is there a war coming?

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

Now that's funny!

Seriously, can't you think up anything for yourself for your signature, or does it always have to be a bumper-sticker (however old or otherwise it may be)?

I'm a racist for not liking Obama by your reckoning am I not?

Huh? Show me where I've even intimated such.

Yeah, how did you guess. Please, please stop!

Note to self: TO doesn't do irony.

By the way, at least he was in the Guard..What military background has Obummer the anointed one 

At least you concede he (GWB) was a draft-dodger.

That's what I thought...absolutely void of any morsel of fact to substantiate the spin the left has leveled at the Tea party 
Marginalize, discredit, mock, degrade, slander, lie... your typical progressive attack strategy to deflect the true message of that which they fear!

Do you exist in a bubble? See: http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/150027/sarah_palin_and_michele_bachmann_would_call_18th-century_philadelphia_freedom_fighters_%27un-american%27/

An excerpt:

At a recent speech in Iowa, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann induced widespread cringing with her claim that Americans of the founding period, no matter who they were, enjoyed exceptional freedom to pursue their hopes for betterment. Slavery and the U.S. Constitution's three-fifths clause don't qualify as little-known facts, and Bachmann seemed ignorant, too, of women's original exclusion from rights secured by the representative government established in the Constitution. Who knows how she'd evaluate the native population's historic situation.

So, they're either totally ignorant of their own history, or they're embracing it all; they can't have it both ways.

How dare the Tea Party bring about efforts to pressure politicians on both sides of the isle to reign in spending, cut Government intervention and strangulation of job producing business', deficit reduction and a balanced budget, yep the acts of a Anti-American terrorist group alright

If only that's all it were about. The US legislature has been reduced to a laughing stock in the free world as a result of the Tea-Party's pathetic antics.

Whatever he did or didn't do... at least the unemployment rate was nowhere near 9.1% and we had a AAA credit rating!
How does this factor with what Obummer is running around in his tax payer funded Campaign bus trip saying; That the Republicans have been holding the Country to ransom, the party of No bla bla bla... had his convictions been so strong, shouldn't he have rammed his hair brained ideas through Congress like he did with Obummercare when he had carte blanche of all three legislative branches of Government  No because the fact is, he had no ideas..completely fecking clueless!

He wasn't just handed a poisoned chalice by the previous incumbent, it was on fire too. I've not, and never have, said that Obama has been exemplary in office, but neither has he been anything like as bad as your lot make him out to be, and he would have done a whole lot better I'd say but for the frustrating and filibustering of the far-right.

[seafoid]

The future if the Tea Party have any influence over it will be brutal. Here is tea party thinking in Israel.


Welfare states and socialism are about as dead as Elvis

08/16/2011 21:16 By EMMANUEL NAVON
Israel will find itself in even more turmoil if the protest movement is hijacked by pompous "mavens" bent on implementing obsolete economic models.
Photo by: Channel 10
August 16th marks the anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. Yet some of his fans still claim that the King of Rock and Roll simply went into hiding and never actually died. The average person rightly scoffs at this sci-fi theory. But how can you ridicule those who believe that Elvis is still alive and at the same time continue to believe in socialism or in the Middle East peace process?
RELATED:
May 1968 and August 2011
In Israel, academics and journalists who claim that both socialism and the Oslo accords can be salvaged consider themselves to be at the forefront of sophistication and rationality. In truth, however, they are no less irrational than Elvis Presley's most wacky fans.

With Israel's social protest movement now in its fourth week, the government has established a professional committee made up of 15 ministers (dubbed the Trachtenberg Commission) to examine the social justice protest leaders' demands and to suggest ways of making life more affordable for the middle-class. High-ranking academics have volunteered to help the protesters formulate their demands.

Among the self-appointed consultants is Yossi Yonah, a professor of philosophy at Ben-Gurion University. But how exactly is Prof. Yonah qualified to engage in a discourse on macroeconomics with the Trachtenberg Commission? True, the same question can be asked about Yuval Steinitz, himself a philosophy professor turned Minister of Finance. But the issue is not whether philosophers are adequately equipped to grasp the economics of the situation—after all, Karl Marx held a Ph.D. in philosophy—but rather what the real agenda is of some of the movement's leaders.

