Like father like son
That.
The adopted son of former US President Ronald Reagan has taken to Fox News to remind American conservatives that when they use free email services they are helping the liberals win. In an editorial published on the right-leaning news website on Wednesday, Michael Reagan, a radio host and Republican strategist, reminds …
So Raygun snr, initially pro abortion, protected medicare, increased national debt, passed tax rises 7 out of 8 years in office, remind me which party he stood for :-) On balance he did also slash taxes on the wealthy and widen the 'poverty gap', and did eventually cut som social spending.
I actually don't dislike him, he seemed to have the courage to do what needed doing (although not all the time). I find it amusing his son is playing off the family name when his dad was basically wearing a republican hat and liberal shoes. His poppa was one of the more center right presidents.
You know why I never got a reagan.com email address? First off, it detracts from whatever I say. People discount whatever you say based upon social cues like email domains and such, much like we automatically think the hipster in the coffee shop bragging over his bluetooth about his sexual escapades is a douchebag (and a liar -- the army has good reason to call those glasses hipsters wear "VD-prevention eyewear").
Google is entitled to free speech in the form of political donations, but apparently, Republicans are not socially entitled to such a liberty. Possessing a conservative bumper sticker is a good way to get your car keyed. Usually, you'll hear some self-righteous juvenile bullshit about sticking it to the man or whatever. Case in point: you think it's intelligent to block the domain. Sadly, you'll get shown a good deal more respect for exercising your right to free speech than I will get for exercising mine in pointing out this hypocrisy. I suppose your next trick will be trotting out the usual the lame-assed excuses and ad hominem justifications afterwards.
You could, of course, grow up, and realize that anybody sporting this domain has handily singled themselves out as a ripe target for your abuse, but I suppose that's too much for you to comprehend.
Left and Right are not particularly useful definitions since the US two party-system has polarized all sorts of thing as belonging to Left or Right on an entierly arbitrary basis. Anti-abortion apparently that's lumped in with believing in low taxes for some reason? Compulsory medical insurance? Left wing thing apparently (despite forcing people to pay for private health care via insurance seeming pretty non-socialist to me). They just become two camps that grow increasingly logically inconsistent.
But what's really interesting with "Left" and "Right" is how little they match up to many people's perceptions. Biggest political donations in the Obama vs. John McCain presidential fight? Goldman Sachs donated 75% to Obama and 25% of their donations to McCain. Microsoft donated 70% of their contributions to the Democrats. Time-Warner: another big Dem. backer. Ask most Left wing people and they'll insist that the Right is the corrupt big business end of the scale, better funded, and that the Left are the underdogs. But Obama got and spent around double what his rival did in the presidential campaign. I'm not ranting about the Left here, political contributions need reigning in massively all around. But the image most people have of the "Left" is seriously at odds with the reality.
I even saw someone on these forums rant about fascists as a right-wing idealogy. Uh, Mussolini - pretty much responsible for the modern term, was a socialist. The NAZIs were the National Socialism party and when they gained power, economically turned into a kind of state managed industrialism (hardly capitalist). But somehow some people want to cast these things as tendencies of "The Right".
The Tea Party - considered very Right-wing - were pretty much all against foreign wars whilst the Democrats were voting to fund them. Reality vs. Popular Depiction clashing once again.
They're not useful terms. They were back in the days of Pitt the Younger, but modern American politics has turned them as much into camps of allegiance, as based on consistent ideology. And hypocrisy is rampant.
There i some truth in that, its closer to a center right and far right. There is no mainstream left wing parties.
Politics as a whole has become corrupted by donations, lies, lobbying and vested interests. Just look at the people we put forward, can republicans honestly say Palin was a good candidate? She accused Obama of being a drug smoking dog eater. Really, thats the person you want to show the world? Republicans have some great ideas and some piss poor ones, just like the democrats do.
Re getting your car keyed over a bumper sticker, thats frankly pathetic. If you don't agree with a persons political ideas, assuming they aren't a tin pot dictator, then vandalism has no place. Not all people, republican or democrat, are as loony as the folks we see on TV. And for gods sake put Fox news on the comedy channel where it. belongs.
A lot could be solved by compulsory voting and a none of the above box.
"A lot could be solved by compulsory voting and a none of the above box."
