BS: What would America look like IF ... ?

Subject: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Donuel
Date: 01 Aug 14 - 09:41 PM

What would America look and feel like if the obstructionist House of representatives got everything they could possibly want. What ARE THEIR HEARTS DESIRES?

I have a Capt. Obvious mind and can't possibly think of everything tea party types want, nor would that list reflect the values of any conservative members here so respectfully don't take offense to the answers to this question or feel that they reflect your own opinions.

First and foremost I think extreme conservatives want to cast aspersions upon the President in order to demonstrate how bad a "ginger" sp is as a leader and then pass job bills that would contrast Barak's economic recovery once Obama is out of office.
I believe they want a new American apartheid starting with welfare and the right to vote.

The desire to blame immigrants for putting Americans out of work, spreading disease and crime are the key reasons conservatives use to deport 12 million people whose paperwork is out of order thus making America look like what we did to the Japanese Americans during WW2 (only worse)

Even the fruit pickers have to go which would make America a hungrier and more expensive place to live,


What else do they want and what would America really look like if they got their way in everything they could possibly want?

If they got their way...
I hate to say it... but I think America would look like and have more in common with Iran than just the death penalty.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Ebbie
Date: 01 Aug 14 - 09:47 PM

A good share of the problem with the far right- and lately, even the main GOP body - is that they really can't articulate *what* they want- they only know what they are against.

Ask any one of them why the President should be impeached, in what way he has lied, how he deserves the title of traitor, what he has done to merit their opprobrium and they won't answer. They can't.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Donuel
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 12:54 AM

Well they can't say to the media "cuz he's black".
Or do you mean to say they won't know their opinions until they are told by their Cruz Rove talking point 3000 computer or private TV channel like the Palin and Beck channels?


As Nader would say its not so much red or blue its the corporate think tank baiting of the divide and conquer strategy. there is far more united sentiment between left and right than corporate born issues broadcast. For example punishing the wall st. fraudsters.



Btw Ebbie while I appreciate your discussions, where are the usual gang of pranksters, jokers and satirist politico wise guys and gals?
vacation? Is there a filter or black list in effect?
Its like, when I post, the only readers out there are you and the NSA ;)


I need to know where the specter of extreme conservatism is going and where it would actually end up. Is it just racism and a push for a Christian religious state or is it guided corporate fascism?


First corporations became a real corporal person more alive than Pinocchio and could talk louder with money than sound waves .
Now it has a religious soul especially for closely held corporations!
One thing is for sure, corporations are mutating and evolving. Some of them can invert themselves and become citizens of another country in as little as 24 hours. Poof... no more US taxes.

Here are a couple Brave new house republican scenarios:

Arizona deportation trucks on 18 wheels in a convoy of armed Humvees and spotter stun drones followed by a formation of ethnic purity militias all headed to a franchise prison factory labor camp of Hispanic youths who compete4 with outsourced Chinese goods to sell back to wall mart.


Or will it be a mad max waste land of the poor with oasis' of walled communities. Or will the real haves have everything delivered to their island or will the real Americans just live very privately in France.

Where are the new Tea party songs of revolution? Heck I already heard a new Ebola song on npr yesterday. Are there right wing base ballads I need to hear?


PS Ebbie stay tuned for the redacted CIA report on who is in control. coming soon.   It turns out that a CIA task force not only hacked the senate staff in charge of overseeing the CIA but then they accused the staff of stealing documents and tried to prosecute and imprison Senate staff for doing their job. Brennan denied it all as being all lies and beyond reason and just today apologized and said oops. Yep we tortured, no shit Sherlock. "We lied" Duh. How could the redacted CIA report surprise or shock anyone. Was W tortured too?

American values have the integrity of Lance Armstrong and pretty much always has. clang clang clang Oops there goes my ill relevancy alarm

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 01:15 PM

What they USED to want was all the blacks to swim back to Africa with a Jew under each arm. Or so the saying went.

Now I'm not so sure. Whom do they hate more - blacks or gays? Women are most, I know, I'm asking silver v. bronze. Atheists, of course, aren't even being considered in this context as they have no souls.

It always shocks me that no matter how racist Americans are, they are even MORE sexist.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Bill D
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 02:26 PM

".. where are the usual gang of pranksters, jokers and satirist politico wise guys and gals?"

