U.S. Headed Down the Wrong Track??

[Bob Hubbard]

People who will trade liberty for safety, deserve neither and will lose both.

That's a paraphrase of something attributed to another pretty smart guy, Ben Franklin.


Here's the question. With all these expensive layers upon layers upon layers of government, with all these levels of police, with all these ID requirements, and invasive searches at airports, and continually lessened freedoms and liberties......are we truly any safer?

I think not.

 

[MA-Caver]

People who will trade liberty for safety, deserve neither and will lose both.

That's a paraphrase of something attributed to another pretty smart guy, Ben Franklin.


Here's the question. With all these expensive layers upon layers upon layers of government, with all these levels of police, with all these ID requirements, and invasive searches at airports, and continually lessened freedoms and liberties......are we truly any safer?

I think not.

While probably this can be a whole other thread in of by itself it jives with this one as a symptom of the 81% (I'll probably break this off anyway as it bears scruitiny)

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/09/07/america/NA_GEN_US_Profiling_Terrorist_Behavior.php
Miami airport expands efforts to screen travelers' behavior
The Associated Press
Published: September 7, 2006
MIAMI Authorities at about a dozen American airports use "behavior pattern recognition" — monitoring passengers' involuntary actions in hopes of nabbing potential terrorists -- and Miami officials are so impressed with the techniques that they plan to have janitors and skycaps eyeballing the crowds.
If Miami officials have their way, all the airport's 35,000 workers — from janitors to skycaps to Starbucks baristas — will be trained to watch travelers' movements and detect potentially dangerous fliers.
"If you had 35,000 pairs of eyes observing suspicious behavior, that's a strong layer of security," said Greg Chin, a spokesman at Miami International Airport, where officials began training managers Thursday.

So now we gotta watch how we act around airports and other places of high security risks.

*sniff-sniff* damn, that socialist odor is getting stronger... or may be it's fascism??

We used to be so relaxed so secure in our safety within the borders of the U.S. until 9-11 now it's looking over our shoulder, cameras every fricken where, watching what we say on the net and in public speaking... (isn't that a constitutional right by the way??) especially at anti-war rallies, demonstrations, register our firearms (yeah, we've been doing that... but it's more strict now isn't it?) and so on. Now airport screenings on how we act. This will spread to banks, government offices and eventually schools of higher learning and other places... like, malls and sporting events.

So are we headed down the wrong track??

*sniff-sniff* there's that whiff again...

 

[Big Don]

People who will trade liberty for safety, deserve neither and will lose both.

That's a paraphrase of something attributed to another pretty smart guy, Ben Franklin.

• Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
  • This statement was used as a motto on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania. (1759) which was attributed to Franklin in the edition of 1812, but in a letter of September 27, 1760 to David Hume, he states that he published this book and denies that he wrote it, other than a few remarks that were credited to the Pennsylvania Assembly, in which he served. The phrase itself was first used in a letter from that Assembly dated November 11, 1755 to the Governor of Pennsylvania

Here's the question. With all these expensive layers upon layers upon layers of government, with all these levels of police, with all these ID requirements, and invasive searches at airports, and continually lessened freedoms and liberties......are we truly any safer?

I think not.

Most of the Conservatives (Limbaugh, etc) said the TSA would be a boondoggle before it started, that the Department of Homeland Security was redundant, (That is the purpose of the military...) but, politicians of BOTH parties disagreed.
Here is a better quote, although I don't know or care who originally said it:

The only thing that protects us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency

Politicians and bureaucrats are rarely leaders...

 

[tellner]

Bob, you have a good heart, but you need to stop and consider a few of the things you're saying.

There's a constant high level of background noise in your posts that filters down to "The government is evil. Government is always the problem. Government makes people weak and passive."

Government is the expression of the will of the people. It may do wise things or foolish things. But it is ultimately no better or worse than any other center of power and influence. The alternatives are the Union Hall, the Church and the Boardroom.

The Union Hall is gone. Almost forty years of unremitting war against organized labor has destroyed its political power. The race to the bottom was considered a paranoid fantasy in the days of the last liberal in the White House - Richard Nixon. Today we have been taught from the cradle that it is an inexorable Law of Nature. Labor can not bargain for the marginal product of its own input. Wages have been stagnant or falling as a portion of GDP for decades. Pensions are a thing of the past. We get less vacation time than any developed nation and use a smaller fraction of it. Healthcare is going the same way. The forty hour work week is a pale joke. The NLRB now spends more time rolling back the last seventy years of workers' protections than seeing to their rights.