I'd bet that, particularly with compulsory voting, "none of the above" would win in just about every country on Earth. It's a wonderful idea, but what happens next? You do actually have a post that needs filling. Someone has to decide on levels of taxation, public expenditure and foreign policy, because you cannot say "Stop the universe, we haven't got a winner yet!".
I just always find it amusing when conservative Americans use the word "liberal" as if it's a dirty word that suggests being one of Satan's evil hordes, while the in the UK it's more associated with wishy-washy, middle of the road ineffectiveness.
Both are ridiculous, but in polar opposites.
Even though conservatives over here in America think the word "liberal" is a dirty word (as well as liberal ideology being not only wrong, but illegitimate), most self-described liberals are just as wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road and ineffective as yours are over there.
And then there are those of us who've bothered to study a bit of political science, and know that the word "liberal" describes pretty much everyone in US politics.
And while they're all "middle-of-the-road" from a broader political perspective, most of them are ineffective, and many are wishy-washy, for the most part they're hampered by the simple fact that complicated problems rarely have simple solutions. Though there are plenty of simple-minded folk who think otherwise.
it strikes me that compared with a rest of the democratic world, the USA enjoys two right wing parties
The US political system has produced a much narrower spectrum of successful political parties than most other democracies, true. (Japan's is also pretty narrow.) That's partly because parliamentary systems reward limited success in a way that the US's first-past-the-post voting mechanisms do not; you can't be a minor partner in a coalition government in the US. (Well, there's some room for independents-caucusing-with-a-major-party in Congress, and at the state and local level there's a bit more variation. But on the whole government in the US tends to severely penalize minor players.)
Actually, Left and Right came - not from the British Parliament - but from the seating of the National Assembly in the First French Republic (1789 until Napoleon declared himself Emperor.) They really don't have application outside of a small period of French history. But it's easy for people to be lazy.
Yes, Hypocrisy is rampant. The compulsory medical insurance, the individual mandate, was on McCain's 2008 GOP platform and Obama opposed it. After originating in the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, and after 20 years of advocacy by the GOP, when the Dems coopted the idea--why the GOP tried to have it ruled unconstitutional.
Mussolini equated fascism with corporatism, hardly a 'socialist' position by today's usage of the term. Both he and Hitler began their reigns of error by privatizing nationalized industries, selling them to their cronies. Fascism is closer to state managed crony capitalism than socialism and is itself neither 'Left' nor 'Right'. That's why both use it as a derogatory of the other.
Obama is a 'Third Way' Democratic Leadership Council politician, which is why so many moneyed interests backed him. He's a centrist with progressive rhetoric in contrast to the centrist with conservative rhetoric, Ronald Reagan Sr. The Right might hold fealty to Reagan, but if he ran for office today with his governing history, he'd be labeled a RINO and the Tea Party would oppose him. Reagan not only legalized abortion in California before Roe v. Wade, but he also balanced California's budget with what would today be a $17 billion tax increase. As President, Reagan not only signed the largest peacetime revenue generating tax increase in the nation's history, TEFRA, but also increased taxes for Medicare and Social Security.
I even saw someone on these forums rant about fascists as a right-wing idealogy.
Perhaps it was someone who'd read a bit in political science. While many fascists disagree with the left/right dichotomy as a descriptive mechanism, scholars who do use it locate fascism on the far right.
Uh, Mussolini - pretty much responsible for the modern term, was a socialist. The NAZIs were the National Socialism party
Their use of the "socialism" label, and for that matter of ideas commonly associated with the left, doesn't prevent their movements from being far-right.
and when they gained power, economically turned into a kind of state managed industrialism (hardly capitalist).
Who says the extreme right has to be capitalist or liberal?
"Fascism" refers to a class of political organizations and ideologies that are corporatist, syndicalist, and totalitarian, with a powerful state controlled by repressive (police and military), economic, and ideological means. The last typically include a powerful national narrative, often linked to racial or ethnic purity. It's generally considered right-wing because it espouses a strong state made up of corporations or syndicates.
Extreme left-wing political ideologies, on the other hand, advocate dissolving the state or at least hierarchical authority - though in practice this never happens, and they tend to dictatorship and oligarchy.