Starting a thread late on a Friday night can be counter-productive. Posting here drops off significantly on weekends.

Don... I sit and watch the circus and ponder these questions for hours. My own observations lead me to these conclusions:

1)Only some of the extreme conservatives actually 'believe' all the stuff you hear about in polls. Some just assume that repeating negative talking points will gradually have an effect.... and they may be right.

2)The similarity of certain slogans & accusations make me almost certain that they come from only a few sources...perhaps Limbaugh being fed by the Koch brothers and consulting with Rove and Cruz... then having certain Fox News folk 'interview' those who can be trusted to repeat the latest slogan carefully. (I'd LOVE to be a fly on the wall during meetings when John Bohener gets his marching orders.)

3)There is a HUGE underground stream of money (partly in the form of campaign contributions) being fed to those conservative members of Congress who keep up the pretense.

4)" THEIR HEARTS DESIRES" include banning abortion, at the expense of other health care; continuing the process of voter suppression & Gerrymandering because they KNOW that demographics are not in their long-term interest unless they control Congress; installing judges... especially on SCOTUS... who will allow whatever it takes to establish fundamentalist Christianity to (at least) de facto influence the educational system; and enough control of mass media to promote whatever forms of conservative causes may arise.

5) I also believe that enough of the right-wing-nuts are not competent to understand their own goals & processes that they will continue to look foolish enough to the populace at large as they lock & load in circular firing squads that they are 'unlikely' to elect a president anytime soon. They do not look for intelligent, competent, educated candidates... and if they stumble upon one, he is quickly stifled in favor of purveyors of the **slogan de jour**. I sure hope #5 is right!

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 03:05 PM

IF?

All Afrikans would be slaves. There would be a bounty on redskin scalps. Bean-eating greasers could be shot in sight.

Women would not have the vote, and would be the chattels of their fathers or husbands. Abortion would be absolutely forbidden, even in cases of rape or to save the life of the mother. Single male rapists of single women would, on conviction be sentenced to marry their victims who would then become their property. Parents would be entitled to beat their children and husbands their wives.

Failing to profess Xtianity would be a capital crime.

New cars would have to have 7 litre v8 engines and be made in Detroit, and users of V8 Detroit irons and big SUVs would have the right to drive other cars off the road (and rape the drivers and passengers if female).

Mobo would be renamed "nigger music" and banned from radio ad TV.

The internet would be censored and every advocate of UnAmerican values would have to appear before the House Committee.

All supervision of the security business and "black ops" and mercenaries would become illegal.

Homosexuality would be a capital offence (in thought or deed) but all "spiritual" leaders would be allowed unlimited wives, of 11 years old or older, and the delivery of ones daughter into such a marriage (which she would not be allowed to refuse) would constitute a payment of tax (for so long as tax was collected.

Income tax would be abolished (except on the poor) as would public schooling and all vestiges of public health treatment.

Water would be sold at market prices.

There would be no public sewage facilities.

The US mail would be privatised.





I could go on.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Ebbie
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 04:16 PM

Interesting summary, RB. So now, what would the UK look like IF...?

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Bill D
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 04:41 PM

Oh... and #6) There are political positions which are mainly the products of personal psychological backgrounds, instead of reasoned analysis. This makes it harder to answer Donuel's questions in detail.
Some conservatives & 'libertarians' are just people who *don't like being told what to do*. This manifests itself as rationalizations involving positions against paying takes and 'regulation' of business practices...etc. Some people have no real idea why they resist regulation... they just react and try to invent a "slogan" later to justify it.

What America would look like if knee-jerk conservatives were totally enabled by pragmatic, opportunistic conservatives is....ummmm... not pleasant for us 'sensible types'.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 05:18 PM

Ebbie - we HAVE control of both houses by right-wing upper classes.

We are losing the NHS.

We are denouncing human rights.

We may be bounced out of the EU.

We are selling weapons to both Russia and Israel (while David Scumeron calls for sanctions at least against the former).

Proposals are afoot to water down both race relations law and sex discrimination law and key parts of the Equalities Act have never been instituted.

There are tax cuts for the rich, and cuts in the payout of national insurance for the poor. There are calls for "flat rate tax" (which axiomatically steals from the poor to give to the rich). The bigger your tax liability, the less of it (on average) you pay.

