Libya is just between tyrants.

There will always be violence until they find a tyrant they can live with. That's the way it has been throughout history. Kings were tyrants in Merry Old England. Uprisings, insurrections, beheadings and confrontations between Lord's armies with sword, pike, bowmen, canon and flintlock took their toll on the royal powers. Eventual result after hundreds of thousands of deaths, were the Charter of Liberties then the Magna Carta, leading England on the path toward recognition of Human rights, And the eventual relegation of Royalty to figurehead status. Guns, only recently becoming reliable enough to be effective, played as much a roll as swords and scythes.

It basically took Europe 1,000 years (middle ages) to realise that running your country/society on the basis of religious law is a dumb idea.

Now we just have to wait for the rest of the world to figure it out.

But Iceland was founded by secular individuals who didn't bring their religious beliefs into the government, on the whole they've been pretty successful.

It's not a problem that they may have religious beliefs. It's a problem if they let religious or other dogma take precedence over their own deliberation (if they're capable of such).

All the historical presidents you mentioned have proven themselves capable of individual thought.

Not so the rest.

It's necessary and proper to offer due respects to God, and customary that politicians pray for the light and safety for the country. No atheist or agnostic has become president of the U.S. However, there's a huge distance between asking for God's blessing and seeking to make public policy an expression of God's will. The big lesson of the modern age, which begins around 1700, is that trying to shove the holy intent into earthly politics screws everything up. Churchmen in power tend to become fanatics, crooks, manipulators, bureaucrats, or incompetents, just as secular politicians often do, and they are harder for the people to get rid of or influence when they govern from the pulpit. Mixing politics and religion or science and religion makes for bad politics, bad science, and bad religion.

Sheep Pellets everywhere looks like what is currently happening now actually. ;)

Col

And distorted my vision.
I should just let them be, I guess.

Hm, Hooked on arsenic... that's difficult to achieve. Maybe we can create an isotope of arsenic what tastes like media attention and looks like a short term stick of knee-jerky - they just can't keep their dirty little mitts off that stuff.

[i]You're just a troll. A nasty one perhaps, but with no substance[/i]

Cool. "Troll"? About three posts and you've already fallen to insults - is that a new personal best record for you?

So, can we expect to see you also add "spammer", "psycho", "murderer", "stalker", etc as you've been carrying on about me elsewhere?

Going to be pleading "don't talk to Rick" here as well?

I don't mind your doing that, you understand - it puts you in context.

You may well be a conservative in Finland, but you definitely fall far short of that definition in America. Here, you're just a muddled blend of statism and socialism. Where you fall on the right/left line in very socialist Finland I have no idea, and I don't much care.

[i]your neoconservative media groupies can stand up in comparison to the makers of your nation.[/i]

Is that some sort of socialist, statist phrase? When you rush to throw in the word "neocon", is that supposed to be the automatic trump card, ending all further debate? Sort of like calling people "trolls", "spammers", "brownshirts", "psychos" like you do - if you post the accusation against another first, you automatically win?

And I assume you're referring to The Founders with the reference to "the makers".

First, a "neoconservative" is a new conservative. As in, a liberal who has realized the error of their ways and adopted conservative principles. As in neo=new + conservative. I realize it is supposed to be a magic word for use by the left that automatically demonizes anyone it's thrown at, automatically assigning the person who uses it the moral high ground. But it is a word that actually has a meaning, it's not just a socialist identification phrase. Anyone who works with language as their profession should understand that language has meaning.

I've always been a conservative, so I'm definitely not a "neocon". So who - given your close following of the US political scene - in the Republican party is a reformed liberal that you're applying the "neoconservative" label to? As best I can figure out, the last neoconservative was Ronald Reagan, reformed Democrat.

Your confusion about neoconservatives dispensed with, can you identify even ONE of The Founders (you know who they are, you know what The Federalist Papers are without resorting to Google, right?) who wouldn't fit right in with Tea Party political philosophy?

Can you give us just one name and an example of where they'd be more "progressive"? I know you'll have to resort to Google and do a lot of reading, but can you come up with just ONE name? It should be easy if the "neocans" are so radically different than The Founders and their philosophies as you claim with your invective.

This will be interesting. More progressive on federal government power and size? Taxation? Gun control? Capital punishment? Where will Ansu lead us where the Founders would have said - "Whoa! Those right wing conservative Tea Party types are way too far to the right!"

