And it's almost more troubling, systemically, that someone who speaks from the point of view of the party that claims that the demographic in question, the working poor who don't fancy themselves the sort who go to shelters, and who may well not be able to go to shelters, and who, if they did, would surely break the spine of such government and private resources as are available presently, should go to shelters for the destitute, while his party says they should suck it up and work harder, thinks any of this makes any sense.

I know how you sleep at night Morris. I just think that the fortunate among us need to ensure that the least fortunate, whose least fortunateness is as a matter of theory and practice absolutely necessary to our prosperity, ought to be treated better, and not insulted for being the people who happen to occupy an inevitable role in the civil society without which you and I would be shit out of luck.

"Nothing you say about our success is going to make me okay with anyone starving at all in the richest country on earth, any more than it will make me okay with a country that can't pay hard workers a real minimum wage, can't provide a meaningful and functional safety net for the 5+% unemployment and the many disabled people capitalism guarantees will exist, can't provide all of its citizens with adequate health care, etc."

Which is exactly the problem. Democrats and liberals say they cannot tolerate when people experience difficulty. So they attempt to shift that difficulty from the individual to the collection of individuals in government. But this is a form of deprivation, and liberals do not understand this. Difficulty is unavoidable, it is the human condition. But without difficulty, there is no significance to success. What does it matter if I succeeded if it was not difficult? No one cheers you on for beating an 8 year old at Tic Tac Doe, and if government should ever succeed at eliminating all difficulty, life will lose all significance because everyone will have everything. If there came a time when no one experienced powerlessness, powerfulness would lose its meaning and its joy because the lack of experienced powerlessness would make powerfulness (success) unrecognizable, because it would not be different from any other experience.

The second problem unlike the first is not the goal of eliminating difficulty and success per se because compassionate people aim to eliminate individual suffering; it is a question of how much is good enough. If a minimum wage of $7.50 for any job isn't good enough, why should a minimum wage of $10 be good enough? Why shouldn't we make it $20? $30? $100? 1,000,000? Financial success is measured in relative terms, it is the hedonic treadmill where someone who makes twelve thousand a year suddenly gets a raise to fourteen thousand, and now they're happy. But someone making a million dollars now makes $900,000 so they're upset. There is no good enough when it comes to financial success, no one turns down a raise no matter how much trouble that lottery money gets them in.

Research on happiness indicates that financial success is important as far as a person knows they won't starve or go without a place to stay. After that, you don't see increases in happiness that aren't intermingled with appreciation in their work or better relationships with others. The Democrats' fascination with financial deprivation in America is not about people starving, it's about the inability to tolerate difficulty, the rigid and compulsive nurturing at that deprives our souls of the recognition of growth.

If everyone is truly the same, there is no growth, only equality. So there can be no progress. At the point one person progresses above another, there is no more equality. Children cannot be discrimited against because of their age, so they must have an equal right to drive. People cannot be discriminated against because of their lack of education, so they must be allowed to perform surgery. It's not their fault their parents weren't rich and connected so they couldn't go to medical school, it's not their fault they weren't genetically wired for that kind of intelligence, there is no reason to deprive anyone of another's success because that is difficulty, and Democrats can't stand difficulty.

Equality by legislation is only sustainable if everyone is truly equal and wants nothing more, that's why socialism always fails. People are individuals with individual gifts that lead to individual success, and to deprive them of that success is to starve their souls of their truly human rights.

Again with the strawman argument. My goal isn't to make everyone the same, nor is it to make everyone happy. And as far as line-drawing goes, when the lines you like to draw -- capital gains; how much gun regulation is acceptable; when life begins -- are any less arbitrary from mine, you can mock my arbitrariness. Otherwise, Pot, Kettle here, you're black.

Everyone experiences difficulty, Morris, but only someone who comes from the demographic that if they stay out of trouble almost certainly won't starve could talk about widespread malnutrition as "difficulty." Only someone who will never have to work ten times harder than you do, eating shit from people who don't respect you, just to earn less than government bureacrats, based on sampling what it costs to live in various parts of the country, bureaucrats of left and right persuasion, have defined as poverty, a term of art that connotes, in essence, no matter what you do, you can't even live like a decent human being.

