Except that everytime the quote is used “against” Pres. Obama it is without the first sentence.

If that sentence doesn’t “support” the claim that Pres. Obama was talking about government sponsored infrastructure, then why is the sentence always being dropped from quotes?

I think the reason is self-evident, because most people reading both the first and second half of the statement would recognize that Pres. Obama was speaking of the roads and bridges.

You would have a great case if everyone was quoting the whole statement, but Mr. Boortz et all don’t use the whole statement, and it really undercuts the claim that even in context it reveals a sinister overtone by Pres. Obama.

Fun to be sure, but not particularly useful or instructive for voters.

I don’t think you have a winning argument.

I pay fuel taxes even if I don’t use the interstate highways. Depending on the state, I also pay direct use taxes (i.e. tolls) and other fees (excise) to use those highways, state roads, and other common conveyances.

A company like UPS, on the other hand, derives a huge share of it’s profits from long-haul, interstate, trucking via the Federal highway system. What they pay in fuel tax is no where representative of the true value they receive. In essence, the individual tax payer who fuels their personal automobile for in town driving, agriculture, etc is paying an indirect subsidy to those who use and derive massive economic benefit from said highways.

It’s even more appalling when you consider the large corporations who cost shift onto the individual tax payers to support their business. I love Amazon, but they are a big offender of this. They can locate distribution centers in low-cost areas, but only because they are serviced by interstate highways which allow their common carriers (FedEx, UPS, again) to hub-and-spoke to tax-payer subsidized airports.

The massive price advantage that Amazon and others in their business have over local, small business derives from their singular ability to cost shift their own utilization costs onto their own customers – us – in the form of fuel, property, and sales taxes that they should in all rights be bearing themselves. As very strong fiscal conservative it gauls me to no end that I have to subsidize the liberal, coastal consumers who do bear any of the costs of delivering them inexpensive products from online shopping, while those of who live economically and ecologically balanced lives in less populated areas continue to be forced to subsidize the big city gluttons whose preferred vendors have gamed a rigged system to their massive benefit.

Education is a similar, equally gauling topic which follows the same trend – a relatively small cadre of institutions have gamed the system to extort large subsidies that they don’t deserve.

I think this is proof positive that it’s a losing issue. It’s just as plausible that he’s talking about “this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive”, and that the sentence about roads and bridges is a non-sequiter.

I agree, of course, grammatically it’s an atrocity.

But the very fact that our side is not typically quoting the entire paragraph is all the evidence we need to know that the entire context supports the apologists defense rather than our case. If, as you contend, that apologist have no case, we should simply be using the entire paragraph, or in the short form, the preceding and following sentence. But of course, we aren’t, and that’s pretty much the end of the argument. This is ipso facto evidence that the entire quote is not supportive of our argument, or else we’d making a better argument by using more of the quote.

You have a better defense than most, simply because you willing to consider the whole paragraph, and still find it to be offensive. Folks like Mr. Boortz, and unfortunately like Gov. Romney, using a single sentence, are likely to ultimately suffer some sort of turnabout by excising a single sentence.

No clue. Luckily it doesn’t cost me anything to respect the office. It’s basically free. It’s not like you can’t criticize the man or the policy because of the office.

I also disagree with the substance of the concept behind calling Pres. Obama the “ruler”. It’s I believe intended to shade his actions with illegitmacy, which I believe often they are illegitimate. But the source of the illegitimacy is where I diverge. They are not illegitimate because they came from the man or the office, but because they are bad policy not inline with what the people, the Representatives we’ve sent to Congress want, or what the States want.

I had a lot of trouble restraining myself when Pres. Clinton was in office, but I tried to simply stick to policy. Whatever pleasure was to be found in exposing the criminal disrespect for the office that was displayed by Pres. Clinton was far overshadowed by the serious damage he did to the country through his bad policy decisions.

Really, title says it all.

All things you have posted are policies I disagree with, some of them *very* strongly.

However, the grounds are probably different.

For example, with the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the recess appointment when Congress wasn’t technically in recess – the Congress allowed the President to usurp their authority to give advice and consent.

Congress allowed the President to assume a new power – to declare when Congress is and is not in session. And they took no action to stop him. I don’t hold that against Pres. Obama. I expect our candidate to seek to exercise the maximum executive power that is legal and to strike a balance with Congress when disagreements come up. So far, Congress keeps caving. And under a Pres. Romney, or future Pres. Jindal, or Pres. Christie, I expect those administrations to likewise use that authority, and to seek whatever balance of powers are within the scope of the Constitution, and to use that executive power to advance conservative goals and policies.

On the policy, I think it’s absurd that the executive can declare when Congress is session, but from a legal point of view, it’s simply a balance of power issue. It’s not enumerated, it’s not defined by the Constitution – it’s a question for the co-equal branches to answer by statue, or precedent.

The other items you’ve listed are all authorizing either under existing law, executive rule making authority *DELEGATED* by Congress, or by the Constitution. And the only check there is on this is Congress, who simply refuse – for what reasons I will never know – to place a check on the executive branch in any of those cases.