They're not useful terms. They were back in the days of Pitt the Younger
They come from the French revolutionary-period Estates General, actually. True, that overlapped with the end of P-the-Y's days.
In centrist liberal politics, the sort espoused by both the major parties (and most significant minor ones) in the US, "leftist" ideologies are those that prioritize a more egalitarian state and advocate an activist government to produce it (and so put a lower priority on things like property rights), while "rightist" ideologies prioritize property rights and economic freedom (and so advocate a less-intrusive government). Note these are both liberal positions - they both seek to shore up civil rights; they're just coming at it from different directions. You can see it as a question of whether purported natural rights (eg the right to possess sufficient resources to secure a comfortable existence) outweigh purported immediate rights (eg the right to retain the profits of your labor).
That said, the major parties do have rather incoherent platforms, viewed solely on this left/right axis, as approximately a zillion commentators have noted over the years. But it remains a useful approximation precisely to the extent that people continue to use it, and so agree more or less on what it means in this context.
I remember my wife paying for a hotmail address with 2 or 4GB storage (or however much; more storage was then already free with gmail), so having them on his "bad" list proves that paying money doesn't sufficiently guarantee me the money goes to sufficiently extremist pockets.
Advice please?
It takes a real political zealot to frame everyday things like webmail as a battle of GOOD versus EEEEVIL. Most of us just use it to email things. Most of us don't care too much if the web mail providers leans Democrat or Republican. Mostly importantly, most of us don't live in the US.
Well not really. There are many people who base many decisions on the political contributions and endorsements of the manufacturers of the goods they buy, the actors in the movies they watch, the talk shows that a given advertiser buys time on, and so on, ad nauseum.
I can't see anything wrong with not wanting to contribute to the income of a service that uses part of the income their users generate, to support causes that the users are against.
"So far, Google employees have raised more than $263,000 for Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, Reagan says, and Microsoft employees have chipped in another $363,000."
Unless he is claiming that S. Ballmer and L. Page accompanied by their respective boards personally go round Redmond or Mountain View shaking collection tins under their employee's noses murmuring "nice job you've got there, shame if you lost it" then work-place collections (for whatever reason) are scarcely new or unprecedented. What he in reality appears to be complaining about is that a certain proportion of individual Americans donate to a political party he does not like. Funny how those who shout loudest about patriotism in US politics refuse to recognise those rights and freedoms that they boast about when they are exercised by fellow US citizens whose politics the barking wing of the Fox News Party don't like.
Exactly.
I also think its valid to know whether a company uses its profits to lobby/support political campaigns/candidates.
But knowing how a PRIVATE individual chooses to spend their income? None of anyone's business. Or doesn't the idiot know the difference between individuals and the companies they work for?
If so, he doesn't seem to know much about "individual rights" the Repubs are supposedly so big on. Or is everyone supposed to follow the Chick-Fil-A model, and just funnel company profits in the right directions.
Nailed It!
The only conclusion that can be drawn at all from those statements is that INDIVIDUALS as opposed to the anonymous "super" PAC's are donating more money to Obama than Romney on those specific sites and from those select companies.
What's disgusting here to me is American news Media today, the golden age of professional Journalism is long gone in this country with the age of cable... Am I the only one who sees the irony in Fox New's claim of "Fair and Balanced" News coverage? You have Fox News on one extreme and MSNBC with the Ed and Rachel Maddox Shows at the other and all the others fall somewhere in-between and just blindly playing the sound-bytes with no apparent care about the actual validity of the comments made in them. Every year it gets harder to cut though it all to get to the truth of what's actually going on. Used to be the news would verify information and report it factually, it was a matter of integrity and professionalism over ratings. Sadly today that's too boring when you have 900 channels to choose from.
Mine's the one with the CSPAN program guide in the pocket, If I'm going to get fed manure on TV it'll get it straight from the source and make up my own mind.
The left-leaning side of society is more "modern" than the right.
Case in point ... Of my Wife's side of the family (231 people in all), all the folks who are registered Democrat (a hair over 100) happily use my email server for family messaging. Only five of the 100ish registered Republicans use email AT ALL, and only two of them use my server. The other three use AOL.
The rest? The rest are greens and various other frothing independents. They all used my system, until I banned every last one of 'em for abuse of resources ...