The Church is close to the most horrible center of power imaginable. By its own standards it can never be wrong. It has the right and duty to impose its will on every aspect of human life. Its corrosive effect on human rights, science, the arts, political freedom and just about everything else in the public sphere is difficult to overestimate. There was a reason the Founders were children of the Enlightenment, not the Reformation. They abhorred and feared the idea of a "Christian government".

Wall Street? Take a look at what you get with the Untrammeled Power of Business. You get Bear Sterns, Enron, Global Crossing, Wal Mart and so on. General Motors spends hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy the very idea of mass transit and redesign cities so that people will be forced to use its products exclusively. Short term thinking rules. If you do anything that does not "maximize shareholder equity" you will be replaced. Run a company into the ground and you can loot it on the way down. Lie? Cheat? It's only a problem if you get caught. And that won't happen because Business has been freed from the Nanny State with its onerous regulations and laws.

Remember that race to the bottom? Where do you think it came from? There are laws in place to keep people from bringing any unfavorable fact about anything related to the food industry to light. Safety, health, living wages, even what you do with your spouse in the privacy of the marriage bed and what you eat or smoke on your own time are grist for their mill. Halliburton in Iraq is a perfect example. Female employees are raped to the point where they are bleeding from their anuses. Object? You'll never work again. Go to the authorities? You are stuck with binding arbitration with Halliburton's internal arbitrator. And our embassy/fortress is being built quite literally with slave labor.

For the last forty years we've had the most expensive and all-pervasive propaganda machine in human history singing a refrain. Government is evil. Democracy is a sham. The rich are that way because they are better, smarter and more touched by the gods than the rest of us. Whatever they want is better than what we could possibly dream for ourselves. We should shun the power that comes from our collective will and turn everything over to them. "They" are the Church and the Boardroom. They are turning us into a Third World dictatorship with a President whose advisors refer to him as the "Sovereign" to quote John Yoo's memo. Income and wealth distribution are quite literally in line with Bolivia and Uruguay. Johnson's Great Society is gone. The Great Compression which did so much to create the Middle Class is gone. The New Deal is almost gone. And the K-Street/Wall Street Axis is hard at work on the Constitution.

This is what happens, Bob, when the People take your advice and run in terror from their own power. It means that they have nothing with which to defend themselves from the utterly selfish and amoral powers of the Cross and the Dollar. Far from "Big Government doing everything for us" we have a government which does little or nothing for us but more to us at the behest of the super-rich. During America's heyday - the 50s through the early 80s - it did quite a bit, more than it does now. That worked pretty well. During the 1930s and 1940s it saved us from Fascist treason, bloody unrest and a World War. It can grow out of control. It can become corrupt just like anything else that gives men wealth and power. But we really can't do without it. Suck it up. Deal with the reality you have rather than the fantasy.

Private industry does a quantifiably, verifiably crappy job of handling large scale-long term systems like health, transportation, power, water, prisons and schools. Where profit is an effective motivating and regulating force in these fields it only works when there's an independent third party representing the interests of those whom the infrastructure is supposed to benefit. That is to say, the government.

We can not go back to being a nation of small shop owners and single-family farmers. That romantic ideal never really was how we lived. It worked for a while sorta kinda. That was mostly because income and wealth were not ideally but at least reasonably equitably distributed. There was a lot of resources available relatively cheaply on an expanding frontier. To make things work we need a government that is effective, transparent, accountable and not overly friendly to Wall Street. In short, we need to grow up and stop wishing that the Magical Fairy in the Sky be He Jesus or The Invisible Hand will somehow miraculously make it all better.

Communism doesn't work.
Capitalism doesn't work.
Mixed economies can work, but it takes work to make them work.
Slogans and magical thinking really don't work.

 

[Big Don]

Bob, you have a good heart, but you need to stop and consider a few of the things you're saying.

There's a constant high level of background noise in your posts that filters down to "The government is evil. Government is always the problem. Government makes people weak and passive."

Government is the expression of the will of the people. It may do wise things or foolish things. But it is ultimately no better or worse than any other center of power and influence. The alternatives are the Union Hall, the Church and the Boardroom.

