I am probably going to open a whole new can worms here. I might regret opening later, but some of the topics being discussed really got me thinking about things. One of the things said that really kind of got me going on this was:

Pattygreen: Christians (usually conservative republicans) for the most part try to live moral, virtuous, nonsinful lives.

I am not a Christian and I live a moral, virtuous, and for the most part nonsinful life. I know several people who live the same, and are not Christian, and have conservative beliefs.

Cleo's Mom: First of all, "conservative republican" is redundant, because they are all conservative. I don't think there are any moderate republicans left particularly among those elected to office.

However, I just wonder if it is MORAL to mislead or outright lie, because listen to what these conservative republicans have said:

Dana Perino said on Fox: We did not have a domestic attack during bush's administration.

A month later Mary Matalin said: bush inherited 9/11 from Clinton.

Yesterday, Rudy Giuliani said that we never had a domestic attack under bush but we had one under Obama.

Now, I ask you - do these people think the American public is really that stupid? Apparently. Those on the right just make things up and keep repeating it. And when they repeat it often enough eventually some people begin to believe it.

They reduce things to some emotional, hate filled sound bite: death panels, obamacare, socialism, hitler, nazi.

This is because they are unable to engage in meaningful, intelligent, fact-based discussions. Maybe they don't want to do that because they don't have the facts on their side.

First I am a moderate Republican. I do tend to lean a little more to the right, but on some issues I lean to the left. Some things I can lean pretty right, and others I lean pretty far left. It really depends on the issue. I'd like to think that would make me moderate. I know many people who are moderate Republicans also. So we are still out there. There are some politicians who are still moderate also.

Second just because you are a Republican does not mean that you can not have a intelligent, meaningful, fact-based conversation. That is like saying liberals have their heads in clouds and live in fantasy nerf world filled with rainbows and butterflies.

Both sides sling mud back and forth. Both sides have their hate filled idiots. Both sides have their good and bad points. Both sides LIE, LIE, and LIE some more.

I get so sick and tired of hearing about how the Republicans have screwed everything up...I mean really they did it all alone.....no help from the left at all???

I personally feel that if you lean too far left or right you can't have a very grip on reality, and when our politicans lean too far left or right it's not good for our country either way. I hope someday too see more moderate politicans in office.

You post bible quotes all the time when they suit you. While you want the government to be involved in certain parts of what the bible says (like homosexuality and abortion) but you don't want the government to be involved in what it says about helping the poor.

LAWS are not in the same catagory as GIVING. Laws need to be made for the safety and social governing of mankind. Giving is required of each person as he or she seems fit. "God loves a cheerful giver." Government can not regulate what each individual desires to 'give' of their own heart. And government should not take what they feel is appropriate from the people and do our giving for us.

And our laws are made and based on what people in our secular society deem appropriate for a civil society. You want the sins listed in the bible to automatically become law. That's not how our government works, nor should it.

While there are some things in the bible, like murder and stealing, that have become laws, these would have become law without the bible because they are necessary to maintain order.

And government taking (taxes) from people and then distributing them as necessary IS EXACTLY WHAT OUR COUNTRY, CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT IS ABOUT. For you to say otherwise is a very naive statement and shows a lack of understanding about how our government works and is supposed to work by law.

But our government does not and cannot tell you what to give personally to charity.

Not true. You just think so because abortion and homosexuality are not on your list of sins (wrong doings). Murder, stealing, lying.... these are probably on your list, so they are okay with you to regulate with laws. Well, they are also biblical principles. Biblical principles like abortion and homosexuality. We need a guideline (the bible) to tell us what is right and what is wrong. Without it, there will be chaos. If a man feels that lying is okay, then when he gets on the witness stand in court, he can lie and whose to say he can't. If we can't make it a law, then anyone will be able to lie and suffer no consequence for it. It is the same with every issue out there.

Sins and laws are two different things. Religious institutions have the right to tell their congregation what they believe to be sins. But that does not mean that there should be automatic laws against what religious institutions believe are sins.

There are many religions practiced in this country. You cannot discriminate for or against any one of them with regard to what THEY believe are sins. Therefore, if we start allowing ANY religious institution to determine what sins should become laws, then we would have to allow ALL religious institutions to determine what sins should become laws.

Despite the fact that you believe this nation was founded on christianity, any legal test of this would require that no religion be discriminated against with this regard, and think of how many different practices call themselves "religion" in this country.

• 2 comments on Paul Krugman: hvance
  
  I don't know where to start in commenting on the article on Paul. He is in my opinion, a socialist, plain and simple. After seeing every attempt at socialism fail miserably, who cares what Paul Krugman says? He is wrong in his approach. The man is a failure in his profession.
  
