chet wrote:

steve wrote:

It's not like I need to look very far to find despicable shit in the man's world view. He's a tax-cut-obsessed, states'-rights, anti-abortion, anti-public education, anti-welfare right-winger. Fuck him.

Its true hes anti-abortion. I dont agree with this one.

Hes not anti-public education though; hes just against it at the federal level. Rick pointed out why hes against this. We've been throwing more and more money into the system over the years, and were getting worse results. This is a quote from him from a 2002 newsletter -

However, the voucher debate really ignores the more important question of whether public schools should be run by federal or local government. The Constitution does not authorize any federal involvement in education; Article I grants Congress no authority to create, fund, or regulate schools at all. Therefore, under the 10th Amendment public education should be purely a state and local matter. This means Congress should not be taxing you to fund a huge federal education bureaucracy that exercises dictatorial control over curriculum and standards nationwide. Those tax dollars should be left with parents and local voters, who can best decide how to allocate precious education resources. Public schools should be funded at the local level with local tax dollars, where waste is minimized and accountability is greatest. The failed federal system of public school funding has become a bureaucratic black hole, where the majority of tax dollars never reach the classroom.

Whats wrong with states rights?

federal oversight into public education funding is very important- to eliminate glaring, wide disparities in schooling from state to state. for example, kentucky and massachusetts generally have very good public education. louisiana does not because at the state level louisiana made some decisions that benefitted privately funded, religious and/or charter schools (and there's the racist factor that is more insidious that I won't get into). if this were regulated at the federal level that each state should spend x$ on each child for textbooks, computers, quality teachers, infrastructure and so on, those shitty schools in Louisiana wouldn't be so shitty.

isn't this "states rights" stuff the same verbage the confederate south spewed in the 1850's? Not that I think that there's anything wrong with states having a say, but there absolutely has to be a median of how money is spent, and accountability nation-wide.

In this case the intention is that every american gets a good, fair public education. If louisiana (or any state for that matter) can't educate their poor, then hell yeah, the federal govt. should step in.

oh, and since we are voting Crap-Not Crap on Ron Paul.

He's CRAP- the "Lyndon LaRouche Republibert" Nutbag of this decade.

He also has no chance in hell at winning.

[quote="mr.arrison"]

He's CRAP- the "Lyndon LaRouche Republibert" Nutbag of this decade.

[quote]

Hes way different than LaRouche. LaRouche is for the war on drugs, believes that the holocausts deaths were overstated, etc etc. I wont waste anymore time talking about LaRouche though.

mr.arrison, there's also this to consider in the "Ron Paul is against public education" debate. He's a signatory of a charter that says this.

Website for the Alliance For The Separation Of School & State wrote:We believe parents, and not the state, should be in charge of their children's education. That control may take many forms and levels of involvement, but the state will never be part of the picture.

If this seems like an impossible idea, consider that 8 million children already learn free of state control. We're not starting from scratch here. The snowball of educational independence is already rolling.

Emphasis mine this time.

chet wrote:

mr.arrison wrote:
He's CRAP- the "Lyndon LaRouche Republibert" Nutbag of this decade.

Hes way different than LaRouche. LaRouche is for the war on drugs, believes that the holocausts deaths were overstated, etc etc. I wont waste anymore time talking about LaRouche though.

I know he's "different", but he's an un-electable nutbag all the same.

Rick Reuben wrote:I seriously doubt you could prove that the working poor are not on line.

Rick, you are welcome to come to Baltimore and see entire neighborhoods of some working (and mostly unemployed) poor people who are not online. In fact there are swaths of the city where Internet access isn't even offered as an option. These parts of the city are not vacant- although they may look like post-WWII Dresden. Even utility poles are sawed down and sold on the black market to buy drugs.Does the city replace them quickly? No. I can sure as hell tell you these poor people don't have hi-speed or broadband wireless.

America has significant poverty too. If you think not, you aren't looking or opening your eyes.

Rick Reuben wrote:

alex maiolo wrote: You have plenty of time to post to this board from your computer

The only way to estimate how much 'time to post' skronk has ( unless Alex is walking alongside skronk throughout his day ) is to total up the number of skronk's posts that Alex sees on his computer. There is no difference between 'number of posts' and 'time to post' in this context. The fact that nihil rose from the dead to complain about it makes me laugh, but the fact that Alex agreed with him is startling. Use your heads.

Whatever.
Almost 11 posts a day, every day?
.05% of all daily posts, out of all of the people who post here? Shit, even our hero Kerble only post 7-8 a day on average.

My point, and I stand by it, is that the impoverished aren't spending a large portion of their day doing things like posting to the PRF.
I don't care how many posts a person makes in a day - I really don't - but it does say something about the amount of free time a guy has, no?

Yes, it's a judgement call that I may be incorrect about. However, in this day and age, when people are genuinely poor and underprivileged, my bullshit detector goes nuts when someone who meets this profile claims to be poor. It's not like I'm calling anyone a rich kid, spoiled or anything - I'd never be so bold. I'm just saying 95% of the world could only be so lucky to be so poor.

-A

Ron Paul's lack of popularity or media coverage have nothing to do with a Vast Media Conspiracy to drown out his voice. It has to do with the fact that most sane people simply cannot agree with the claims of a lunatic.

The fact that he's a racist is indeed disgusting, but it weighs very little in my utter contempt for him. So don't bring that up as a straw man argument. We hate Ron Paul because his positions are lunatic.

And, by the way, every time I use the word "lunatic" as an adjective, I am, in my mind, stressing the second syllable, which makes it sound different from when it's used as a noun. I love this little trick, which I just learned a few months ago. This is why I use it so often in this thread.

Rick Reuben wrote:The Left is begging for excuses to reject Ron Paul.

You keep saying this like there aren't obvious he's-a-right-wing-asshole things about his professed positions that we on the left would reject. We don't need excuses.

Rick Reuben wrote:Even if Paul's success is partially attributable to multiple voting, that still means he's popular.

Yes, with people who don't understand democracy.

EDIT: Sorry if that came off a little terse, I'm balls-deep in a difficult assignment right now.