The Union Hall is gone. Almost forty years of unremitting war against organized labor has destroyed its political power. The race to the bottom was considered a paranoid fantasy in the days of the last liberal in the White House - Richard Nixon. Today we have been taught from the cradle that it is an inexorable Law of Nature. Labor can not bargain for the marginal product of its own input. Wages have been stagnant or falling as a portion of GDP for decades. Pensions are a thing of the past. We get less vacation time than any developed nation and use a smaller fraction of it. Healthcare is going the same way. The forty hour work week is a pale joke. The NLRB now spends more time rolling back the last seventy years of workers' protections than seeing to their rights.

The Church is close to the most horrible center of power imaginable. By its own standards it can never be wrong. It has the right and duty to impose its will on every aspect of human life. Its corrosive effect on human rights, science, the arts, political freedom and just about everything else in the public sphere is difficult to overestimate. There was a reason the Founders were children of the Enlightenment, not the Reformation. They abhorred and feared the idea of a "Christian government".

Wall Street? Take a look at what you get with the Untrammeled Power of Business. You get Bear Sterns, Enron, Global Crossing, Wal Mart and so on. General Motors spends hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy the very idea of mass transit and redesign cities so that people will be forced to use its products exclusively. Short term thinking rules. If you do anything that does not "maximize shareholder equity" you will be replaced. Run a company into the ground and you can loot it on the way down. Lie? Cheat? It's only a problem if you get caught. And that won't happen because Business has been freed from the Nanny State with its onerous regulations and laws.

Remember that race to the bottom? Where do you think it came from? There are laws in place to keep people from bringing any unfavorable fact about anything related to the food industry to light. Safety, health, living wages, even what you do with your spouse in the privacy of the marriage bed and what you eat or smoke on your own time are grist for their mill. Halliburton in Iraq is a perfect example. Female employees are raped to the point where they are bleeding from their anuses. Object? You'll never work again. Go to the authorities? You are stuck with binding arbitration with Halliburton's internal arbitrator. And our embassy/fortress is being built quite literally with slave labor.

For the last forty years we've had the most expensive and all-pervasive propaganda machine in human history singing a refrain. Government is evil. Democracy is a sham. The rich are that way because they are better, smarter and more touched by the gods than the rest of us. Whatever they want is better than what we could possibly dream for ourselves. We should shun the power that comes from our collective will and turn everything over to them. "They" are the Church and the Boardroom. They are turning us into a Third World dictatorship with a President whose advisors refer to him as the "Sovereign" to quote John Yoo's memo. Income and wealth distribution are quite literally in line with Bolivia and Uruguay. Johnson's Great Society is gone. The Great Compression which did so much to create the Middle Class is gone. The New Deal is almost gone. And the K-Street/Wall Street Axis is hard at work on the Constitution.

This is what happens, Bob, when the People take your advice and run in terror from their own power. It means that they have nothing with which to defend themselves from the utterly selfish and amoral powers of the Cross and the Dollar. Far from "Big Government doing everything for us" we have a government which does little or nothing for us but more to us at the behest of the super-rich. During America's heyday - the 50s through the early 80s - it did quite a bit, more than it does now. That worked pretty well. During the 1930s and 1940s it saved us from Fascist treason, bloody unrest and a World War. It can grow out of control. It can become corrupt just like anything else that gives men wealth and power. But we really can't do without it. Suck it up. Deal with the reality you have rather than the fantasy.

Private industry does a quantifiably, verifiably crappy job of handling large scale-long term systems like health, transportation, power, water, prisons and schools. Where profit is an effective motivating and regulating force in these fields it only works when there's an independent third party representing the interests of those whom the infrastructure is supposed to benefit. That is to say, the government.

We can not go back to being a nation of small shop owners and single-family farmers. That romantic ideal never really was how we lived. It worked for a while sorta kinda. That was mostly because income and wealth were not ideally but at least reasonably equitably distributed. There was a lot of resources available relatively cheaply on an expanding frontier. To make things work we need a government that is effective, transparent, accountable and not overly friendly to Wall Street. In short, we need to grow up and stop wishing that the Magical Fairy in the Sky be He Jesus or The Invisible Hand will somehow miraculously make it all better.

Communism doesn't work.
Capitalism doesn't work.
Mixed economies can work, but it takes work to make them work.
Slogans and magical thinking really don't work.

