older, anyway. wiser? not by a long shot. but i don't actually believe this guy.

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@OwlInASack not without being delusional to start with, or hitting your head on someting really sharp in the interim.

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For the record, our middle class is still by far the largest class with well over 51 percent of the working population. Then again, that term is only relative to different conditions one is in. One of the biggest is where you live. Single with no kids living in West Virginia, making 45k a year and you are upper middle class.. Move to LA and keep everything else the same and you are lower working class. Add a wife and child and you become poor. lt is all relative. [finance.zacks.com]

Yes, but that fake president is out of office now..

@Captain_Feelgood Well Captain, you have been drinking too much feelgood. I was once a GOP member myself but it will never happen again. Let me give you a clue here. Talking of Obama or Hillary is simply a diversion. Neither of them are in power right now.

I thought we started losing civil liberties during HW Bush thats why we called him king George

both sides have most certainly not gone off the deep end. this both sides crap has got to stop; it's not true. the other side is NOT equally ridiculous. what is ridiculous about not wanting to pay money we need for infrastructure and the social safety net on an immoral wall that destroys natural habitats, steals property from homeowners and will NOT STOP DRUG TRAFFIC? the democrats are not asking for a single thing except to open the damned government back up. trump has not OFFERED a single thing. he has shut down the government and it holding america hostage for his (stamp foot here) waaaaallll. in what way is that a sign of the left going off the deep end? and by the way there are no conservatives. what do the right wingers conserve? not money: they give tax breaks to gazillionaires and then say oh no we're broke now, we'd better cut social security and medicare, oh but we need money for a wall.... is that conservative? no, it's regressive and it's greedy. the democrats want to give everyone health care, keep the post office open, not destroy the environment for the sake of a few bucks (none of which go to ordinary people) and NOT turn the public school system into a "path to god." wow, how extreme of them. who knew?

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from msnbc:

"In the case of the current government shutdown, however, there’s an inescapable detail: Democrats aren’t asking for anything. Consider the competing postures:

"Congressional Democrats: We just want to re-open the government. We don’t have any extraneous policy demands and we’re asking for no concessions.

"The Trump White House and congressional Republicans: We’ll consider re-opening the government if Democrats approve billions of dollars in spending for an unpopular border wall.

"To portray this with 'both sides share the blame' commentary isn’t just misleading, it’s also an enormous favor to the party that deserves responsibility.

"Indeed, to a very extent, it actually encourages the president to try to govern through hostage strategies because it signals to the White House that if Trump relies on extortion, the political mainstream will suggest Democrats give him something for his troubles. If not, they’ll be presented to the public as recalcitrant and unreasonable.

"The push for some kind of 'compromise' between the parties is misguided, in much the same way it’d be a mistake to call for a hostage-taker and law enforcement to strive for a middle ground."

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@genessa , those aren't the things that are off the deep end, though. I'm far more likely to side with liberals than conservatives but there are things done in the name of liberalism that I just can't agree with.
The constant victim-hood for example. The insistence that marijuana cures everything. The insistence that anyone who disagrees with anything liberal must be a racist, the demonizing of everyone on the other side.
Those are actions that parallel the extremists on the right.
Comparing moderate and logical liberal actions to the extremist right and calling the left noble is the exact same thing conservatives are doing. Conservatives bark that liberals are all socialist, drug-addicted baby killers and claim they are righteous.
Both sides need to stop the ridiculous rhetoric.

@heymoe2001 but liberals do NOT insist that marijuana cures everything. we really don't. where did you hear that we do? from the right. the victimhood of the left is ALSO a rightwing talking point. and we do not insist that anyone who disagrees with us is a racist. we insist that racists are racists. as for demonizing people on the other side, if they'd just stop marching with the kkk and mocking tribal elders and raping girls and women and pretending we need a wall to keep isis from flying to guatemala and then walking barefoot for a thousand miles or so pretending to be frightened women and children, maybe we would stop demonizing them! there is NO PARALLEL. that is another rightwing talking point. and... who called the left noble? we don't think in those terms. we're just trying to get the madness to stop and some actual goodness to start. you've been listening to trolls.