Yossi Yonah has written extensively on the subject of "multiculturalism," and in a 2005 interview published in Haaretz, Yonah summarized his vision for Israel's future thus: "Besides the naturalization of the migrant workers, [the next steps for Israel] will include the annulment of the Law of Return; the cancellation of the arrangement of automatic naturalization for Jewish immigrants; and provision of a worthy solution for the Palestinian refugee problem, based on the Geneva Convention."

So you see, for people like Yonah, it's not only about economics.

The Trachtenberg Commission also includes several experts on the economy including Prof. Avia Spivak from Ben-Gurion University. Spivak recommends raising taxes - especially corporate taxes - which will supposedly fill public coffers. This is despite the fact that companies might thus be encouraged to simply pack it in, and also despite the fact that economic theory and practice have both demonstrated that government revenues actually decrease when taxes are too high.

Then there is Shas' brilliant idea for lowering real-estate prices: Rent control. This would mean the government, and not individual landlords, would decide on how much to charge for rent. In the past, whenever such policies were implemented, they invariably triggered the adverse result of increasing the price of real estate. The reason for this is simple: when real-estate investors cannot charge the rent that would make their investment profitable, they stop investing in real-estate. And when investments in real-estate decline, the housing supply naturally follows suit. With supplies decreasing, prices then increase correlatively.These days, the pervasive discourse in Israel's media is that the high cost of living and the hardships of the middle-class are the result of "ultra-liberalism" and that Israel must become a "welfare state." But in fact, the very opposite is true. Israel is not a liberal economy; rather it is dominated by oligopolies that strangle consumers and by monopolies (such as the National Land Authority) that control supply.

If the Israeli economy is strong and productive, it is partly due to the economic liberalization undertaken by then-prime minister Shimon Peres in 1985 and again by then-minister of finance Binyamin Netanyahu in 2003.
What Israel's economy needs is more, not less, freedom and competition.

As for the second suggestion of creating a welfare state, our know-it-all pundits are conveniently forgetting that this model is a central factor in causing European economies to crumble. If Greece, Spain and Italy are broke, it is partly because their welfare states were born at a time when the population was young and the economy was not exposed to foreign competition. With an aging population and the constraints of a globalized economy, the European welfare system has simply become unsustainable and too expensive. Europe's financial markets are suffering as the debts that welfare governments incur continue to rise.

Israel's provincial public discourse does not end there. The violence in Britain, we are told, is to be blamed on Thatcherism. The fact that the Labor party, and not the Tories, was in power between 1997 and 2010 is irrelevant. The truth, of course, is that former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher verily saved the British economy, and that were it not for her reforms, Britain's fate today would look similar to Greece's.
If the current social protest movement in Israel finally provides the opportunity to lower the cost of living by breaking up monopolies and cartels and by lowering taxes, it will be remembered as one of the best things that ever happened to the country. But if the movement is hijacked by armchair ideologues to implement policies that have been proven over and over to be counterproductive, then Israel is in trouble.

But I'm not being fair. The Israeli hard Left should be given a chance to put their multifarious economic theories into practice, but only once they tell us where Elvis is hiding.
The writer is an International Relations Lecturer at Tel Aviv University and the founding partner of the Navon-Levy Group Ltd., an international business consultancy. He is also the author of numerous books on Israel's foreign policy, including most recently, From Israel, With Hope: Why and How Israel will Continue to Thrive.

[muppet]

It is amazing how little difference there is between the ideology of the extreme left and the extreme right.

Both govern ruthlessly.
Both have a super-powerful ruling class, little or no middle class and a serfdom.
Both have one law for themselves and one for the rest.
Both cling to power as viciously as possible to the bitter end.
Both eventually fail under the weight of the ruling classes gluttony.

Come to think of it certain religions match some of that too.

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

Interesting piece in today's Guardian (that some far-right wouldn't wipe their arses with, apparently):

US voters are not mad. Our stereotype of them is patronising and wrong

Martin Kettle

We shouldn't get carried away by media coverage of the Tea Party. Many Americans are put off by the Christian right

America is a country of mad people governed by buffoons. That's the way a lot of Europeans are content to see it, no matter how much they love the US in other ways. A country of mad people because they are so religious, violent, overweight and in denial about things that look obvious from here but which the flag-wavers over there refuse to get. Governed by buffoons because, for the past half-century, from Lyndon Johnson to George W Bush, no US president was truly respected in much of this continent. Not even Reagan on the right or Clinton on the left. All of them, in various ways, were laughable.

