Thinking that we should default on debt and start a global depression is not something to be proud of.
Disagree. That's someone who is loyal to their ideology, acting like a Rorschach when things don't go their way. I mean, you're saying her idiotic refusal to compromise at all during those discussions was a GOOD thing. And it wasn't.
ron paul and rick perry are at polar opposites on many key issues. i dont hear rick perry talking about pulling all our troops out of the middle east, legalizing drugs, keeping the government out of marriage, ending the fed, ect. rick perry's base is the GOP base. he is as mainstream/insider as you can get. ron paul is the pariah of the GOP - his views are pretty much at odds w/ most mainstream republicans. i really dont see much overlap in terms of their base. infact, if you look at all the republican candidates the only one saying anything different than the rest is paul - and its why he will never get the GOP nomination - he could win every strawpoll and caucus and they still will never give him the nod.
Oh - don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of using words like that when we're being openly racist. That's actually my principal criticism of soft racists like basso & probably yourself as well, it's far more poisonous than jsut saying things straight up...if he just said "Obama's a ******" he'd be shouted down and banned from polite society, but instead he tosses a little bit of flame bait out there with the "tigger/******" connection and we're off to the races. Similarly, it's interesting that actually saying the word "twitter negroes" makes you - who are warning us about this phenomenon as one of the major social ills of our time - substantially more uncomfortable than pitching the idiotic idea from stormfront and other white suprmeacist garbage dumps that blacks are organizeing a race war via social networking device. Which do you think is more damaging? Me mocking basso & beck & the rest for being racist clowns or you pushing Glenn Beck racewar jerk-off fantasies in the first place?
She never argued to default on the debt. There is enough money coming in to pay bondholders. She said to not raise the debt ceiling and as a result be forced to cut current spending while prioritizing paying bondholders and the military. Certainly it is easy to disagree with a strawman version of her argument though.
so not not giving out social security to people depending on it is cool with you. i don't think rooting for default needs a strawman
We have this thing called the budget that we vote on every year. Congress already voted and passed a budget. You don't get to vote twice and change your mind. (and keep the country hostage while you're voting on it the second time around) They passed a budget this year so make it an issue the next time around.
I disagree. I think her refusal to compromise is not idiotic and is in fact a good thing. I much prefer ideologically motivated decisions to politically motivated ones. The fact that you are calling her position rooting for default proves that it does. And yes, I think reduced social security benefits are not only okay, but necessary. Apparently you do. If enough money was coming in, all of the budget items would have been paid without a second vote. There was not enough money coming in, so a new vote was necessary. The outcome we got was more debt being approved. The outcome we should have gotten was less money being spent.
Except for a couple of problems: 1. She - and no one else in the GOP - actually proposed a budget that would have balanced our budget by last week. No one has even gotten close to suggesting how to cut out $1 trillion from our budget overnight. So yes, advocating not raising the debt ceiling was no different than advocating for a default on the debt because she had no plan for how to cut the necessary spending to make her theory work. The only point she ever got to was "don't raise the debt ceiling". 2. There's no evidence that the executive branch has the legal ability to pick and choose who it wants to pay. It's not clear that the government could simply prioritize bondholders and the military, even if they wanted to.
Except that her refusal to compromise is a purely politically motivated decision. I find Bachmann's campaign to be both funny and scary because it truly is the dumbing down of the Republican party and American politics right before our eyes. She gets up on the stage in the Republican debate and the first thing she does is a chant about Obama being a one-term president and this is what excites her base, because they have no interest in the real issues or actual debate.
What I'd like to know is how Bachmann can be the candidate of the downtrodden - those most affected by and angry about the recession - and still be against extending unemployment benefits for many of those same people, as she confirmed she was on Meet the Press yesterday. If she got her way, those checks would stop coming before the first primary votes were cast, which would have a devastating effect on those voters and their support of her. Lucky for her nothing she is ever for or against actually becomes law.
I assume you meant to post that she did NOT actually propose a balanced budget, instead of the opposite. Since payment of debt interest was less than income, this is categorically untrue. It may well have been advocating for a government shutdown, non-payment of social security or medicare/medicaid or any of a number of other things. That would be the result of government spending outstripping government revenue. What it would not require is default. The only way not raising the debt ceiling would require default would be if tax revenue was less than interest on the debt. We are not quite to that point yet. Bondholders are constitutionally required to be paid. That is in the 14th Amendment. It was put into place to make sure that the debts incurred to fight the civil war got paid back. There is no constitutional requirement that planned/budgeted expenditures be made. So it may not be clear that the military could be prioritized by the executive (most likely congress would simply pass a bill prioritizing them) but bondholders can, would, and should be given priority.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Sure, Perry can project that persona, but he is far more radical, far more the Fundamentalist Christian, far more the creature of the most extreme Big Money people in the GOP than, for example, George W. Bush ever was. Some folks may not know this, but as Governor of Texas, Bush's church that he went to on Sundays when he was in town was the Methodist Church in Tarrytown, an old, tony neighborhood in near West Austin. That's about as "mild" a Christian church as you are going to find. A good friend of mine who lived in Tarrytown at the time saw him there regularly. For a comparison, showing just how different the two are (and I'm using Bush as The GOP Mainstream, a fair thing to do, IMO), simply look at Perry's fundamentalist Prayer Fest at Texas Stadium... lunacy writ large, and nothing like the religion practiced by mainstream Republicans, not in my opinion, or in my experience over the years (yes, I know a lot of Republicans). Perry will come across as a "Mainstream Republican" when the audience expects it, but that isn't what he is at all.
I am curious why you support Bachmann over Paul. I find Ron Paul's positions to be more ideological consistent with the idea of 'liberty' than Bachmann's. Bachmann while perhaps more rhetorically gifted than Paul her positions seem rather shallow, and contradictory when you consider her social positions, while also being handicapped by her penchant to misstate.
I think if Ron Paul ever got ahold of monetary policy he'd make the Great Depression look like child's play.
Like all the other Republicans, I think she'd be conventional on monetary policy. She's never said much on the topic, so I assume it isn't an important issue to her so she'd re-appoint Bernanke or just nominate respected mainstream Republican economists. This is Ron Paul's issue, and he's an extremist on it. He basically wants to go back to the gold standard.