A minimum wage that puts a person over the poverty line is a pretty good choice of line to draw, and at least in the more dear parts of this country, where more people are working for that wage, $7.50 at 40 hours ain't it.

An amount of nutrition that passes muster with the health experts who decide when malnutrition begins for all children, regardless of how screwed up their parents are, that's a good line to draw.

As for healthcare, it's more expensive to deliver what amounts to universal health care through ER's without preventative care, so someone who loathes government expenditures should welcome a universal safety net that provides proactive health care to everyone.

And speaking of which, for someone who hates every penny taken from him, defends the rights of the avaricious to hoard every goddamn penny even though they'd be in loincloths in the woods if it weren't for all the people they can't be bothered to reward in any way greater than what the law, which they manipulate to suit their ends, requires, for someone who defines national prosperity as a growing income divide and an ever-increasing consolidation of wealth among the top two percent, I dare say you have a breathtaking amount of nerve suggesting that anyone puts too high a value on money. If it's not that big of a deal, than stop shooting you and your neighbors in the foot at every turn by advocating policies that are demonstrably worse for you than the alternative.

"My goal isn't to make everyone the same, nor is it to make everyone happy."

Your very words betray you. You just talked about how nothing could make you okay with anyone starving. In a world of 6 or 7 billion, one is too many. So how does that mean something besides that you cannot tolerate individual failure, that your goal isn't to make everyone the same in terms of their food supply, that your goal isn't to make everyone happy in terms of their food supply? Who is it you're not telling me about that you're willing to tolerate being unhappy with their food supply? Or who is it you're not telling me about that you want to be more equal than others?

Overweight and obese children make up 32% of all children. If children are starving in their homes and in the streets, why have we never had more overweight and obese children? If food is so expensive, how is it that a third of our children's families can afford for them to be overweight, especially since people from lower income groups are more likely to have larger families?

"Everyone experiences difficulty, Morris, but only someone who comes from the demographic that if they stay out of trouble almost certainly won't starve could talk about widespread malnutrition as 'difficulty.'"

This is the kind of arrogance that makes people not want to engage liberals in discussions. Tell me, Mr. Psychic, how much money do you think I make? Do you think teachers make enough? If you increase my MS salary by half, you get what a starting teacher makes with a BA. But it's where this question comes from that is so ugly. You think that if a person has not experienced a particular difficulty (not having enough food), they can't appreciate what it's like for people to go through it. You value identification with the powerless over empathy for them.

The poisonous part of this is that when you identify with a person, you focus on all the reasons they're in the mess they're in, how it feels for them to stay there (in your words, "in essence, no matter what you do, you can't even live like a decent human being"). When you empathize, you appreciate their situation without blindiing yourself to the ways they can get out.

It's only self centered people who cannot empathize, who can only identify with another when the other shares their own experience; of course, what appears as identification is actually only self centered focus on their own experience in that situation, because someone else may experience any particular situation in a different way from the way they did yet the narcissist will doubt anyone experiencing it in a different way as having really experienced it, because they can't see past their own experience.

"A minimum wage that puts a person over the poverty line is a pretty good choice of line to draw"

So you admit the poverty line is arbitrary, then use it as a measure when you claim a distinction as to what people should make? But again I ask you, why just the poverty line? Are you callous to their experience? Do you just hate people? Why don't you want them to makes twice the poverty line? Why not three times, since as you say their boss may not appreciate them? Do you just not care?

"An amount of nutrition that passes muster with the health experts who decide when malnutrition begins for all children, regardless of how screwed up their parents are, that's a good line to draw."

So we've come from Obama telling people where they can set their thermostat to telling them what their children can eat. We can't be unfair, so we'll have to mandate specific meals to ensure that evil parents don't fill their kids with fatty foods, right?

"As for healthcare, it's more expensive to deliver what amounts to universal health care through ER's without preventative care, so someone who loathes government expenditures should welcome a universal safety net that provides proactive health care to everyone."