  
• Patrick Mulligan
  
  Paul Krugman is partisan political hack with no credibility outside of his own far left socialist circles. He's an advocate of Keynesian economic ideas that have been abandoned even by modern neo-Keynesian economists (who are still wrong, but at least have the decency to try to repackage Keynesian ideas in light of modern economic reality). Had he been born 50 years earlier he could have been one of FDR's socialist Utopian "brain trust" lackeys, and he would have been considered a pretty hip, forward thinking dude. Unfortunately for him, he came on the scene a generation later when his beloved economic ideas had since led to stagflation and astronomical government debt, and weren't considered quite so fresh anymore.
  
  

The people who made the buses for Waterbury already had the job of making buses. They make buses for cities all over the nation. The $64 million dollars worth of stimulus money didn't stimulate a darn thing! It was wasted! It created zero jobs!

Patrick Mulligan

Paul Krugman is partisan political hack with no credibility outside of his own far left socialist circles. He's an advocate of Keynesian economic ideas that have been abandoned even by modern neo-Keynesian economists (who are still wrong, but at least have the decency to try to repackage Keynesian ideas in light of modern economic reality). Had he been born 50 years earlier he could have been one of FDR's socialist Utopian "brain trust" lackeys, and he would have been considered a pretty hip, forward thinking dude. Unfortunately for him, he came on the scene a generation later when his beloved economic ideas had since led to stagflation and astronomical government debt, and weren't considered quite so fresh anymore.

And who is Patrick Mulligan? Just some right wing poster who posted his opinion on the Intellectual Conservative website.

A poster? :rolleyes2: How many nobel prizes in economics did HE receive? His opinions mean absolutely nothing!! Zero credibility. :thumbup:

These last couple days the right wing has really been giving me something to laugh about. From Palin talking from the hand to the homeschoolers who can't spell to some dumb poster. Keep it coming.

If you took Bush's worst year in office it was $2.7 trillion spent. In 2009, Obama's first and only year, he spent $6.2 trillion. When Obama says he is going to reduce the debt he means he's going to spend less than what he spent the prior year. So, even if he cuts his debt in half, he'd still be spending $3.1 trillion that year which is more than Bush's worst year of spending! It's his way of being deceitful to you people. It only 'sounds' good, he's a great talker. but the reality is it's worse than bush's spending. By the year 2012, our debt will be estimated at $27 trillion! I'm not 'for' Bush. I'm for less spending.

Bush Deficit vs. Obama Deficit in Pictures

President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious. The Washington Post has a great graphic which helps put President Obama’s budget deficits in context of President Bush’s.

What’s driving Obama’s unprecedented massive deficits? Spending. Riedl details:

• President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add another $1 trillion.
  
• President Bush began a string of expensive finan­cial bailouts. President Obama is accelerating that course.
  
• President Bush created a Medicare drug entitle­ment that will cost an estimated $800 billion in its first decade. President Obama has proposed a $634 billion down payment on a new govern­ment health care fund.
  
• President Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation. Presi­dent Obama would double it.
  
• President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. President Obama has already in­creased this spending by 20 percent.
  
• President Bush tilted the income tax burden more toward upper-income taxpayers. President Obama would continue that trend.
  
• President Bush presided over a $2.5 trillion increase in the public debt through 2008. Setting aside 2009 (for which Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for an additional $2.6 trillion in public debt), President Obama’s budget would add $4.9 trillion in public debt from the beginning of 2010 through 2016.
  

UPDATE: Many Obama defenders in the comments are claiming that the numbers above do not include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years. They most certainly do. While Bush did fund the wars through emergency supplementals (not the regular budget process), that spending did not simply vanish. It is included in the numbers above. Also, some Obama defenders are claiming the graphic above represents biased Heritage Foundation numbers. While we stand behind the numbers we put out 100%, the numbers, and the graphic itself, above are from the Washington Post. We originally left out the link to WaPo. It has now been added.

CLARIFICATION: Of course, this Washington Post graphic does not perfectly delineate budget surpluses and deficits by administration. President Bush took office in January 2001, and therefore played a lead role in crafting the FY 2002-2008 budgets. Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for the FY 2009 budget deficit that overlaps their administrations, before President Obama assumes full budgetary responsibility beginning in FY 2010. Overall, President Obama’s budget would add twice as much debt as President Bush over the same number of years.

President Obama wouldn't have to spend as much as he has if he didn't have to clean up bush's economic messes, among others.

patty: "The people who made the buses for Waterbury already had the job of making buses.:

Regarding the bus plant employees - they wouldn't have jobs if there were no bus orders. They don't make buses just to give people jobs - the buses have to be sold.

I know of a bus plant in that has been in business for 40 years and was closed because there were not enough orders. It is a small town and that plant employed a large percentage of that little burg's workers. Oh, and they manufactured buses for schools all across the country too.

Your comment defies logic.