That changed in 2008. With one mighty bound, the nation of mad people became a nation of visionaries, electing not a buffoon but an incredibly cool, incredibly smart, incredibly articulate leader who was so progressive and sensitive that, guess what, he might almost have been one of us. Except that, inconveniently, he wasn't. But that didn't matter. We gave him the Nobel peace prize when he'd only been in office for five minutes and drooled whenever he looked in our direction.

Now, with 15 months to go before the next US presidential election, a spectre is haunting Europe. The spectre is the possibility Barack Obama might not be re-elected. In fact it's more than that. It's the sense, among a lot of Europeans and a lot of progressives – US ones too – that Obama wasn't as great as he seemed and that, as a result, he has allowed the mad people to get their act together again and prepare to elect another buffoon next November. Prejudices confirmed. Comfort zone resumed.

That's the not-so-subtle subtext of a lot of the European reporting on US politics this summer. It's what underpins the still-not-quite-played-out European fascination with Sarah Palin, a politician who made a giant contribution to the Republican defeat in 2008 and who, if her party were foolish enough to nominate her again, would repeat the gift, even more generously, in 2012. And it's what gives so much of the discussion of the Tea Party such a hefty dose of transatlantic schadenfreude. The message to Europe from Iowa at the weekend scarcely needed spelling out. It permeated every report from the cornfields: they're so awful – and they're going to win!

Sorry to spoil the party, but almost everything about this stereotypical view of the US is both patronising and, perhaps worse, wrong. Let's put some serious caveats out there. Let's admit that the Republican right is often very dynamic and effective, admit that Obama has often failed to leverage his power as effectively as he could have, admit that Americans have become increasingly sceptical of big government and worried about deficits, and admit that, in the light of the midterm elections and with the economy sliding, only a fool would dismiss the possibility of a Republican win in 2012. Look at the polls. Seven out of 10 Americans are currently unhappy with Obama's handling of the economy. His job approval ratings have just slumped to 40%. It has to improve if he is to win.

But let's also look at a few stubborn realities that stand in the way of the self-fulfilling Republican prophesy. Let's start with the fact the Ames straw poll, last week's Iowa fundraising event, is no guide to anything except itself. It's a stunt for conservative Republicans. And it has duly conferred its blessing on one of their number, Michele Bachmann. But that's like Labour holding Barnsley.

Take note, too, of the limitations of the Tea Party. It's easy to get carried away – as Tea Party fans themselves certainly do – with the belief that they are a new force breaking the mould of American politics. But the public is becoming increasingly negative towards the Tea Party, while a new analysis published in the New York Times this week suggests the campaign is largely made up of the same old white, Christian, conservative Republican voters who did the business for Newt Gingrich in 1994 and for Bush a decade later. "The Tea Party's generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government," conclude political scientists David Campbell and Robert Putnam, "but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God into government."

This matters because, out there in the real US, real voters are not so much enthused as turned off by the overmingling of religion and politics. Yet that's what Bachmann, who holds prayer sessions on the campaign trail, offers. And it's also what Texas governor Rick Perry, the latest Republican contender to be written up in grand guignol terms, offers too. Perry may pull in supporters on the campaign trail but when he holds large prayer rallies, when he calls the head of the Federal Reserve treasonous and threatens him with a "pretty ugly" reception in Texas, and describes Obama as "the greatest threat to our country", both of which he did this week, he cuts himself off from many more voters than he speaks for.

Beware, too, of mistaking the voices of midterm US voters with those who vote in presidential years. You get a different kind of American at the ballot box in presidential years – more young voters, more black ones, often more female, certainly more liberal and more independent. You also get many more of them – one in every three Americans who voted in 2008 sat out the midterms two years later. None of this means that they will all be voting for Obama in November 2012, but if they do, the outcome will look much less Republican than it did nine months ago, when there were much higher numbers of angry white guys.

In the end, a presidential contest is about a choice between two candidates and their messages. With Republican candidates attacking each other and paying court to the party's core conservative vote, the chance that they may nominate someone unelectable would obviously help Obama. But much will also depend on his ability to re-energise the coalition, and particularly the independents, that swept him to victory on such a relatively high – by US standards – turnout in 2008. In a recession, with high unemployment and a crippling deficit, and after suffering a capricious but humiliating economic downgrade on his watch, that will not be easy. There are lots of sensible people in the US as well as mad ones. But Obama still has to win their votes.