" I believe it is because we are trying to have the activity included as a sport in the next Olympics. We're just warming up!"
Hmmm, the putting-your-foot-in-your-mouth event? That'd come under the general heading of Gymnastics, would it?
Mind you, introducing a new event of "back-pedalling" (an activity that usually follows foot-in-mouth) might give the US a chance against the UK in Cycling :-P Todd Akin's shown he'd great at that......
Mr. Son of Reagan:
You are apparently unfamiliar with the relatively recent ruling which establishes that corporations are persons in the eyes of the law and therefore are permitted to spend their money supporting whichever candidates they feel would be best for themselves, the country, and/or the world.
>> Meanwhile, those same tech titans' employees have contributed just $87,000 to the campaign of Obama challenger Mitt Romney, all told.
Sadly Mr. Reagan isn't aware of a guy all of us IT folk remember fondly as Bill Gates. His Gates Foundation slips billions and billions of dollars into sectors focused on conservative ideology -- segregated charter schools over all-inclusive public schools, Big Pharma drugs over cheaper generic meds, selective contract bidding over hiring local workers, the list goes on and on.
Whatever amounts companies like Google and Yahoo donate to whichever party, it's insignificant pocket change compared to what the Gates Foundation gives to indirectly support conservative causes. (Add the direct funding from groups like the Koch Brothers and Dick Cheney's ironically named Better America Super PAC and it's less than insignificant.) Reagan is spitting out numbers that have absolutely no meaning when taken in context to any kind of comprehensive analysis of what kind of money is backing either party.
Cue playback of this song title from the movie "Team America...."
Who'd of thought that a puppet movie parody would have captured such a future, "real-world" (ehem..) political sentiment, now "re-imagined" (no doubt) by this not-quite Son of Reagan.
Buck o' five, indeed.
or: "hackneyed simile that ignores so much that you have to be totally stoned to make sense of it."
You need therapy dude. I suggest reading the comic nancy, what with all the fucked up zen-metaphors punctuated with the totally hotness of Auntie Fritzi and all her pop culture references. A good read when you're stoned, but hard to explain when you're not.
... in measuring "employee donations", because those are typically small change. By contrast, if you're going to donate serious money, it's certainly possible (if not probable) that you'll do it through a lobby group or PAC, who can keep the list of donors confidential.
Case in point: two of Silicon Valley's allegedly left-leaning tech organizations are eBay and HP. A certain Meg Whitman has been/is CEO of both those pinko groups, yet still managed (in a gap year, as it were) to run for Governor of California... as a Republican.
The tech sector isn't really "left leaning" when it comes to the dollars (although it is much less socially savage^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hconservative). It certainly has a lot of left-leaning employees, but in this case it is the number of dollars that count!
Yeah, but ol' Meg was a Schmuck after the mold of Romney.
Election 2012: "The Battle of the Schmucks".
Would that they be allowed to battle to the death for office -- then, regardless of who wins, we'd see a 50% reduction in political schmucks, and after a few cycles, could effectively flush the toilet we know as "Our Nation's Capital"
Colour me shocked, but if that's the case, I'll get my credit card out right now. But, oh wait, companies make money any way they can. Even through selling their paying customer's details.
Do people really buy into this sort of nonsense? US politics is crazy.
Meh. Any of them offering IMAP service *own* your data, and can troll/mine it for whatever they want. (Yeah, I know, even without IMAP, you can mine it, but this just makes it convenient and easy.)
I figure between Michael and Non Reagan, we have us a real life ying and yang thing going on.
From what I understand, Reagan is claiming donations to the commies from these free e-mail demons of less than $1M in total - isn't this the kind of money that Mitt Romney finds down his pants that he forgot about ?
(According to Wickedpedia "Romney and his wife had a net worth of between $190 and $250 million")
Why is any political party or would-be elected person allowed to receive money from any firm for anything? I thought democracy was about individuals choosing members of representative bodies to represent people, not private or public firms or unions or other "organisations" paying for favourable treatment.
Similarly, why on earth would any democracy allow commercial lobbying for business (private or state) interests? Or do most "Western" governments now get elected by companies and not by "the people"?
I thought most countries had got laws against corruption, including bribery.
