I’m also for a guaranteed annual income, thereby dispensing with a whole range of programs that cost far more and have far less positive effect.

You see, as a Libertarian, I’m for having as little government as possible, and the remnant dedicated to doing things that are actually best done by that level of government. I figure people who pay taxes ought to get something tangible in return for it. While free markets do many things better than any other solution, they fail when there is a conflict between making a profit and delivering a promised service, or a very long delay between investment and income.

Indeed, in some cases, the only practical way to profit from some investments is to tax the resulting economic expansion – any other way tends to prevent the economic expansion you were depending on to justify, say, usage fees.

The wealth of a nation is ultimately the people it is composed of, and there is no predicting who is “worth it” and who is not, save in perhaps very broad ways. But one thing is for sure – the more freedom people have, the less central planning can affect their lives, and hence the general allegry to trusting individuals to make “good choices.”

Poverty and ill-health are very effective ways of making liberty irrelevant, which may go a ways to explain why the world bank and dictatorships of all sorts are so dedicated to keeping the majority of their people poor and sick. Seems to me that the most fundamental, constitutionally-mandated task of our government is to maximise individual liberties; to increase the number of choices people have, not just in theory, but in truly practical ways.

R. Mildred: I agree with you but think you could have indulged your spleen less. But I agree; while politics is the art of compromise, it must be within the bounds of principle, and if a politician has none of his own, he at LEAST should have some decent regard for the principles (and interest!) of his constituency.

If anything, I was even harder on him. In a sense, hatred shows you care; and in regard to Lieberman, I do not care. There is no upside to supporting Lieberman in any sense; not even if he gets his “Just Desserts” and is sent to prison with the rest of his cronies, we still have to pay for the privilege of seeing him rot in prison.

Let him luxuriate somewhere else; I would be quite satisfied with him surrendering his passport and going to live in Israel. Northern Israel, by preference.

and congratulations to Joe, who if nothing else will probably knock Nader out of the most-loathed-ever third party candidate spot if he keeps this up. Well done, sirs.

Word.

What is WRONG with Connecticut? Did we learn nothing from the Lieberman/Weicker fiasco? How could more than 100,00 damn people, 100,000 damn Democrats, have voted for Mr. I Cannot Allow This Result to Stand? HOW? I have never seen anyone display this kind of hybris and contempt for the voters. I thought if he lost the primary he was done, but nothing will surprise me now. Watch all the independents who hate Bush and the war and the Democrats vote for Joe. Because they’re afraid of a Republican. Republicans are so bad you don’t know what they’ll do, they might, oh, put crazy extremists on the Supreme Court, or accuse opponents of Bush of being traitors, or suggest that rape victims should just dust themselves off and drive to another state to get medical treatment. They must be stopped at all costs.

So they let in Alito because… they had the power to stop a far right wing bushchev toady who hates women, gays, and loves napalming and torturing iraqis gettign onto SCOTUS, but voted so that he got onto the SCOTUS because… they’ll stop people torturing and napalming iraqis, and uphold the constitution given rights of women and homosexuals, despite their long track record of voting against such lefty extremist concepts as peace and civil rights, and their retoric which supports their voting record to the hilt?

Seriously, after the Alito fiasco, I am really concerned by the number of liberals who are under the bizarre misunderstanding that people who vote for baby napalming will in someway help stop baby napalming because to any degree because, gosh shucks, deep down they’re really decent people, despite them saying otherwise and acting otherwise and giving us no real indication that they’ve been anything but honest in how they represent themselves as pro-baby napalming.

We know they hate us, we know they’ll let us down when it counts, and always someone whips out this stupid nonsensical blither about “Perfection” versus, what’re the centrist calling it these days? still “compromises” right?

Compromises mean I may not be able to get another abortion in the future, mean that I may die during pregnancy I do not want to go through because Lieberman, and kos and kerry and that crazy DC lady, feel that my uterus is there’s to sacrifice for the greater “good” AKA their bank balance and political clout on the hill.

This is not Perfection I’m talking about, it’s self preservation, it’s “I can’t screw myself over any more, oh crazy guy who thinks he has the right to use my uterus as a pawn in political power games”. And yes this is pretty much a minute of hate, but this is not all my hate, nor is joey, as you can plainly see, the sole target of my hate.

And I tell you this: I do not hate these bastards nearly as much as the relatives of children who have been napalmed.

And on what fucked up world are we living on when “not actively caramalising little children” is some near impossible feat that we have to work slowly towards?
I have gone my entire life without caramalising a single child, it’s really not that hard.

And Marc: I can’t copy and paste stuff right now because IE is fucking me around, but for the record I’m not against involvment in the democratic party, I’m against the democratic party being the be all and end all of progressive politics. I’m against them having a say in who progressive organisations support, NARAL backed lieberman because they got ordered to, because hte duopoly sunk their tentacles in and now we’re all boned. Stuff like that is why we may not have ten years but will probably need them, and so I am aginst stuff like that.

If the dems give me someone worth voting for, I’ll vote for them, I’m not a total absolutist (I’ll try to get a post up about the full mildred plan before I move apartments again) but I am an absolute, fundamental, minimalist when it comes to morality.

And I’m pretty sure that “doesn’t advocate the napalming of babies” can be something that all sane human beings can hold to as a very minimum level of moral decency we should demand of our politicians, and woe be to those who don’t live up to that minimum… And I agree with almost the entirety of your post except the bit where you imply that kos has got it right by not ripping into joey as hard as possible without pulling any punches btw. really.

And whether or not Jane did something specifically icky (white privelage means that if it is horribly racist, I could ignore that aspect of it so that I focus on the joey mockage, which is why I don’t want to see the damn thing – I can’t trust myself to view it accurately through the dense fog of privelage), her heart was in the right place to really try to pull out all the stops attacking him imho.

It’s the thought that counts in my book.