[mannix]

thank God i was born an reared in ireland.

[thejuice]

Well looks the war has started sooner than we thought

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14585625

[Tyrones own]

Interesting piece in today's Guardian (that some far-right wouldn't wipe their arses with, apparently):

US voters are not mad. Our stereotype of them is patronising and wrong

Martin Kettle

We shouldn't get carried away by media coverage of the Tea Party. Many Americans are put off by the Christian right

America is a country of mad people governed by buffoons. That's the way a lot of Europeans are content to see it, no matter how much they love the US in other ways. A country of mad people because they are so religious, violent, overweight and in denial about things that look obvious from here but which the flag-wavers over there refuse to get. Governed by buffoons because, for the past half-century, from Lyndon Johnson to George W Bush, no US president was truly respected in much of this continent. Not even Reagan on the right or Clinton on the left. All of them, in various ways, were laughable.

That changed in 2008. With one mighty bound, the nation of mad people became a nation of visionaries, electing not a buffoon but an incredibly cool, incredibly smart, incredibly articulate leader who was so progressive and sensitive that, guess what, he might almost have been one of us. Except that, inconveniently, he wasn't. But that didn't matter. We gave him the Nobel peace prize when he'd only been in office for five minutes and drooled whenever he looked in our direction.

Now, with 15 months to go before the next US presidential election, a spectre is haunting Europe. The spectre is the possibility Barack Obama might not be re-elected. In fact it's more than that. It's the sense, among a lot of Europeans and a lot of progressives – US ones too – that Obama wasn't as great as he seemed and that, as a result, he has allowed the mad people to get their act together again and prepare to elect another buffoon next November. Prejudices confirmed. Comfort zone resumed.

That's the not-so-subtle subtext of a lot of the European reporting on US politics this summer. It's what underpins the still-not-quite-played-out European fascination with Sarah Palin, a politician who made a giant contribution to the Republican defeat in 2008 and who, if her party were foolish enough to nominate her again, would repeat the gift, even more generously, in 2012. And it's what gives so much of the discussion of the Tea Party such a hefty dose of transatlantic schadenfreude. The message to Europe from Iowa at the weekend scarcely needed spelling out. It permeated every report from the cornfields: they're so awful – and they're going to win!

Sorry to spoil the party, but almost everything about this stereotypical view of the US is both patronising and, perhaps worse, wrong. Let's put some serious caveats out there. Let's admit that the Republican right is often very dynamic and effective, admit that Obama has often failed to leverage his power as effectively as he could have, admit that Americans have become increasingly sceptical of big government and worried about deficits, and admit that, in the light of the midterm elections and with the economy sliding, only a fool would dismiss the possibility of a Republican win in 2012. Look at the polls. Seven out of 10 Americans are currently unhappy with Obama's handling of the economy. His job approval ratings have just slumped to 40%. It has to improve if he is to win.

But let's also look at a few stubborn realities that stand in the way of the self-fulfilling Republican prophesy. Let's start with the fact the Ames straw poll, last week's Iowa fundraising event, is no guide to anything except itself. It's a stunt for conservative Republicans. And it has duly conferred its blessing on one of their number, Michele Bachmann. But that's like Labour holding Barnsley.

Take note, too, of the limitations of the Tea Party. It's easy to get carried away – as Tea Party fans themselves certainly do – with the belief that they are a new force breaking the mould of American politics. But the public is becoming increasingly negative towards the Tea Party, while a new analysis published in the New York Times this week suggests the campaign is largely made up of the same old white, Christian, conservative Republican voters who did the business for Newt Gingrich in 1994 and for Bush a decade later. "The Tea Party's generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government," conclude political scientists David Campbell and Robert Putnam, "but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God into government."

This matters because, out there in the real US, real voters are not so much enthused as turned off by the overmingling of religion and politics. Yet that's what Bachmann, who holds prayer sessions on the campaign trail, offers. And it's also what Texas governor Rick Perry, the latest Republican contender to be written up in grand guignol terms, offers too. Perry may pull in supporters on the campaign trail but when he holds large prayer rallies, when he calls the head of the Federal Reserve treasonous and threatens him with a "pretty ugly" reception in Texas, and describes Obama as "the greatest threat to our country", both of which he did this week, he cuts himself off from many more voters than he speaks for.