[i]Give 'em that old, old, old-time religion. That's what they want, and behind their politicians they will try to drag the world back to an era of modest dress, daily devotions, and trying to scourge wrongdoing from public and private life.[/i]

Ah yes... The Plot. The secret Plot of Republican candidates to carefully sneak in modest dress, obligatory prayer, etc. Bachmann, for example, can say repeatedly that her position is that the President has no business dictating to states their position on same sex marriage. In debates, in [i]Meet The Press[/i], etc. Doesn't matter. The spies from the "anti-religion zealots" movement, inserted into the Bachmann campaign staff, have assured us that she's really lying - if she were ever to become President she would immediately ban same sex marriage. We know this truth to be self evident.

Meanwhile, on the other side, the Democrats and "progressives" have a secret plan to deliver the US to communism. We find ourselves on Morton's Fork, forced to choose between the two.

Scary. Run away, run away!

Fear mongering makes for wonderful what-ifs, but doesn't generally have a lot to do with reality.

I have my doubts that the "anti-religion zealots" (who make anti-religion their own religion) represent any spirit of enlightenment. Particularly with their dismissive, aggressive attitudes and fear mongering towards anyone in public life with strong religious faith. That kind of mentality is anything but enlightened.

As I said, with the current crop of "anti-religion zealots", if George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln etc were running for office today, the anti-religion army would be on the attack faster than a fat kid on a Smartie. Accusing them of wanting them to bring in "that old, old, old-time religion."

[i]All the revolutions in Europe were also revolutions against the Church. [/i]

Like The Glorious Revolution, perhaps? What part of the English Bill of Rights contains limitations on the church? Any church?

Seems to me one of their chief complaints was the Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes (Google it) and their repression of the Protestant church.

Here, I won't force you to Google "The Glorious Revolution" so you can find out what it was and read the Wikopedia version. It was the revolution against the Divine Right of Kings in England, and resulted in the English Bill of Rights.

How that revolution was also supposedly also a revolution against the church, how the English Bill of Rights supposedly reduced the power of the church, gave the individual protection against churches, etc would be most interesting. I don't think it had anything whatsoever to do with also being a "revolution against the church". But perhaps you can provide us with some evidence I'm wrong on that.

More like a generalized wave of stupidity. Lately, Republicans have (as have waves of politicians in the past) discovered that stupidity works, at least as far as manipulating a mob goes.

Certainly, if there's the delusion on your part that Bachman or Palin have a scrap of intellect between them, then there's little for you and me to share. Those gals have cleverness, yes; and a talent for managing certain classes of situations, yes; but a general awareness of what's really going on? They're good at hotting up a crowd that doesn't care that their ideas don't hang together.

George W. Bush was a caricature of a president: a genial, direct-thinking, semi-retarded kind of talker, in cowboy boots with elbows swinging. I imagine he would have been very likable on a person-to-person basis, cooking steaks in the back yard. People liked him, because he was fit, charming, good-looking, athletic for his age: all they could have been, if they'd had the determination to stick with it. He also had trouble finding the right words and trouble going from one idea to the next; just like an average man. But he thought boldly, and reacted with his gut and with certainty. People thought they resembled him much more than they resembled smart guys with advanced degrees and policy experience. For that, they trusted him; and he led them incompetently into stupid military adventures, and bankrupted the government handing money back to people who had plenty and would proceed to do nothing to enrich their country, and turning our fortunes over to a pack of unprincipled financiers.

The country seems to be screaming, "Don't trust elites! Give us stupid!" And for the last few decades, the Republicans have been doing their best to serve up stupid. Which, by the way, includes the heavily politicized evangelical zealots who are pushing right-wing politics from the pulpit.

You can't count either, or perhaps you can only count when it's convenient to you?
Your behavior is by now fully documented, I don't need to put up with your crap, and am indulging you only to feed your ulcer.
Your words touch me not at all :p

You mean like calling people "spammers"?
"Troll"?
"Psycho"?
"Stalker"?
"Killer"?

Ummmm... no, I do believe that was you.

Man, oh man, if they're "documenting" my posts, some poor bugger is filling up hard drives keeping up with you!

must be fun being so unconnected.
How is a reaction against the catholic church not a reaction against a church?
Don't bother answering, as you will make no sense...
And even if we pretend you've found an exception to the rule, well... it only changes "all" to "all but one".
And that's provided we overlook that this "glorious revolution" - a bit of parliamentary scheeming and an invader waiting stage right - is even comparable to the popular uprisings of continental europe, and not a "revolution" of name only.

