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Friday, December 25, 2009 - 12:50pmSanction this postReply
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I'm guessing Reid meant to say something other than "If you didn't get any pork from me to buy your vote for the health care bill, you're an idiot."

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Friday, December 25, 2009 - 1:06pmSanction this postReply
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This is not properly formatted for a quote. Reid neither used quotation marks about his own words nor did he refer to himself as "he."

Edit the quote field to say:

I don't know if there is a senator that doesn't have something in this bill that was important to them, . . . And if they don't have something in it important to them, then it doesn't speak well of them.

rather than

"I don't know if there is a senator that doesn't have something in this bill that was important to them," he said Monday about what's become known as "cash for cloture." "And if they don't have something in it important to them, then it doesn't speak well of them."

and edit the source field to say:

{a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/chi-1224edit1dec24,0,3305796.story"}Cash for Cloture{/a}

with > for } and < for {, of course, and it will be properly formatted and usefully linked.


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Saturday, December 26, 2009 - 10:25amSanction this postReply
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Some Rand is appropriate here:
A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one’s interests are safe, everyone’s interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands. While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.


A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles ...

source:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/mixed_economy.html

Ed


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Saturday, December 26, 2009 - 3:21pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks again for the formatting tips, Ted. Sooner or later I'll get all this figured out. Once again, past the 1 day deadline to edit.

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Sunday, December 27, 2009 - 8:17amSanction this postReply
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It is amazing, and terrible, to see how correct Rand could be about such things as "mixed economies" and the political messes they engender. It is appalling to think that such people as Reid and Pelosi, and the Senators and Congressmen/women who take the largesse, are oblivious to the truth of that critique.

"That is what politics is, give and take," to paraphrase Reid on this subject of who got what in the health bill. Seven State's Attorney Generals have filed suit to determine the Constitutionality of such give-and-take politics. When will those AGs wake up and demand Constitutionality on other matters just as grievous? How did Obama get complete control of student loans, with the attachment of six years of community "duty" attached to it? Will students who refuse community service go to jail? If enough of them go to jail, will we have to build new jails? Will they go to "white collar" prisons, or be in the mix of murderers and rapists and wife beaters?

Those, of course, are secondary to whether or not Obama can just sign a law that says Big Brother will decide who gets loans, how much, and where they do their service to their country. There are hundreds of things that have been just as seemingly unConstitutional. If you are investigated under the Patriot Act, for example, you can go to jail for telling anyone you are being investigated. So it has become unlawful to tell the truth, if asked, and Patriotic to lie if asked "who were those dark suits talking to you behind closed doors?"

And what about the new mandates on States to fund a bigger share of Medicaid? Every day I wake up, read the headlines, and think, "Starnesville, here we come."


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