When the ACA passed, it delegated immense power to the Department of HHS. A massive transfer of power from the Congress to the Executive, and ultimately from the people to the executive. And that’s why it’s so important to repeal the bill. But so long as it’s law, I would expect our candidate to immediately use the rule making authority delegated by Congress to change the policy to something that we all find more palatable, pending a new balance of power excised by Congress and the executive.

The last 40 years has been one of the Congress ceding immense control and authority to the Executive. Immense. Staggering really. Congress is routinely handing over it’s regulatory and rule making authority to paper pushers in the executive and it’s truly sick. We need to fix it ASAP. But my complaint here is not with the Executive, it’s with CONGRESS, which is where more and better conservatives (not just GOP, but CONSERVATIVES) is so important. Congress needs far more and far better conservatives.

Closing thought. The Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate, combined, should yield at least as much power as the SCOTUS or the President. That’s the vision of a co-equal branches. Does anyone really thing that Speaker Boehner and Leader Reid weild anywhere near the power that Pres. Obama (or Pres. Bush, or Pres Clinton, or Pres HW Bush, etc) yielded? Of course not!

Don’t get it, sorry.

Would you be kind enough to elaborate? I am not a dkos reader/user, and don’t think that I have ever posted there. From time to time read something cross posted but that’s about it. Not much of interest to me…

When I was growing up there were at least some remaining Democrats who while inherently statists, had common cause with limited government. Those days are just about over. I can’t think of any Democrats who hold office on the national level who have an open belief in limited self-government.

> shipped via .. ship .. and then rail to a metropolitan area near you,
> then trucked to either your door or the loading dock of the store you
> purchased it at.

That’s the crux of it. If it was purchased near me, in my state, it is taxed by my state (we have a sales tax). The sale is supporting a business near me, with employees near me. That is supporting my state with income tax (which we also have). The local downtown is enhanced because I probably also did some other business at the same time.

The contra case is that it was boated directly overseas, warehoused out of my state, and shipped via UPS to me. No sales tax. It’s certainly more efficently, but some other state has repeaped the benefit.

Normally I am fine with this – States must compete to attract business. BUT typically the States are stealing from productive tax payers to give these new businesses incentives, and then a good chunk of the true transportation cost is obscured because UPS and FedEx operate with an implied subsidy on transportion costs. My local retailer lost out not through the free market, but through market distortions of (a) tax benefits and (b) subsidies to UPS/FedEx and (c) unfair sales tax advantage.

It remains to be seen if Amazon and other large online retailers can sustain their growth if they have to compete fairly with Sales tax (they are about to find out), and who knows what would happen if FedEx/UPS lost their effective gas tax subsidy and absurd market distortions in air freight.

> Ditto for the bread in your breadbox, the frozen pizza in your
>icebox, the deodorant in your bathroom cabinet, etc. etc. Yes, you
>can avoid all of these ? the Amish do eschew many, after all .. but
>unless you do, the interstate and its? tax subsidy benefits you.
I have no problem with anyone choosing or not choosing whatever products they want to buy interstate. I am simply stating however that it’s not right that freight carriers cause X% of maintenance and costs of the interstate highway system, but only pay X/2% percentage of the fuel tax. This is the implicit subsidy. A local manufacturer of goods is at a competitive disadvantage because of this (and hundreds of others) unfair market distortions enforced by unfair taxation.

> That said, I would prefer to see tollbooths sprouting like
> mushrooms after a rain if it means a reduction (or a hold, at
> least) in the federal fuel tax?.

Agree totally. This is the best way to make sure users of the system pay their fair share of the costs of the highway system, and no more or less.

Of course, chances are we’ll get tolls AND fuel taxes, once again screwing ourselves

That I specifically say MCI Worldcom, and not MCI.

Vint Cerf (I’ve met him – twice now!) was and is a pioneer, and a great example of a public servant who did well in business. I was an MCI Mail user from way back.

That whole line of business the internetMCI product line – was amazing. But the entire Worldcomm/LDDS team mismanaged it into the ground and it was the basis for a company that pushed huge frauds which we probably all know about by now. I believe that by 2000 Vint was long gone, running the Internet Society, but I may have my dates wrong.

You said something else interesting, which I hadn’t thought of:

> The cat is out of the bag, as most here knew all along. We?re just
> glad that the fence sitters got to see his true beliefs?.finally.

I didn’t see it that way – I didn’t think this is anything different than what Pres. Obama has been saying on his standard stump speech for over a year. Which is clearly collectivst policies and positions. I viewed this as an attempt to take that view point and make it something explicitly anti-business. So I have to think on that, I may have missed that angle.

Maybe I will pin it on my calendar and we can see how it comes out in a week, two weeks and a few months?

I don’t think it will amount to any electoral movement. Maybe I am 100% off base, but I got my hopes up to many times to be an optimist this time around.