Hang it up.

Either that or bend your efforts to truly insidious insult. What you are doing is not even amateurish.

I am fluttering about, ineffectively - my wing obviously broken.
How better to make the snake reveal itself?

It the right Flavor and they will attack each other to get their grubby little hands on it. :0

Col

Not even obliquely, to Rick as a snake.

Snakes never go too far, they are admirably undirectional.

You have no substance. Like those necons you compare to Jefferson et. al.

I voted for the man, I'll admit. I found McCain an acceptable alternative, but I doubted him after the Palin nomination. The idea that a seventy-odd year old man with a history of cancer should pull a virtual cartoon character off the tundra, who would be our alternative president in case he couldn't serve... why couldn't he (and his party) see that despite 20% of Americans loving her, 50% would see her as a repellent joke? Anyway, I go off topic. I voted with O because I hoped there was some mangerial and political power behind the obvious brains. Seems I was wrong.

What he (and Bernanke) got right was keeping the banks afloat. Took some guts, because everybody for a time wanted the bums to fail. Bums or not, if the big banks go down, you have a genuine Great Depression ver 2.0 going. That's a continuing risk, by the way, because...

What he got wrong was not spearheading a drive to regulate the behavior of banks, and to break them up into small-enough-to-fail pieces. He left regulation to congressional committees, which are pretty much operated in the interests of the financiers. Presidential leadership against runaway finance could have affected what the commitees would do. He didn't lead.

His stimulus program could have gone a long way to pulling the economy out of the pit and getting more people employed, accomplishing things that would be useful for country. Instead, he underestimated the task and the viciousness of the fight to pass it, and led with his spirit of compromise. It was half as big as was needed, and poorly applied. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, which don't do much (according to economists I read) to stimulate; and a third was on stuff like unemployment compensation, which although it keeps money moving doesn't spark anything new or useful; and the rest for his "shovel-ready" projects which mostly took years to come into action. Again, he trusted to the good will of squabbling men beneath him to do the right thing, and he blew it.

The health care bill is another case of hands-off/look-the-other-way leadership, and although better than no bill, does little to keep us from spending more money every year on health. It was an idea that had to be sold strongly to the country, so that Congress would feel the hot breath of the people behind them and force them to do something difficult but effective. Instead, we get a warm wet towel of a program, with half the country already in angry opposition to it.

I see no evidence that Obama is a socialist, nor any more of a statist than the Republicans who have gone before him. (In fact, the last non-statist Republican was Coolidge.) Chattering about the socialist Saul Alinsky is a way of not talking about anything Obama has done. Obama's actions in office have been patently anti-socialist, despite talk radio's unanimous but unupportable claims that he's the most left-wing leader since Karl Marx.

[i]The idea that a seventy-odd year old man with a history of cancer should pull a virtual cartoon character off the tundra, who would be our alternative president in case he couldn't serve...[/i]
The idea that somebody living in Alaska couldn't possibly be as qualified to replace a sitting president as the current VP brain trust who can't even consistently lie about his academic scholarship (more properly, his lack thereof) is duly noted. This would be the same guy who said Roosevelt got on television when the stock market crashed, right?

Given how rarely we lose a president and get the VP versus the immediacy of what the elected president does, personally, I don't vote on the basis of who the person in the wings is.

[i]What he got wrong was not spearheading a drive to regulate the behavior of banks, and to break them up into small-enough-to-fail pieces.[/i]

Or perhaps, deciding that federal regulations using the CRA to force banks to give loans to people who didn't qualify financially, against normal prudent banking practice, might be a good place to remove regulations. Or perhaps figure out a way to avoid a future occurrence of what Barney Frank and fellow Democrats did with Fanny and Freddie, continuing to ramp up their unsafe lending in the face of calls that they were in deep trouble, might be a good way to look at curtailing government interference in prudent bank practice.

There is a very definite difference between actions that are "the behavior of banks" and bank actions that are the result of "the behavior of politicians". How convenient to blame banks for the regulations, policies, and agendas put in place by the governments who regulate them.

As an investor, why WOULDN'T you buy derivatives from a bank when they are made up of mortgages from institutions that government is assuring anyone are financially sound, great national assets, and the mortgages are backed by the full faith and credit of the US? Takes the entire aspect of risk out of considering investing in derivatives when the government is telling you they'll cover them and therefore there really is no risk, doesn't it? They become more like a very well paying bond under those circumstances. Of course, what Barney was telling Congress and the business community wasn't exactly correct, as we now know. And yet somehow or other, it becomes all the banks' fault, and Barney is nowhere to be found.