Beware, too, of mistaking the voices of midterm US voters with those who vote in presidential years. You get a different kind of American at the ballot box in presidential years – more young voters, more black ones, often more female, certainly more liberal and more independent. You also get many more of them – one in every three Americans who voted in 2008 sat out the midterms two years later. None of this means that they will all be voting for Obama in November 2012, but if they do, the outcome will look much less Republican than it did nine months ago, when there were much higher numbers of angry white guys.

In the end, a presidential contest is about a choice between two candidates and their messages. With Republican candidates attacking each other and paying court to the party's core conservative vote, the chance that they may nominate someone unelectable would obviously help Obama. But much will also depend on his ability to re-energise the coalition, and particularly the independents, that swept him to victory on such a relatively high – by US standards – turnout in 2008. In a recession, with high unemployment and a crippling deficit, and after suffering a capricious but humiliating economic downgrade on his watch, that will not be easy. There are lots of sensible people in the US as well as mad ones. But Obama still has to win their votes.

Could someone/anyone explain the ridiculously blatant double standard here where by I'm constantly accused of being indoctrinated by Fox news even though I rarely turn it on, rarely ever post a link to an article of interest to the topic, the one exception of course will always be that no other media source are carrying it,
Yet you lads can post article after article after article from the most left of left leaning outlets, columnists and commentators and somehow think no one notices!
Amazing really!

[Mike Sheehy]

thank God i was born an reared in ireland.

Don't you live in New York ?

The US has its faults, thats for sure, but there is nothing worse than gobshites like you who live in the states yet are constantly having a go at the country. Why don't you f**k off back to Ireland if you find the place and/or the people are so bad.

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

Could someone/anyone explain the ridiculously blatant double standard here where by I'm constantly accused of being indoctrinated by Fox news even though I rarely turn it on, rarely ever post a link to an article of interest to the topic, the one exception of course will always be that no other media source are carrying it, Yet you lads can post article after article after article from the most left of left leaning outlets, columnists and commentators and somehow think no one notices!
Amazing really!

"The most left of left leaning outlets...", sorry, but that's just ridiculous. If I'd posted something from 'Socialist Worker', or 'Marxist News' you might have been justified in such an outlandish claim. That demonstrates  just how far to the right your personal political perspective is actually fixed.

Did you even read the piece, or are you just engaging in instinctive knee-jerk reactionary denunciation? That would be the same knee-jerk reactionary mode that sees you routinely defend Fox News, for example.

[mayogodhelpus@gmail.com]

China give Uncle Sam a bit of a spanking in the first skirmish.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14585625

[Tyrones own]

Could someone/anyone explain the ridiculously blatant double standard here where by I'm constantly accused of being indoctrinated by Fox news even though I rarely turn it on, rarely ever post a link to an article of interest to the topic, the one exception of course will always be that no other media source are carrying it, Yet you lads can post article after article after article from the most left of left leaning outlets, columnists and commentators and somehow think no one notices!
Amazing really!

"The most left of left leaning outlets...", sorry, but that's just ridiculous. If I'd posted something from 'Socialist Worker', or 'Marxist News' you might have been justified in such an outlandish claim. That demonstrates  just how far to the right your personal political perspective is actually fixed.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Martin James Kettle (born 7 September 1949) is a British journalist and author. The son of two prominent communist activists Arnold Kettle (best remembered as a literary critic, 1916–86)[1] and Margot Kettle (née Gale) (1916–95), Martin Kettle was educated at Leeds Modern School and Balliol College, Oxford University.

Kettle worked for the National Council for Civil Liberties as a research officer from 1973. He then began his career in journalism as home affairs correspondent for New Society (1977–81) and moved to The Sunday Times in 1981, working as a political correspondent for three years. He has been with The Guardian since 1984 and also wrote regularly for Marxism Today in its later years. He writes a column on classical music in Prospect magazine.

Kettle is best known as a columnist for The Guardian, where he is assistant editor, having worked as the newspaper's Washington D.C. bureau chief 1997-2001. He was formerly a leader writer (1993–97) and chief leader writer 2001 onwards. Martin Kettle has often defended New Labour and Tony Blair (a personal friend) - though not over the Iraq war. However, he thinks the David Cameron-led coalition has had a positive effect on the country.[2] He has been dismissed by John Pilger as Blair's "most devoted promoter".[3][/b]  don't ye just love it when they turn on each other!