... your eyes are brown

 

[Bob Hubbard]

... your eyes are brown

Really? So are mine.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

• Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
  • This statement was used as a motto on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania. (1759) which was attributed to Franklin in the edition of 1812, but in a letter of September 27, 1760 to David Hume, he states that he published this book and denies that he wrote it, other than a few remarks that were credited to the Pennsylvania Assembly, in which he served. The phrase itself was first used in a letter from that Assembly dated November 11, 1755 to the Governor of Pennsylvania
    Most of the Conservatives (Limbaugh, etc) said the TSA would be a boondoggle before it started, that the Department of Homeland Security was redundant, (That is the purpose of the military...) but, politicians of BOTH parties disagreed.
    Here is a better quote, although I don't know or care who originally said it:
    Politicians and bureaucrats are rarely leaders...

• • 
    
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_who_would_give_up_Essential_Liberty
    
    "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
    • This statement was used as a motto on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania. (1759) which was attributed to Franklin in the edition of 1812, but in a letter of September 27, 1760 to David Hume, he states that he published this book and denies that he wrote it, other than a few remarks that were credited to the Pennsylvania Assembly, in which he served. The phrase itself was first used in a letter from that Assembly dated November 11, 1755 to the Governor of Pennsylvania. An article on the origins of this statement here includes a scan that indicates the original typography of the 1759 document, which uses an archaic form of "s": "Thoſe who would give up Essential Liberty to purchaſe a little Temporary Safety, deſerve neither Liberty nor Safety." Researchers now believe that a fellow diplomat by the name of Richard Jackson is the primary author of the book. With the information thus far available the issue of authorship of the statement is not yet definitely resolved, but the evidence indicates it was very likely Franklin, who in the Poor Richard's Almanack of 1738 is known to have written a similar proverb: "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.""
    • http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Disputed
    
    

    Bob, you have a good heart, but you need to stop and consider a few of the things you're saying.
    
    There's a constant high level of background noise in your posts that filters down to "The government is evil. Government is always the problem. Government makes people weak and passive."
    
    Government is the expression of the will of the people. It may do wise things or foolish things. But it is ultimately no better or worse than any other center of power and influence. The alternatives are the Union Hall, the Church and the Boardroom.
    
    The Union Hall is gone. Almost forty years of unremitting war against organized labor has destroyed its political power. The race to the bottom was considered a paranoid fantasy in the days of the last liberal in the White House - Richard Nixon. Today we have been taught from the cradle that it is an inexorable Law of Nature. Labor can not bargain for the marginal product of its own input. Wages have been stagnant or falling as a portion of GDP for decades. Pensions are a thing of the past. We get less vacation time than any developed nation and use a smaller fraction of it. Healthcare is going the same way. The forty hour work week is a pale joke. The NLRB now spends more time rolling back the last seventy years of workers' protections than seeing to their rights.
    
    The Church is close to the most horrible center of power imaginable. By its own standards it can never be wrong. It has the right and duty to impose its will on every aspect of human life. Its corrosive effect on human rights, science, the arts, political freedom and just about everything else in the public sphere is difficult to overestimate. There was a reason the Founders were children of the Enlightenment, not the Reformation. They abhorred and feared the idea of a "Christian government".
    
    Wall Street? Take a look at what you get with the Untrammeled Power of Business. You get Bear Sterns, Enron, Global Crossing, Wal Mart and so on. General Motors spends hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy the very idea of mass transit and redesign cities so that people will be forced to use its products exclusively. Short term thinking rules. If you do anything that does not "maximize shareholder equity" you will be replaced. Run a company into the ground and you can loot it on the way down. Lie? Cheat? It's only a problem if you get caught. And that won't happen because Business has been freed from the Nanny State with its onerous regulations and laws.
    
    Remember that race to the bottom? Where do you think it came from? There are laws in place to keep people from bringing any unfavorable fact about anything related to the food industry to light. Safety, health, living wages, even what you do with your spouse in the privacy of the marriage bed and what you eat or smoke on your own time are grist for their mill. Halliburton in Iraq is a perfect example. Female employees are raped to the point where they are bleeding from their anuses. Object? You'll never work again. Go to the authorities? You are stuck with binding arbitration with Halliburton's internal arbitrator. And our embassy/fortress is being built quite literally with slave labor.
    