[i]Instead, he underestimated the task and the viciousness of the fight to pass it, and led with his spirit of compromise. It was half as big as was needed, and poorly applied.[/i]

Right. If it had been twice as big instead, 1.7 trillion dollars, then it would have been more efficient and the money better spent. Double the taxpayer money spent, double the efficiency. Works every time.

I am constantly bemused at complaints of how hard Obama had it passing legislation when he also had large majorities in the Senate and House. Oh... and the spirit of compromise... "Republicans can come along, they just have to ride at the back". What trouble Obama did have was Democrats who weren't blind to the fact a lot of Americans who voted Democrat didn't want anything to do with these plans either.

It is easy after the fact to say "My plan would have worked if I'd had more money or if Democrats hadn't been giving me a hard time about how they'd vote after listening to their constituents". You don't stand on your record on what you did, you claim it would have been successful if you'd done it differently. Of course, if he'd spent twice as much and it still failed, then the complaint would have been the stimulus really should have been twice that big again. For socialists and statists it's never "Well, that didn't work". It's always "Well, we just didn't spend enough, regulate enough - we just didn't go far enough". The idea that their beliefs are a failure simply never occurs to them.

Maybe if we surpass Japan's number of porkulus packages and spending after their bubble burst, we'll be able to surpass their record of a Lost Decade as well.

[i]Again, he trusted to the good will of squabbling men beneath him to do the right thing, and he blew it.[/i]

Hey, I recognize that: "Pass this bill." "Pass it now". "Do it". The idea that Obama and these enormous porkulus packages might actually be the wrong thing to do is, of course, barely worthy of consideration. Those "squabbling men" may have realized what a disaster it would be despite Obama's dreaming. Perhaps because they'd been in government so many years they knew spending like that always evaporates once it disappears into bureaucracy. Perhaps because they were horrified at the thought of saddling their kids with that sort of debt. But more than a few of them - some being Democrats - predicted exactly what would happen to the money in that porkulus package. And as it turns out, they were right.

[i]I see no evidence that Obama is a socialist, nor any more of a statist than the Republicans who have gone before him.[/i]

Well, when you think twice as money should have been spent on Porkulus v1.0, much of that on entitlement spending, I imagine your bar of what constitutes socialism is quite high. When somebody talks about "redistributing the wealth" and "the fortunate can afford to pay more" (i.e. you didn't work harder or longer or smarter, you just log fortunate), that's socialism. When the top 25% of taxpayers (gross income threshold: $67,280) pay 86.34% of all income taxes collected in the US while the bottom 47% pay no tax at all for the services they use, and it's still not enough, that's already socialism. When you want to tax that top group for being "fortunate" even more, that's really socialism. As in "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs". How could it be different?

Is tax and spend entitlement program socialism confined only to the Democrat ranks? Not hardly. And is statism restricted to the Democrat party? No, not hardly. Lots of RINOs around. Which is what set the stage for the Taxed Enough Already Party philosophy to appear.

[i]Chattering about the socialist Saul Alinsky is a way of not talking about anything Obama has done.[/i]
Really? The class warfare "millionaires and billionaires", "make the rich pay their fair share"? The nasty banks and HMOs? That doesn't fall in with Alinsky's rule to demonize the other side? The irreverence and ridicule - Obama's kids can do their homework but the people in the House apparently can't do the same?

Obama started out working for an Alinsky offshoot. He TAUGHT Alinsky's tactics and strategies in the communities he worked in, not just practised it. And he's never been able to rise above being a community organizer and rabble rouser. It's in every domestic speech he gives about finance and public policy.

You can't talk at what Obama has done - or at least tried to do - and the manner in which he has tried to do it without seeing Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals all the way. It is part and parcel of Obama.

It's simply a fact. Just as it is a fact that Obama had a long relationship with another radical, a criminal one - Bill Ayers. Unrepentent domestic terrorist and the man who gave Obama his political coming out. And one more - Jeremiah Wright, black bigot and anti-Semite. Sat and listened to the hatred Wright spews for 20 years with never a word of protest until that got at least some media coverage.

That is our current president, and yet apparently a candidate from Alaska or somebody who openly professed religious faith would be scary.