Alaska Darin

The number comes from a validated source. I love how you liberals always have some worse case scenario to fall back on as your rationale for changing the entire fabric of society. Maybe you should concentrate that on the public employees who're getting pensions that average 75% of their 4 highest earning years and earmark that money to some of the "grandpa butt wipers" you seem to need to curry favor for. I am. I come from a big Irish family. My relatives are cops, health care workers, teachers, etc. My son is a Master's degreed therapist who works with the mentally handicapped for a pittance because the government you love so much refuses to provide oversight on the programs they've put in place to supposedly "help". He's writing a book on all the things he sees, it'll likely be ignored and cost him his career because NO ONE likes the truth these days. One of my sisters is a Speech Therapist. Another is a senior RN at one of the top hospitals in the country. All of us come from an extremely poor upbringing with parents who taught us not to take a handout but to work hard and good things would happen. My wife is retired veteran who is now a teacher at an inner-city school and could turn the stomach of even the most hard core liberal with the tales from her day-to-day and all the corruption/malfeasance in the public education system. But it's the corporations that are ruining America, right big government corporation liberal? Sure you could, you !@#$ing coward. I'd eat you for lunch and pick my teeth with what was left of you. Don't pretend you're anything but a pretender in this game.

The average "nursing home" worker has a high school diploma and a few weeks of training. They make about $25k a year. The problem isn't the wage. The problem is the cost of things has continued to skyrocket because government continues to !@#$ things up by trying to control everything. They've driven up the cost of housing, food, cars, insurance, and medical care because they simply won't let the market work the way it should. Your solution is even more of the same ****! You'd have a better chance of success if you prayed to the God of Powdered Deer Penis. It's like ObamaCare. It fixes NOTHING but has THOUSANDS of pages of bull ****. You liberals trumpet it like it's the Arc of the !@#$ing Covanent but there's not a single provision in it that does anything to address the actual problems that cause health care to be expensive. My wife and I each made far less than $25k a year for the first few years we were married. We did without a second car, cable, long distance, and various other "luxuries" that the average American enjoyed. We were both military, so we at least had ok (not great) health care but we were so young we rarely used it. I worked an additional job the first SIX years I was in the military so we could save enough money to buy a house and so my wife could finish her Bachelor's while still on Active Duty. We were both putting in upwards of 70 hour weeks and living in the highest cost of living area in the United States. Sell your !@#$ing bull **** somewhere else. You !@#$ing liberals piss and moan when people give wildlife handouts because it teaches them to be dependent and eventually ends their lives but can't see the correlation to the welfare state that you've created with over a half century of the same abject !@#$ing stupidity. It's now so easy not to work that you've created a voting block that is perpetual and generational. AND IT STILL ISN'T ENOUGH. MORE, MORE, MORE. You're not going to get a different result but you still don't learn. No, yours is "sunshine and unicorns" and doesn't even come close to reality. You want to pay popcorn tub fillers and cashiers a "living wage", which is completely impossible everywhere but fantasy land. Your "solution" will ensure there are no more movie theaters or low end restaurants because no one is going to be willing to pay $12 for a !@#$ing Happy Meal or $30 for a bucket of corn. These are ZERO skill jobs and anyone worth their salt does them only as a bridge to something better. How you liberals doing at controlling public education costs? You freakin' OWN that venue and it's as bad as the ever-evil health care system. Why is that? Turn off your !@#$ing television and go outside. There's a whole world out there that you're not going to fix with liberal idealism, because that's what's actually broken it.

Please don't feed the trolls. Unless you're Canadian.

"Rev up strong"? He could campaign "strongly" before he won the office because he had no record. That's no longer the case. People overestimate this stuff based every freakin' election. I remember when GHWB had a 90+% approval rating in February of his re-election year. He lost. Mr. Obama better hope the economic news gets significantly better or it's not going to matter what he says or how much money he collects.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the point that I'm making, though I'm not surprised that it went over your head.

Your response shows just how little you actually know about Switzerland.

For Your Enjoyment

Which will change nothing for the positive but will make you liberals feel like you accomplished something. And at the end of the day, it's really more about your feelings than actual accomplishment.

Thinking is hard.