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@genessa I find it strange that some think the left has caused a loss of civil liberties when such liberties did not arrive through the right. In fact, using religion to fight abortion for any reasons, the right will do or claim anything to get that child born. Once birth occurs the kid is on his own in every way possible.

@DenoPenno propaganda is strong, and not always direct; indirect propaganda has extra strength.

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@heymoe2001 I'm fairly liberal, but I would have been fine with Bob Dole as president in '96. I would have voted for McCain over Gore in 2000 if Bush hadn't pulled the dirty trick of saying McCain was for breast cancer.
[nytimes.com]

I would have considered voting for McCain in 2008 if he hadn't picked Palin as running mate.

I like virtually everything John Kasich said on Bill Maher a couple weeks ago. But I think Kasich has as much chance of winning the Republican nomination as I do. But if he did, I would vote for him.

I don't think marijuana cures everything, but I do think it is effective in pain management, which does seem to be a huge problem in this country considering the "opioid epidemic".

I do think racism is concentrated in the Republican party, which is why they continually shrug off birtherism, "good people on both sides", "get that son of a bitch off the field right now", etc. He knows exactly what he's doing--fanning the flames of latent racism to gin up his base. The tone is set from the top. Are we Democrats to blame for our reaction to it? Maybe. But maybe it is to a large extent also justified.

As many have said, not all Republicans are racists, but if you are racist...you are probably not a Democrat. Is that reverse racism? I don't see it that way, as prominent leaders in racist movements all publicly support Trump. Trump even pretended he didn't know who David Duke was during the campaign, and refused to reject his support. (Soon after a video surfaced from years before where Trump clearly knew who both David Duke and the KKK were; pretending you don't know who prominent racists are in order to garner their support and those who support them--ie, racists--is a bit racist too, isn't it?)

@genessa , it's easy to say the left is balanced and fair when one is on the left. The folks who watch Fox news really believe that IT is balanced and fair because it backs up their own prejudices.
The left is just as guilty of refusing to see its own prejudices and insists it has none.
I left the democratic party during the primaries. I can't side with the nonsense I hear on that side either.

@heymoe2001 no, you have it backwards. it's easy to be on the left when you realize it is not balanced and yet works to be balanced, and tries hard to be fair. there may be some people who don't think about it much and just vote leftward because they're used to it. i don't think that represents most of us. the democratic primaries were business as usual. there was nothing especially nonsensical about it, and no matter what you think of hillary (meaning how much or little of the faked-up baggage people have attached to her for decades, mostly thanks to david bossie), she wouldn't be taking us out of nato, appointing department secretaries who have vowed to destroy their respective departments, hanging out exclusively with criminals (or tolerating criminals if one was discovered) or palling around with putin. if the senate were run by democrats, we would not have unqualified men endangering our liberties in scotus, we would not have a government shutdown over a silly and dangerous wall, and... well, THINK about it. you couldn't side with nonsense, eh? what have we got NOW?

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@genessa , I didn't side with what we have now. I voted for Clinton in both the primary and the election. The democrats handed the election to a buffoon because half of them couldn't take not getting their way. They held their collective breath and pitched a tantrum and refused to vote for the only candidate on either side from the primaries to the end who had experience and know-how, and, frankly, the balls to get things done. It was childish.

@heymoe2001 when you say the democrats, you mean the voters, not the party, which is not generally what we mean when we say THE democrats. a lot of them were not actually democrats but let's pretend they were: even so, hillary got almost three million more votes then trump. that wasn't enough, though it should've been; jill stein made a dent, and nonvoters did too, but you know what? i can't totally blame the nonvoters because voter suppression was MASSIVE, and i believe it had a MUCH bigger effect than anything else. i think an awful lot of nonvoters wanted to vote and were prevented from doing so, and if we don't do something about that, it'll happen again.

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