Did you even read the piece, or are you just engaging in instinctive knee-jerk reactionary denunciation?

Would that be the same type knee jerk reaction you're first out of the gate with each and every time George W's name comes up
Did you even watch that YouTube clip I posted for you that clearly shows Barney Frank and the Democrats were squarely to
blame for the Housing Crisis that spear headed this economic collapse.
But you see by reading the Guardian and watching Jon Stewart etc it's not your fault that you are so ignorant to the facts..the liberal left
Media machine doesn't deal in facts...just what works for them!

[Tyrones own]

The six categories of wasteful and unnecessary spending are:

The war on terror
Homeland security
Israel's $3bn
Guantanamo
627 overseas bases
The Bush tax cuts

   

Yes I remember it well... all that hope that the above would change after the 2008 election 

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

Would that be the same type knee jerk reaction you're first out of the gate with each and every time George W's name comes up

I didn't need anyone to act as a news conduit for me where he (GWB) was concerned. All I had to do was to look at and listen to the man, and when he used words that I couldn't understand (not because I was unfamiliar with the words, but because they weren't actually words) the man made is own measure in my eye, with no help from any news intermediaries.

Did you even watch that YouTube clip I posted for you that clearly shows Barney Frank and the Democrats were squarely to blame for the Housing Crisis that spear headed this economic collapse.

A gross-oversimplification, and yes, I watched it.

But you see by reading the Guardian and watching Jon Stewart etc it's not your fault that you are so ignorant to the facts..the liberal left Media machine doesn't deal in facts...just what works for them!

So Kettle once wrote for a far-left organ, and in your eyes that means he can't ever be more moderate (your claim that The Guardian itself is extreme left is still ridiculous). And Ronald Reagan began political life as a Democrat - go figure.

[ExcellentDriver]

And no its not the latest...it's been around 2 1/2 yrs

Whatever. How about trying to think for yourself, eh?

As opposed to being a racist...right

As not opposed to anything, just answer the questions (like I'm doing right here).

Just to piss you off...working pretty good don't you think?

Yeah, how did you guess. Please, please stop!

#1 for ten years and counting... 

#1 and?...

Yep, saw through him from the very start...an inept community organizer/agitator up to his eyes in Chicago style cronyism, unlike yourself who is still so full of hate for Bush that you can't bring yourself to admit that you got it oh so wrong with this blamer in chief 

As opposed to a draft-dodging, failed oilman (in a state where it was virtually impossible to be a failed oilman), with big family connections to those with their grubby hands on the US levers of power? And it isn't over till it's over.

Is this actually based on any facts that you can produce or is it simply more evidence of brainwashing from the mid-stream media services you subscribe to?

Well, there you go again (as another hero of yours might memorably have uttered once). Just because we all don't see things through an extreme right prism doesn't mean that we've been mind-altered in any way, unbelievably. As for the Tea-Party - 1773 preceded the abolition of quite a lot of US supremacist relics.

And on non answered questions, have you no comment on the time line video of Bush trying to warn of the dangers of the housing market only to be shot down by the Democrats

Oh right, I see. So, so strong were his convictions that he pushed legislation through Congress, despite the opposition of the Democrats, to avert the impending disaster? How prescient!

Faer Strabane,

The Tea Party started off as a reaction against BUSH'S Policies. They just happened to gain momentum when Obama became President.

Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman are just two more Neo-Con Flakes who will continue keeping America in Debt.

Ron Paul for President!

[ExcellentDriver]

It is amazing how little difference there is between the ideology of the extreme left and the extreme right.

Both govern ruthlessly.
Both have a super-powerful ruling class, little or no middle class and a serfdom.
Both have one law for themselves and one for the rest.
Both cling to power as viciously as possible to the bitter end.
Both eventually fail under the weight of the ruling classes gluttony.

Come to think of it certain religions match some of that too.

The problem is not Religion, per se, but the Elites that control them. Jesus, Mohammed or Moses didn't instruct their followers to support a Bailout of the Banks. The problem here is Power and Greed (not to mention the warmongering Faux-Christians).

However, you are right on both the Extremes within the Matrix. As Chairman Mao famously said, "In troubled times the naive are always drawn to the charismatic radical!"