Where do you come from that you can still believe prevention works? People don't prevent, they adapt. How many college students do you know that say, "My doctor told me this hamburger isn't good for me, so I'm going to eat a salad." Until it's brought to their attention in a way that's significant, it doesn't matter.

So again, if you actually had a prevention system that wiped out heart attacks, there would be less incentive to worry about having a heart attack. Look at America, everyone wanted to prevent the next terrorist attack after 9/11; now they care only about the economy because we haven't seen a major terrorist attack for seven years. Look at New Orleans with the focus on levees just a few years after Katrina. People adapt, they don't prevent.

"for someone who hates every penny taken from him"

And YOU want to legalize theft?

"defends the rights of the avaricious to hoard every goddamn penny even though they'd be in loincloths in the woods if it weren't for all the people they can't be bothered to reward in any way greater than what the law"

So you think the solution to a person rewarding another person based on what the law says is to change what the law says? Suddenly when the law requires more of a reward than they can afford, they'll loving giving away more money or have more incentive to replace that person with a machine? If the problem is one of morality which is the assumption of your question, why not teach virtues in schools as a solution?

"I dare say you have a breathtaking amount of nerve suggesting that anyone puts too high a value on money"

Again, money is your focus. The market works itself out because when employers don't pay enough for workers to feed themselves and their families, there are less workers, and nobody to work. You act as though the solution to the moral problem of greed to put people in government in charge of more when you know we can't get through a year without somebody in government going to jail for peddling influence. People are people, in business and government, and the more that have their hands on money, the less of it reaches workers. The problem isn't the money, its collection is just a symptom of greed that becomes the next person's (in government) reason to focus on and collect money; so when are we going to start teaching values again?

"If it's not that big of a deal, than stop shooting you and your neighbors in the foot at every turn by advocating policies that are demonstrably worse for you than the alternative."

This is where liberals always end up, they want dissenting voices to quiet down. They cannot tolerate the imperfection of one person disagreeing any more than the imperfection of one person starving. It does matter that people have enough money for food, only you have convinced yourself that PEOPLE LIKE ME believe differently because that is a reason to shut us up. Look at any society where people in government become more involved and you see an increase in corruption by undeserving politicians and beaurocrats profiting off of tragedy. That's wrong, and that's why I oppose liberal policies.

"And as far as line-drawing goes, when the lines you like to draw -- capital gains; how much gun regulation is acceptable; when life begins -- are any less arbitrary from mine, you can mock my arbitrariness. Otherwise, Pot, Kettle here, you're black."

How exactly is the traditional conservative view that life begins at conception arbitrary? When could it begin before then? And Scalia is clear in his opinion that civilians should be able to carry the same rifles soldiers carry. How is that arbitrary? And if you want to eliminate the capital gains tax altogether, be my guest. A fair sales tax is the most equitable solution because it doesn't punish people for making money or saving money, just collects when people spend money.

Wow, this is the most comprehensive display of Morrisitude I've seen in weeks. I need a little while to point out all the ways in which whomever it is you're debating (it clearly isn't me) is kicking your ass.

Morris I'm not going to touch the first half of that, but the second half, sure, I'll hit on a few points:

1) Liberals like free speech and disagreement. It's Rush, Bill O. etc. who'll call someone a traitor or worse if they disagree with them.

2) Why tax spending and nothing else? Often it's a really great thing for the economy if people spend. Why tax that as opposed to, say, the sale of assets or income? What's your theoretical reason for thinking we want to punish spenders (I assume you consider taxes punitive)?

3) The phrasing "the market works itself out" is hi-larious. I tend to be fairly conservative on economic matters, but the notion that the market magically protects wages at a level that's enough for people and their families is just adorable.

4) And this idea that governments that are involved in the market are naturally corrupt is simply factually inaccurate. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index the least corrupt countries on Earth include Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada. Last I heard the Republican party considered those countries to be practically Communist.

5) And as to the conception point - why isn't the definition of the begining of life in some ways arbitrary? You are talking about a philosophical concept.