When reality fails, pull out the worst possible comparative example to prove your point. I'm sure you love it when the Republican apologists compare your political views to Hitler's Nazi's, right hypocrite? People who have skills get paid a living wage. People who fill popcorn buckets, stock shelves, mop floors, and/or take orders at fast food restaurants don't and shouldn't. At the end of the day, all of you "big government" idiots are getting the "Utopia" you deserve because you don't understand causal relationships or the big picture. Everything is more expensive and lower quality BECAUSE of your political views and the execution, not in spite of it.

It's hard to have any sort of debate when you frame things in such a blindingly retarded fashion. "Conservatives want it as loose as possible" may be a fair statement - if Republicans were actually conservative anywhere but the campaign trail. "Liberals want it tighter than that". Care to tell me how many pages the US Code needs to be before "liberals" have it "tight enough" for their liking? OK. Automatic weapons for every able bodied adult. I love how liberals think they can use a country with a population that's comparable to most large US cities, has a land mass about a third the size of New York State, as their example of Socialist Utopia. Very realistic. I'm sure the extrapolation works. Somehow. I tell you what. You start paying double for everything you buy and I'll start believing you're serious about a "living wage", because that's what it's going to take to even start that conversation. We'll ignore the downstream affects like inflation and job loss (imagine how cheap China's goods are going to look when the cost of making anything in the U.S. doubles overnight). Later you can attend a Union rally and scream about how all the manufacturing jobs were sent "overseas" because you decided it was a good idea to pay the ticket taker at the !@#$ing movie theater $32k a year. Reality. Live in it.

We don't need her for ammunition. We have statistics. Statistics that say how much taxpayers pay for welfare and how the percentages are virtually unchanged despite the increases in both dollars and programs. The Democrats do this because it offers them a GUARANTEED voting block every election. Not much different than the Republicans who dole out taxpayer money to the rich, just more palatable to the masses because it seems more conscionable. It isn't. We now have GENERATIONS of families who live off the dole, know the system and how to game it.

Did you expect he was going to be "good at it' given his qualifications?

Because housing was incredibly over valued and over leveraged. Ask your parents if they ever thought a 2000 SF house on a fourth of an acre should cost over $1,000,000.00 like it did in Southern California and various other metro areas not too long ago. Cheap money, bad laws, and poor oversight. Which of these has truly been fixed?

Wars, programs and benefits there's no way we'll be able to afford, giveaways to political contributors, etc. Nothing ever changes except the letter on the ballot that comes after the crook's name.

She's been sober for 19 straight days. That's got to count for something.

No disagreement there, though we've been kicking the can so long that there seems to be no end to "the short run". Never said that. Doubtful. Also doubtful. Because when you owe your creditors a few billion dollars, you have a problem. When you owe them many trillions, THEY have a problem. That's just a couple of cards in the foundation. The entire house is crumbling, so pointing to that as a win is ridiculous. You should.

I blame both the politicians and the groups that represent veterans and actives on "The Hill". They haven't raised TriCare rates for a VERY long time (if ever). Because of that, they've not kept pace with what's going on in the rest of the country. I don't think most veterans would have a problem with a 3-5% increase annually but when a politician asks for something along the lines of 300+%, there's going to be serious blow back. It's made more disgusting by how many Gulf/Afghanistan vets who're woefully under cared for and are having to go out of their own pockets to get the help they need. Of course our "leaders" could go back and try to actually fix the things that drive up the cost of medical care in this country but that would require work and pissing off people who tend to give them lots of money for elections and cushy board positions when they retire, so instead we'll get abominations like "ObamaCare" and proposed 300+% increases on people who served their country. Keep the 2 party system in place, keep getting shat on.

It's so cute when you're trying to make friends. TPS' post is basic economics - he's not operating over anyone's head. It's also the kind of thinking that's going to have your grandchildren's grandchildren pining for the days when the U.S. was still an economic superpower. Let's just keep kicking the can down the road because there's no way the next economic downturn can be the one that finally puts us over the edge, right? Your desperate need to have some kind of backing on this board is starting to seem like the Who during the "Eminence Front" era.

I bet the taxes in Lake County might put you over budget. Just sayin'.

If you think that's bad, don't ever go to Dachau or Auschwitz. Nothing is even close to those places.

You mean because Mr. Obama is so in touch with NASCAR drivers and has regular cars? You partisans are so friggin' ridiculous.