So he took the original historical worst and compounded it.......got it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-02-08/obamas-spending-exclusive-estimate-of-the-true-number/

Ironically the Obama tax cuts are actually more expensive than all of his new legislation combined (including the stimulus). Even if he was spending money frivolously (he's not) it would still be more fiscally responsible than what the last three republican presidents have done. In fact, excluding Obama, you have to go back to Clinton, Carter and JFK to find fiscally responsible presidents.

yah thrax pretty much nailed it.

technically BO is correct, republicans have raised the debt the most. because that is a rate of change, not the instantaneous value. democrats, while merely being in complete control of the executive and legislative branches, have merely reraised the debt by 18%. which is peanuts compared to w/e bush did. please disregard the fact that any positive percentage creates a new record. lets just focus on the rate and not the value, that way we can state the republicans are at fault.


but jesus christ, i appreciate all of you bipartisan people barbs and misinformation throwing at each other. cant you see through the forest that there are greater powers out there that are perhaps controlling our spending moreso than the politicians? by just reading yalls arguments, the quickest hypothesis that i am drawn to is that there are powers out there who are using the politicians as puppets, and fooling massive swaths of the populace.

monte, are you making this religious now? if so, congrats on 1000 posts.

lol no not religious. moreso wondering if the entire government is too corrupt due to corporate money, lobbyists.

Can't take credit for this, tourney champ showed me it: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

But I thought it was particularly apt after montes post. Just read the small excerpt from the intro.

hmmm interesting, but slightly off from what im getting at. im not suggesting there is a separate government that secretly controls what information we receive and therefore create our mass mindsets/opinions. (although sams link to the dude talking about media filters was very interesting). i see facebook as almost overcoming this theory by itself. the power to read everyone elses thoughts without any middleman skew is quite amazing. you can see whole societies gain momentum once they realize that they all desire something similar. now, instead of relying on gallup polls or (biased) (foxnews or msnbc) polls, you can see the raw data yourself on fb polls. i understand they can be biased as well. but its pretty sick to watch momentum happen there (see: egypt).

my hypothesis is moreso that there are lobbyists who have such an insane amount of money/power at their disposal that they can quickly assume control of any naive politician entering washington dc. i think what the younger generation extremely values and desires to see is someone go to washington with an absolute standard of transparency.

i would LOVE to vote for someone, no matter what they stand for, who would create a facebook page, and honestly update it day-to-day.

may 18, 2011: someone from exxon showed up. his name was robert p. jones. he offered me a $200,000 retirement package if i would join his support-drilling-in-america group. i turned him down. he then threatened me that he would release to the press proof that i had committed some atrocious things in my past, whether true or made-up.

i know i know, this sounds conspiratorial. but i cant help but start to wonder about why the govt, whether repub or demo, continues to make decisions that are seemingly against what the public wants (as i understand from fb, or kdice forums, or wherever)... whether it is to spend less, or to fucking stop going to war in the middle east.

like i am 100% absolutely certain that the majority of our citizens do not want so much fucking waste in our government. yes, we want good education, and good health care, and good military, and good etc, etc, etc... perhaps we cannot afford all of that based on what we take in from taxes year to year.

but one thing we can all agree on is the amount of wasteful spending in achieving these ideals is sickening. this should not be a difficult thing to correct, and given what i perceive as an overwhelming majority block of voters who have this as a high priority, i am dumbfounded as to why the waste/corruption continues.

i specifically remember an item that came out a few months ago concerning some bailout money that went to the city of los angeles for i forget what department to help create jobs. 3 years later, they started tracking down what the huge sums did, and the answer that came back was for every 1.1M spent, one job was created. WHAT THE FUCK. THAT IS MY FUCKING MONEY (okay, its moreso my wifes than mine right now).

and when that item comes out, whats the first way that we get manipulated into avoiding the truth of the matter. fucking news agencies and talking heads start talking about OMG IT WAS THE REPUBLICANS. and then the repubs backlash with OMG THE DEMOS DO IT TOO. and then it devolves into bipartisan shit, and we forget the original atrocity.

our government, as is, is shit when it comes to efficiency. and shit when it comes to transparency.

i frequent twoplustwo poker forums, and theyre going nuts over there about the black friday shutdown of online poker (ive got opinions on that, but they dont matter for now). so they are trying to organize however they can to communicate with politicians and other americans how fucked they are as poker players because of the lunacy of the situation. recently, they got excited because bill frist re-opened his fb page so that the public could comment. so they stormed his page to show him how much they were affected, and to show his followers as well. within an hour, the fb page was re-shutdown to public commenting. and its not like this is just a repub bill frist thing. it seems like its a majority of politicians. just give us some damn transparency. otherwise, the momentum gained from social media is going to catch all of you fucking off guard.

Skrum had a pretty good point which was basically cronie capitalism. Basically it's the modern day equivalent of the spoils system. The obvious solution to that would be more transparency as opposed to say diminishing the governments size/power until it's easily manipulated by corporations. Guess who's opposed to the former and for the latter though?

Anyway the way I read what Bernay was saying is that there is a metaphorical government at play - made up of lobbyists, CEOs, and individuals who are all very powerful. Ever wonder why American milk is never in a bag? This would be an example of the invisible government at play. But yah that's just how I understood it.