Justice is available only for the rich and the government daily attacks the rule of law (except for the very rich).

Concern for the future of the planet has become tirades against "green bullshit".

Cruelty to animals (like badger culling and fox hunting) is supported by the government.

Even the opposition (notionally left of centre) proposes more war on the poor in the name of "austerity" (the regime that gave us a longer recession than any other major economic country.

We kiss US (and Israeli) arse on the international stage and no longer have a viable military presence.


England? Nearly a third world country already.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Ebbie
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 05:44 PM

Oh, wow. Thanks, Richard.

Wonder if we - the world - will ever get things sorted?

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 10:16 PM

Republicans have always been in favor or relaxed immigration laws. More immigrants mean wages can be driven down.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Bill D
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 10:20 PM

The world is covered with human beings ... who are only a few thousand years out of savagery similar to those 'lower animals'. Now we have the deceiving veneer of technology over our _lower impulses.

Get things sorted? Too many have no wish to sort things except as it advances their own situation.

(27 more paragraphs available by request... or just fill in your own examples.. :>()

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Rapparee
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 10:43 PM

I forget who wrote it, but Civilization was once described as a beautiful city on the bank of a river down which constantly flows a trickle of blood -- sometimes the river overflows.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Bill D
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 10:49 PM

And *I* forget who first said: "Anthropologists have finally found the missing link between primitive apes and civilized man...... us."

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Aug 14 - 11:24 PM

Clemenceau or Wilde or Shaw (depending on whom you believe): America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Aug 14 - 12:23 AM

quote:
Republicans have always been in favor of relaxed immigration laws. More immigrants mean wages can be driven down.

Quite so. If the tea partiers ever get the limits they want on illegal immigration, the Republican establishment will make sure that legal immigration quotas are increased to make up for it. Their only real unifying principle is "rich get richer."

In my conversations with Republicans and Democrats, the Democrats always seem to genuinely believe and agree with whatever nonsense their leaders spout. But the Republicans always tell me that I have to read between the lines and realize what their leaders really mean, and they tell me that the public statements are calculated to appeal to dummies, since they're the majority and we need their votes. I've heard that from Republicans of even very low socio-economic class and education.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: gnu
Date: 03 Aug 14 - 11:02 AM

Bill D... "Anthropologists have finally found the missing link between primitive apes and civilized man...... us."

I like that one!

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Bill D
Date: 03 Aug 14 - 11:41 AM

"We have met the enemy, and he is us!"...

Pogo Possum

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Aug 14 - 05:08 PM

The question you are really asking is "What would have happened if the Confederacy had won", because that is what they want.

But how did that inversion happen? Lincoln was a Republican. The Democrats were the Sothern racists.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Bill D
Date: 03 Aug 14 - 06:08 PM

How? Values shift! Dixiecrats. They were the culmination of a process that began after the Civil War.
It really ended when LBJ signed the Civil Rights bill.

It really steams me when the Republicans continue to claim Lincoln whenever it suits their propaganda.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Greg F.
Date: 20 Aug 14 - 06:13 PM

Republicans throw a conniption over the teaching of U.S. history
by Michael Hiltzik
Los Angeles Times August 19, 2014


As students prepare to return to school in the next few weeks, there's no better time for a conservative freakout over education. The issue of the moment is a new outline, or "framework," issued by the College Board for advanced placement classes in US history.

The framework is here. According to a resolution passed at the recent summer meeting of the Republican National Committee meeting in Chicago, it "reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects." The RNC calls the framework, which is to be implemented for some 500,000 AP history students this fall, "biased and inaccurate."
Wartime experiences, such as the internment of Japanese Americans...and the decision to drop the atomic bomb raised questions about American values. - College Boards' instructional framework for AP US history classes

The RNC calls for Congress to de-fund the College Board, an independent body, until the course material can be "rewritten...to accurately reflect U.S. history without a political bias."

You can see what's happening here: it's a continuation of the old culture wars, transplanted to the AP history classroom and slathered over with political foam. One would expect the College Board, in the name of sound pedagogical principle, to treat this uproar with the inattention it deserves.