    For the last forty years we've had the most expensive and all-pervasive propaganda machine in human history singing a refrain. Government is evil. Democracy is a sham. The rich are that way because they are better, smarter and more touched by the gods than the rest of us. Whatever they want is better than what we could possibly dream for ourselves. We should shun the power that comes from our collective will and turn everything over to them. "They" are the Church and the Boardroom. They are turning us into a Third World dictatorship with a President whose advisors refer to him as the "Sovereign" to quote John Yoo's memo. Income and wealth distribution are quite literally in line with Bolivia and Uruguay. Johnson's Great Society is gone. The Great Compression which did so much to create the Middle Class is gone. The New Deal is almost gone. And the K-Street/Wall Street Axis is hard at work on the Constitution.
    
    This is what happens, Bob, when the People take your advice and run in terror from their own power. It means that they have nothing with which to defend themselves from the utterly selfish and amoral powers of the Cross and the Dollar. Far from "Big Government doing everything for us" we have a government which does little or nothing for us but more to us at the behest of the super-rich. During America's heyday - the 50s through the early 80s - it did quite a bit, more than it does now. That worked pretty well. During the 1930s and 1940s it saved us from Fascist treason, bloody unrest and a World War. It can grow out of control. It can become corrupt just like anything else that gives men wealth and power. But we really can't do without it. Suck it up. Deal with the reality you have rather than the fantasy.
    
    Private industry does a quantifiably, verifiably crappy job of handling large scale-long term systems like health, transportation, power, water, prisons and schools. Where profit is an effective motivating and regulating force in these fields it only works when there's an independent third party representing the interests of those whom the infrastructure is supposed to benefit. That is to say, the government.
    
    We can not go back to being a nation of small shop owners and single-family farmers. That romantic ideal never really was how we lived. It worked for a while sorta kinda. That was mostly because income and wealth were not ideally but at least reasonably equitably distributed. There was a lot of resources available relatively cheaply on an expanding frontier. To make things work we need a government that is effective, transparent, accountable and not overly friendly to Wall Street. In short, we need to grow up and stop wishing that the Magical Fairy in the Sky be He Jesus or The Invisible Hand will somehow miraculously make it all better.
    
    Communism doesn't work.
    Capitalism doesn't work.
    Mixed economies can work, but it takes work to make them work.
    Slogans and magical thinking really don't work.

    
    I've not suggested people flee in terror from their government. The opposite in fact, that they reach up and reclaim it, and make it do what it's intended to do. To stop sitting by and letting things happen, but to become involved and make things happen. Not to let career politicians do their thinking for them. You say "third party", and I agree. But the rules are stacked against that happening, and until people get their heads out of their asses and do something to change it, it won't. Change doesn't happen on it's own.

 

[Makalakumu]

My heart will regret this post because I look on this thread and I see some bright minds really do care about making a difference. I really wish it was possible to change this direction, but I don't think its going to happen.

For the past 150 years, wealthy industrialists, with their heads full of visions of a stratified utopia, have planned the direction our society would take for their own benefit. Peice by peice, they've bought our government and our institutions and rebuilt them so they would serve their interests.

Then, they dumbed us down, erasing any means of finding out what they did or changing it.

Now we are left burning like stars in the night, connecting at the speed of light but still separated by spaces to vast to cross.

This, too, was by design.

You can't take control of a system like this expect that change it through any movement. The forces that our government truly represents could buy any movement and shape it to fit their own needs. We possibly could destroy the whole edifice and start again, but unless you excise the tumor that infected our society in the first place (aka guillotine entire families), it will only rebuild itself anew.

Who here has the guts for that? Too few.

My advice. Find your Gray Havens. Diminish into the West. You will not escape, but at least you may find peace.

 

[tellner]

Don, as always your logic and rhetorical skills are devastating. Stick to even shorter words. The ones you're using aren't working.

Bob, then we are in agreement.

 

[Sukerkin]

I would agree, that perhaps your opinion should possibly be weighed more heavily in this area then others on this board, but not that their opinion should be ignored. That's like saying that just because I'm a police officer, on any issue regarding law enforcement, you should just agree with me.

The bit I've quoted above from your post is the way I intended my phrasing, Kenpo. Think of it like 'expert testimony' in a court of law i.e. I know what I'm talking about but the 'jury' is by no means bound to agree with what I say.

Laymen holding personal-experience rooted opinions on economic issues don't invalidate their opinions just because they aren't backed by equations and statistics .

They can sometimes be inaccurate because what is common-sense at the micro-economics level does not translate up to the macro-economics level (a bit like the difference between Newtonian and Quantum physics) but common-sense is always a good rule of thumb in any discourse.