Please, no self-serving justifications along the lines of the expense of getting elected, publicity etc.. Despite modern prattling, a country is not a PLC, in which bankruptcy results in selling the assets and sacking the population. Countries have the awkward habit of still existing and the population still being present throughout even the worst financial disaster, unlike the commercial bribers who pervert the system.
By the people for the people?
"When you sign up for a Reagan.com email address, the company "will not copy, scan, or sell a single word of your email content," its website says"
but then
"How do you handle spam?
We have spam filters in place in addition to each user being able to set their own spam settings. A user can choose to set a spam blocker for a particular sender or an entire domain name. A user can also flag individual emails as spam to help the system learn which emails the user recognizes as spam. The flagged for being spam will then be put into a separate folder for the user."
[ http://www.reagan.com/t/faq ]
So their spam filter *will* be scanning *every single* word of your email.
Or do they have some magical form of anti-spam that works without looking at the mail?
This was a plug for his own email service. A paranoid conspiracy fuelled plug but a plug nonetheless. A service which no doubt has become a red rag to hackers and will be lucky if it goes a few weeks without suffering an embarrassing incident.
It reminds me of Glen Beck talking up disaster preparedness and gold to his lunatic listeners while have substantial stakes in (surprise) two companies that just happened to sell disaster kits and gold.
Ever since I used Hotmail (free e-mail service) and some of GoDaddy's free services I kept getting these urges to vote for Obama. And I don't even live in the US!
I'm so grateful that I finally know who to blame for all this. So; are we now also allowed to sue these political influencing factors? I could always use some extra cash, errrr; I'm all out to pursue the truth ;-)
"In the US the public vote is largely irrelevant. The Electoral Colleges decide who is President most of the time."
Or a majority vote in the US Supreme Court, in the case of Dubya's first 'win', despite popular votes entirely to the contrary.
No, the public vote dictates the votes from the Electoral College. It is done state by state where each state winner grabs ALL that state's electoral college votes. It's an old stop-gap horse and buggy days system that is now antiquated and a detriment to sane democracy. It's how US maps get broken down into 'Red' and 'Blue' states, indicating how the Electoral College typically represents them. Sad and silly.
the government of this particular country - the United States America - which, along with its vassals here in Europe, continues to play a major role in determining policies which affect H sapiens sapiens' chances (slim at best) of making it through the present century....
Henri
We've had Romney (The Man With The Magic Underpants) dissing the Olympics and bigging up "Anglo-Saxon heritage". We've had the woman who can see Russia from her house in Alaska. Last week there was a dimwit who thinks women can't get pregnant if they're raped. Son of Gipper is mild by comparison.
What next.
How unpatriotic! As minimum service, I would expect packet inspection to detect pirated music/movies, deep-profiling to catch all those terrorists and a spam filter that requires the presence of patriotic words or phrases before letting any email pass.
As it stands, it's just an email service with a tiny flag-pin.
Yes Dear World. Obsessed extremist paranoid PoliTard lunacy like this is now rampant in the USA. Everything is interpreted as politically extreme, one way or the other. Political thinking exists only along the brain dead 1-Dimensional political line of right or left. Thus our USA two party system FAILs. It's time for a new world revolution of 3-D thinkers over the lame non-thinkers and psychopaths. (A special 'hello' to VP candidate Paul Ryan, 'Starve The Beast' perpetrator and Ayn Rand quisling).
Why is that?
Politics in the USA has been a two party mudslinging nightmare since the inception of the country. You should see some of the campaign ads from the 1800's for and against Lincoln and other presidents.
Obviously we are incapable of learning from our mistakes. The media is as responsible for political lying and violence as gun toting psychos are.
Fox "News" perpetuates unbelievable lies and half truths every day. The latest with the "You didn't build your business" misquotes and even showing the damn tee shirts. Ah ha ha ha go the stupid talking heads on Fox & Friends because they have begun to believe their own bullshit.
Where are libel and slander laws? Talking like that about ANY President in the 40's, 50's & 60"s would have gotten you a trip to Leavenworth Kansas let alone Guantanamo Bay today.
We need a three party system right now to break the logjam and we also need to civilly arrest and sue every senator and congressman for theft of services and recover their salaries for the last 4 years of obstructionist bullshit. (On BOTH sides of the aisle).
Maybe then they will get the message