One would be wrong. The board's president, David Coleman, responded with a pusillanimous open letter praising the critics as "patriots who care deeply about what students learn" and bowing to the "principled confusion the new framework produced." If he thinks this sort of soft-soaping will mollify the mob, he's got another think coming.
lRelated A few (impolite) questions about the ice bucket challenge

Coleman also notes that he joined the College Board "after the new U.S. History framework was developed and released" (emphasis his), which is an odd way of standing up foursquare for years of work by one's colleagues. He sounds a bit like Gilbert and Sullivan's Duke of Plaza-Toro, who "when there was any fighting...led his regiment from behind."

The attack on the AP curriculum is being led by a retired history teacher from New Jersey named Larry Krieger, whose classroom approach seems to have been based on filling his students' heads with facts and names and dates, underscoring what he calls America's "mission to spread democracy" and with due attention to qualities such as "the valor or heroism of American soldiers" in World War II.

Krieger soon linked up with the Christian conservative group Concerned Women for America, and a campaign was born. On August 4 he participated in a conference call with other conservative activists sponsored by CWA (a recording can be found here), from which the above quotes were taken. He mentioned his rising anger at the framework's failing to mention any of his personal historical heroes, such as the Puritan leader John Winthrop, whose "city on a hill" sermon "sets the theme of American exceptionalism," Krieger said.

The College Board's Coleman maintains that the attack on the framework is based on a "significant misunderstanding"; the framework is an outline which AP history teachers are expected to fill in with facts, dates, and concepts, encouraging their students to develop their critical faculties. It's not proscriptive--just because a particular person or document isn't mentioned doesn't mean he, she, or it is to be excluded from the curriculum--quite the contrary.

In the words of an open letter written by the authors of the framework and published Monday by Education Week, the AP history course is "an advanced, college-level course--not an introductory U.S. history course--and is not meant to be students' first exposure to the fundamental narrative of U.S. history."

By the time students get to AP, the authors observe, they're expected to know about the historical figures whose absence from the framework Krieger bemoans, such as Benjamin Franklin, Dwight Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King. And teachers at this advanced level are assumed to have the tools to put such personages in context.

"Many of the comments we have heard about the framework," the authors state pointedly, "reflect either a misunderstanding of U.S. history or a very limited faith in history teachers' command of their subject matter." Unlike the College Board's Coleman, they don't pussyfoot around with references to the "principled confusion" of the critics; they refer to "uninformed criticisms," which is certainly closer to the mark.

But is Krieger "uninformed," or something else? His description of the framework during that conference call certainly seemed incomplete.

He suggested that the document's treatment of World War II was limited to a line about how "wartime experiences, such as the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, debates over race and segregation, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb raised questions about American values" (which sounds accurate enough).

But he doesn't mention that the very next passage in the framework is this: "The United States and its allies achieved victory over the Axis powers through a combination of factors, including allied political and military cooperation, industrial production, technological and scientific advances, and popular commitment to advancing democratic ideals."

A resolution by ideologues based on this crabbed and incomplete reading of the framework is going to look idiotic, and the RNC's resolution fills that bill.

The College Board has taken the additional step of releasing a sample AP U.S. history test to demonstrate the inclusiveness of its approach. But Krieger, for one, isn't satisfied. He paged through it last week with Newsweek, settling on a series of questions keyed to a famous 1890 photograph by Jacob Riis of squalid conditions in a New York tenement.

One question asked is "Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?" The correct answer is, "An increase in Progressive reform activity."

Kreiger comments, "That's historically true but note that progressives are going to be the heroes in this narrative."

There's your bottom line. In the conservative educational world, historical truth will take you only so far. It's the ideological narrative they're concerned with, and if it doesn't conform to their vision of an America invariably shining the light of freedom and plenty on the world, it must be "biased and inaccurate."

Teachers, and the College Board, should be standing up for principle here, and beating back efforts like this to smother the broad, multi-dimensional realities of American history within a candy-colored shell.


http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-republicans-throw-a-conniption-20140819-column.html#page=1

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST,Mrr at work
Date: 20 Aug 14 - 09:10 PM

Yeah, I had a colleague back in the late 90's who took his kid to the American History museum and came back disgusted because instead of Manifest Destiny they had Genocide.

I prefer real history being taught rather than the winner's version...