 

[Sukerkin]

Tellner your post#24 above was another in your current streak of excellent contributions - the Rep Gnomes deny me so the familiar embarassment of public praise will have to suffice.

 

[Big Don]

It is interesting that you believe a woman who claims she was raped by employees of a company you don't like, but, the several women over the years who accused Bill Clinton of rape, sexual assault, etc were all liars...

 

[elder999]

It is interesting that you believe a woman who claims she was raped by employees of a company you don't like, but, the several women over the years who accused Bill Clinton of rape, sexual assault, etc were all liars...

Who, exactly is it that posted on this thread that they

1) Believe a woman who claims she was raped.....

2) By a company(what company?) "they" (WHO?) don't like.....

.....and what in the name of Zeus does it have to do with the Caligula from Arkansas? Where did anyone post that all those women were liars? Do you think anyone on this board believes that Monica Lewisnky was lying? More importantly, what bearing does it have on the current discussion, and why should we care where the man used his equipment?

Don, please recognize that all of the above questions are rhetorical, and don't require an answer-please spare us all your bileous nonsense-especially me.

 

[Tez3]

It is interesting that you believe a woman who claims she was raped by employees of a company you don't like, but, the several women over the years who accused Bill Clinton of rape, sexual assault, etc were all liars...

Ok, you lost me......................:idunno:

 

[Big Don]

Ok, you lost me......................:idunno:

Google "Juanita Broaddrick"
See Tellner's post with the included (unfounded) allegations against Halliburton and KBR, two companies he has railed against here many times.

 

[elder999]

Google "Juanita Broaddrick"
See Tellner's post with the included (unfounded) allegations against Halliburton and KBR, two companies he has railed against here many times.

Don, go get a dictionary and see the difference between "unfounded" and "unproven."

...oh, and have a look here first.

I still question the relevance of the Caligula from Arkansas-since you claim that someone here called "all those women" liars, I did a search here on
"Clinton+sexual," and "Clinton+rape," and found surprisingly little that would support your claim-in fact, I didn't find any support for it at all.

 

[Makalakumu]

:feedtroll:-offtopic:hb:

Okay, lets drop it and try and get back on topic...

 

[Twin Fist]

Tellner's post was essentially about ethics

that makes ethics fair game for questioning. Such as believing one claim, with little to no proof and not believing another claim, with little or no proof.



He stated the alleged incident with the Halliburton woman as if it was proven. It hasnt been proven.

It is fair although admittedly slightly off topic to ask him if the MANY claims against the former president also merited "automatic belief"

Or is it, as i suspect and apparently Don did as well, that Tellner just hates Halliburton, and any allegation against them from tellner should be suspect?

I mean, I basically proved him wrong about Halliburton half a dozen times the other night....... And he flat out refused to admit it or retract.

That alone makes that point, and really all his points suspect.


I think Don's question was fair, but yes, off topic. But only slightly.
No one is attacking Tellner, just his post. Thats how message boards work.

 

[Big Don]

Is the US headed down the wrong track? Maybe.
If it is, it is because of the Lack of leadership President Bush has exercised, aside from the war on terror. He allowed Congress to run amok, rather than vetoing things he damned well should have. He stood silent on too many occasions. His inactions are far more damning than his actions.
Meanwhile, we have American Cities violating and enabling others to violate Federal Law (Sanctuary Cities) with NO meaningful action by the government to rectify the situation.

 

[Twin Fist]

but, to get back on topic?

Is the country headed in the wrong direction? It is sort of a loaded question dont you think?

I mean, divorce rates are abysmally high, but then the average lifestyle is pretty nice too. i mean POOR people have cell phones and color tv's these days.

Yes, way too many people are in prison, but hey, prison isnt that bad these days, where prisons used to be working farms, now they have computer learning centers and cable tv. Although, that might explain why no one is afraid to go back to prison after they get out............

We have teenagers acting like hedonists on news every other day, yet graduation rates and college entrances are higher than ever.

Lots of people are crying about so called "loss of liberties" yet look at WW2, the last time we were really in a war where the mainland of the US was in danger. Compared to then, we are living in a utopia of freedom.

Yes, in many ways America is hard to recognize. But at the same time, it is the same as it has always been. Happy people are happy, and malcontents and *shock* not.

Thats because time changes everything.

I would change many things if I could. But I am not really worried. No government, no matter how liberal or conservative, really does lasting dammage.

America is not the government, it is the people.