So, you're saying that without that cities order of buses, this particular bus making company would have gone out of business? Who says? Face it! That stimulus money was supposed to stimulate NEW jobs for the over 10% of Americans who are out of work, and it didn't stimulate SQUAT! All it did was buy a few buses for some city. This is happening with most of our money all over the nation, you can bet on it. That is why our unemployment rates are going up along with the debt of this nation. You liberals will not even admit when the government wastes a dime, cause your precious Obama might be criticized for it, and we can't have that, now can we?

President Obama wouldn't have to spend as much as he has if he didn't have to clean up bush's economic messes, among others.

Yawn! If you say that one more time, you might really begin to believe it.

As a matter of fact, whenever I am in a financial mess at my house, I go shopping. I just spend some more, and max out my cards. It always lifts my depression.:thumbup::thumbdown:

Yawn! If you say that one more time, you might really begin to believe it.

As a matter of fact, whenever I am in a financial mess at my house, I go shopping. I just spend some more, and max out my cards. It always lifts my depression.:thumbup::thumbdown:

It's not just my opinion, the economists, who study these things, say it. You have to spend during a time of recession to get money into the economy, to get banks loaning money again to small businesses so they can meet payroll and buy inventory, etc..

Money moves our economy and it wasn't there before the stimulus. The stimulus helped get the economy moving and saved or created millions of jobs.

I don't agree. I believe that if you left it alone, it would have bounced back on its own. Do you really think that Americans would have kept from spending their money indefinitely? There would have been some discomfort, and some job losses, and some problems, and some sacrificing to do, but no one would have starved. There would have been no debt, that this country can't get out of either.

I don't agree. I believe that if you left it alone, it would have bounced back on its own. Do you really think that Americans would have kept from spending their money indefinitely? There would have been some discomfort, and some job losses, and some problems, and some sacrificing to do, but no one would have starved. There would have been no debt, that this country can't get out of either.

You might not agree but that doesn't make you right. Because you're not, you're wrong.

Exclusive: Obama stimulus reduced our pain, experts say

By Paul Wiseman and Barbara Hansen, USA TODAY

President Obama's stimulus package saved jobs — but the government still needs to do more to breathe life into the economy, according to USA TODAY's quarterly survey of 50 economists.

Unemployment would have hit 10.8% — higher than December's 10% rate — without Obama's $787 billion stimulus program, according to the economists' median estimate. The difference would translate into another 1.2 million lost jobs.

But almost two-thirds of the economists said the government should do more to spur job growth. Suggestions included suspending payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, increasing spending on infrastructure, enacting a flat tax on income and extending jobless benefits.

The economists expect the jobless rate to remain in double digits until the third quarter.

David Berson, chief economist at PMI Group, worries that the housing market and the economy will suffer when the government's tax credit to first-time home buyers expires in April and the Fed stops supporting the housing market by purchasing mortgage-backed securities by March 31.

Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services, is relatively optimistic. He sees unemployment falling to 8.9% by the fourth quarter of this year. Cheney says other economists are "nervous Nellies," shell-shocked by the length and depth of this downturn. They've forgotten that "the deeper the recession, the faster you come out of it."

But Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial, says creating jobs is tougher than it was the last time unemployment passed 10% in the early '80s. The reason: The 1981-82 recession was engineered by the Federal Reserve to tame inflation through high interest rates. The Fed brought the economy back simply by reversing course and cutting rates.

This time, the Fed has pushed short-term rates to near zero and has flooded markets with money. But the financial system is so damaged by the Wall Street meltdown that it isn't converting easy money into loans and economic growth: "It's like the Fed is dropping money from a helicopter and it's getting caught in the trees," Swonk says.

The economists don't expect Fed chief Ben Bernanke to take his foot off the accelerator — and push rates up — until the third quarter. So they don't expect any change in the Fed's zero-interest-rate policy when its Open Market Committee meets Tuesday and Wednesday.

"Bernanke and his colleagues are very committed to doing the right thing," Cheney says. They learned from Japan's long 1990s slump, during which policymakers kept declaring premature victory and raising rates and taxes: "It's really important not to snuff out a recovery before it gets going."

I wonder if any of those 1.2 million whose jobs were saved by the stimulus are the ones holding up the signs that say "teabag the liberals before they teabag you"?

patty: "So, you're saying that without that cities order of buses, this particular bus making company would have gone out of business?"

We were taking about jobs. Without orders, people lose their jobs. Without orders, companies can't hire new employees or keep old ones. If you have particular statistics on this particular bus company that indicates that they have more than enough orders to keep all their employees and hire new ones, I'd be very surprised.

And you go on to say that our umployment rates are going up. But that is not what the latest studies say.

patty: "You liberals will not even admit when the government wastes a dime, cause your precious Obama might be criticized for it, and we can't have that, now can we?"

Now that's just plain silly. We criticize anybody who deserves it. You appear to have lost it a little in this post of yours.