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 05:50 AM

Real history has still to be written. Mostly it's Victors History - and I write as the originator of the Franco-German project to correct matters by pointing out not only how Country A won, but also how Country B lost, a much more valuable lesson as we should learn from our mistakes.
The important thing is to preserve our heritage, lest a mis-step lead us astray.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST,sciencegeek
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 09:27 AM

"It always shocks me that no matter how racist Americans are, they are even MORE sexist."

black men got the right to vote 80 years before white or black women... and we still have to fight for equal pay for equal work... only those who are unionized can expect the same pay rate...

what the extreme right wants is either corporate serfdom or wage slaves... money is not enough for the elite few... they need power & control over everything and everyone that can't stand up for themselves. "I owe my soul to the company store..."

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: beardedbruce
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 11:07 AM

But on the other hand, look at the ACTUAL impact of 2008, the great victory of the progressives:


"But the real scorecard on the Senate Democrats elected in 2008 is in the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey data. While all Democrats claimed to be champions of the middle class and defenders of minorities and women, census data show how their program did not live up to their campaign promises.

Since the Senate Democratic Class of 2008 took control, the average real income of the poorest one-fifth of American families has declined every year, falling to $15,534 in 2012 from $16,962 in 2008 (the 2013 data will be released Sept. 16). The average real income of the lowest quintile of Americans is now below the level it was in 1968, the year when the War on Poverty began its spending surge.

The next-highest income quintile, often referred to as the working class, has also experienced a continuous decline in real income since January 2009. The average income of these Americans has fallen 6.5% and is now $1,182 lower than it was when President Reagan left office.

The third quintile—America's middle class—has seen its average income decline to $62,464 from $65,672. More than half of this decline has occurred since the recovery officially began in the second quarter of 2009.

Losses for the typical household, as measured by real median income, have been especially heavy in the very states where 2008 Senate Democrats are up for re-election. In Alaska, household income in 2012 was 7.2% lower than it was at the end of 2008, falling back to its 1988 level. In Arkansas, household income has dropped 8.2%. Colorado households have 13.5% less income than they did before the Democratic Congress and President Obama transformed America. The same is true in Louisiana, where household income has fallen 7.9%. And in North Carolina, household income has declined 10.2%—falling to the lowest level in the 28 years the Census Bureau has provided state-by-state income data.

Census data also show the progressive program has failed women and minorities. Married women, unmarried women and women living alone all saw their incomes fall. Under the Obama administration, the median income of women has fallen more during the recovery than it did during the recession, an unprecedented economic failure in postwar America.

The real median income of African-American households has fallen by 9.5%, more than any other major census classification. Hispanic income has fallen, especially for middle-income Hispanic families, whose income has declined every year since 2008. According to the latest census data, the income of middle-class Hispanics is lower than whenJimmy Carter was president.

The Democratic Party's great political victory in 2008 led to the realization of a progressive agenda in the making for a century. But that agenda resulted in economic failure for working Americans. It failed as it has always failed: Progressive policies buy votes but destroy prosperity. The Senate Democratic Class of 2008 and the entire Obama program are now endangered because their program has hurt the very people it was supposed to benefit.:

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: GUEST,sciencegeek
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 12:54 PM

interesting use of "math" and history... it takes BOTH the House AND the Senate to pass bills... so the ONLY time since the 2008 election that they was an actual chance of progress based on Democratic control of both House & Senate was 2009 & 2010. Since the 2010 election we have had the Tea Party blocking just about any reform they could in addition to a Republican Party that had clearly stated it had no intention of working with the duly elected President and would do everything in their power to make him a one term President.

Please, oh, please explain just how the heck this situation is the fault of the 2008 Senate??? You can't... maybe you should send in aresume to Fox News, they eat this nonsense right up.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Greg F.
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 01:44 PM

Bullshot doesn't need explanations or facts - he's a true fantasist, as long as the fantasy in question coincides with his delusion of the moment.

Subject: RE: BS: What would America look like IF ... ?
From: Ed T
Date: 21 Aug 14 - 03:22 PM

What would America look like IF-it had have been succefully overcome from the north of the border, not the south. (Assuming the meaning of the op is the USA, not North and South America, which also exists, to a greater degree, on the Globe).