Okay, I have a moment. Point by point (not worth the effort to construct a narrative):

* "Not starving ~= "Happy" If I had felt otherwise, I would have spoken in terms of happiness instead of malnutrition. I also at no time spoke in terms of "world starvation." I said it's a tragedy, and implied that it is a sad comment on our insanely wealthy society, that honest working Americans struggle to feed their children adequately. It happens, and not just in the can't-super-size mocking sense you cited, and it is a sad comment. Nothing you have said refutes this.

* You already know this, but let's just say this: an epidemic of obesity afflicting perhaps a third of our children -- some significant fraction of whom would be obese even in more halcyon days when video games and media scare tactics weren't killing the whole notion of outside, unattended play -- is manifestly non-responsive to issues of malnutrition. Indeed -- and this really is what you were getting at, right Morris? -- fat kids in poor neighborhoods in no way gives lie to the proposition that the children of honest, working folk in some material percentage struggle to get ample nutrition.

* Regarding my comments as to your demographic, I'd be arrogant if the data didn't back me up. I don't care what you make; I'd venture to guess you eat just fine. I've made a lot; I've made a little; I've never really approached a level where I might have to resort to those sunny, wonderful shelters and non-coercive religions soup kitchens you keep going on about, and I'd be willing to bet the same is true of you, as it is of most middle-class people. Again, not terribly responsive.

* On the same topic, no, I don't think teachers make enough, or policemen, or firemen, or people who put themselves in harm's way at the behest of leaders with suspect motives. And I would like to see all of that improve. But leave it to a conservative to tell me that paying teachers more than $40K out of school just spoils them, and that they should do it out of the love alone, because every time a Republican runs on a the-world-can-be-just-fine-without-losing-anything-while-lowering-your-taxes mockery of a platform, that's exactly what s/he's saying.

* As for identification over empathy, I honestly don't know what you're talking about, but I'm sure you'll dust off this or that textbook to tell me why I'm such a doofus. I don't know starvation any better than you, and that's my point. I've worked shit jobs, but it's hard to imagine working those jobs knowing that's all there's ever going to be. If it makes me a bleeding heart that that pains me, so be it. But when you tell me it's all a perfect meritocracy, it just shows me how ridiculous you are -- because there is no perfection, the meritocracy is a tail-wagging-the-dog lie that embeds precisely the covert Darwinist illusion I've castigated before (inverting survival of the fittest to I've flourished, therefore I must be the fittest, which is delightfully self-serving and cuts off non-rigorously all debate about relative privilege and equal opportunity but is fundamentally hollow).

* Regarding Obama and thermostats and rejecting clinical assessments of what constitutes malnutrition, what would you prefer? Ketchup as a vegetable? That was one of your hero's more revealing strokes. First, Obama pointing out that people who rail about dependence on foreign oil but then maintain their energy inefficient house at 75 degrees and their SUV's at 20 psi isn't insulting or paternalistic -- it's common f*&king sense. And sometimes leadership is about pointing out the obvious to people belligerently oblivious to it. If your position is that no one can draw a fair line for malnutrition, fine, but if something as concrete isn't amenable of objective assessment, I think you just lost the abortion argument, since pinning down when human life really begins is a far more difficult task, and the consequences of just throwing up one's hands or responding to a scientific question with Christian dogma (based on a cribbed reading of a book put together by people long before they knew what the hell was going on in the womb) is not the establishment of much credibility for participation in other line-drawing exercises.

* Regarding taxation and "taking" and "theft," I was adopting the voice of you and yours. I don't consider taxation theft, any more than I consider it theft when I pay for a candy bar at the store. That there are some things it doesn't occur to me to buy is sort of obvious. That there are still other things critical to our nation's health and security that it would occur to no one to buy also is sort of obvious. That's what taxes are for -- those things as to which no one, in their instinctual short-sightedness, will provide for if not compelled to do so. That endless economic growth you, as an American, have come to believe is your birth right is manifestly a product of coercive taxation, so either stop worshipping GDP, or stop bitching about taxes simpliciter. We can debate tax policy, but all too often you sound like every other street-corner idiot who thinks no taxes is the way to go, at the end of which raving they get in their government-subsidized car and drive home on their taxpayer-funded road, stopping at a tax-funded school to pick up their kid, before going home and taking a s&^t, and flushing it into their tax-subsidized sewage system, all in order that they don't lose 40% of their offspring to the plague before they reach the age of 10. It's inane, and ignorant, and as unengageable in debate as it would be if you maintained that gravity were actually the work of a billion gerbils on magnetized hamster wheels in the earth's core.

* "The market works itself out because when employers don't pay enough for workers to feed themselves and their families, there are less workers, and nobody to work." Really? So killing off workers is the lower threshold? Good to know. You privilege to use the word "civilization" in discourse is suspended until further notice.

* "People are people, in business and government, and the more that have their hands on money, the less of it reaches workers." Good, we agree. Except when the government collects money, there's no incentive not to give it out, because no one's getting paid more regardless. In business, on the other hand, every deprivation imposed on labor is another cool nickle in the pocket of an executive or a shareholder, often someone who is both. But rather than expect you to accept this rather obvious point, I'll be satisfied that you've just made an admission that precludes you from ever claiming private business is superior in the allocation of resources to government, since, as you just said, they're all pretty much the same, being run by people who are imperfect in many of the same ways and all. Glad we got that one sorted out.

* "Look at any society where people in government become more involved and you see an increase in corruption by undeserving politicians and beaurocrats profiting off of tragedy." As compared to what? Look at this country in its less regulated business climates and you see an increase in corruption among undeserving businesses and businesspeople, and corporations profiting off of tragedy. Just because we seem to take more delight in hanging our politicians out to dry for petty offenses, and seem remarkably indifferent to executives who rob us blind to go from richer-than-Croesus to richer-still doesn't make the market version superior, or less costly to the populace at large, than government corruption. Since corruption is an inescapable feature of people in society, it stands to reason that when you grow government you'll grow corruption in absolute numbers, just as when you grow the welfare rolls you'll grow the number of freeloaders you find there. This is statistics as lies and damned lies, it's not a policy position or a governing ethos. I'm not trying to silence dissent, Morris -- I'm asking for coherent dissent. My party doesn't go around hanging the traitor label on people who don't subscribe to the latest kill-them-all-let-god-sort-them-out quasi-crusade promulgated by the folks who think there isn't a problem that can't be solved by a war; we criticize their policies mercilessly, and with reason, but we're not the ones unwilling to debate. After this last eight years of borderline McCarthyist slander in lieu of political dialogue, you've got a lot of nerve slinging this one around.

* Regarding line-drawing: Conception is neat and easy, sure. But if life is mere biological processes, which is all that's happening at conception, than we're going to have a problem with the way we treat broccoli, farm animals, dogs and cats. Why isn't the egg life? What makes us peculiarly human is our cognitive faculty. I'm not arguing for cognition as the threshold, to be clear, I'm just pointing out the obvious -- that while you're free to take the strong conception-forward position, smart, reasoning people, people of faith even, might disagree with you, and since the point is ultimately philosophical or metaphysical you might need to find something a little more robust to argue for your position. Unless -- and here's the rub -- your conception of your faith makes you so disdainful of anyone whose opinion varies that it is beneath you to debate, or to yield or compromise with those who disagree. That's precisely the sort of doctrinaire bullshit you castigate the left for, or, more to the point, your caricature of the left.

* And as for a sales tax, whatever. You and I both know what that means is folks who have no choice but to spend every penny they make just to get by -- which is an alarmingly high proportion of the populace, as negative savings rates attest -- are going to shoulder an outrageously disproportionate part of the burden, while those who make, literally, more than they can spend will have a free ride. That might look equitable to you, but since, as your fond of reminding us, you may well not get to join the ranks of the people that really benefits, I have no idea what you're point is. Do you have any idea what your sales tax would look like if you had to fund the military-industrial complex on it? And as someone who probably pays little or nothing in income taxes, that's a hell of a thing to volunteer. Come to think of it, if you're so anti-progressivity, how about you step up and pay more than your share, as an act of civil disobedience? No? Didn't think so.

You kids have fun now, but I just wanted to let you know that you can be OBESE and MALNOURISHED at the same time.