2012 Braggin’ Rights, Missouri Wins 78-74

I agree that being respectful is a much etbter way to have dialogue. I also believe that if someone pulls a knife or gun on me, I etbter drop any pretense of playing nice , and either play by the rules that have now been defined, or live (or die) with the consequences. While this might be a bit of an extreme comparison, it’s really not that extreme.There are folks who have been ratcheting up the absurd rhetoric. I don’t like it a bit, but me not liking it isn’t stopping it. At the same time, there are lots of folks who sit back and talk about how they don’t like it, and try and talk nice . This is a great approach during many moments , but when it comes down to the election runoff, the fact is that folks have pulled knives and guns out (metaphorically), and no amount of not liking it is going to change that.The lies and distortions that people are throwing around need to be called out by every one of us who sees them. I agree with most of the points you make in this post. While I’m registered as a Republican, it’s absolutely laughable that the Republicans can whine about the debt, as it is largely created by Republican policies. You don’t get to say you want to lower taxes, AND that you don’t like the debt. That’s just crazy either you want to reduce the debt, or you want to keep on this path we’ve been on for 30 years of lowering taxes regardless of what that does to the debt. Either / or you don’t get both. By the way, reducing spending is a great idea at the same time, but nobody seems to do that. Instead, the whine about the stimulus package, while welcoming the dollars that it brings to their district or state, happy for the jobs that it does create.For 30 years, as we’ve cut taxes irresponsibly while increasing spending. Reagan taught politicians that even though this is absurd economic policy, Americans will buy it without questioning it. So we’ve done it for 30 years without asking questions, nobody worried about when the credit card bill was going to come due. During that time, as a TRUE FISCAL CONSERVATIVE, I’ve fretted over the fact that the ONE TIME you really need the federal government to engage in aggressive deficit spending is when the economy is in the tank and needs stimulation, but if we drive the economy too far into the tank, then when we really need to take on some debt, we will have wasted our wad .That’s EXACTLY what’s happened. We added over a trillion dollars to the debt during the latest Republican years by waging 2 wars and never having the courage to ask the American people to pay for them Bush and my Republicans just put it on the credit card without ever asking The People to pay for these wars they were so sure needed to be waged. We then added another trillion dollars to the debt by bailing out banks. This was Bush who did this without pausing for a minute. Are Democrats guilty as well? Sure they were complicit, but it was Bush who led that charge. Folks, these 2 things account for a fifth of our TOTAL DEBT.We stimulated an economy that didn’t need stimulating back in the early Bush years. Bush did this to try and make his administration look good to try and create the great growth we had in the late 90′s. We didn’t need the stimulus then all it did was add more debt when we didn’t need to take on more debt.And government takeover of healthcare? I agree, give me a break. This is a really simple one. If our system works so well, then why is it that we pay twice as much as every other modern nation, and we receive lower quality healthcare? The conservative in me wants to understand this. Why does everyone else seem to get so much more out of their healthcare dollar? So, give me Medicare as an alternative just open Medicare up to anyone who wants to buy it. It’s not free I have to pay for it but give it to me as an alternative to the absurd rates, policies, and care that Cigna and United offer. Even then, the government isn’t providing any health care they’re just acting as the insuring agent, and all care continues to be provided by private companies. But this alternative scares the bejesus out of the insurance companies, because they know they provide no value at all in the stack of healthcare all they do is suck money out of the model. They know that our healthcare stack could lose them completely, and this would lower costs while increasing the quality of the actual care. So they fight this with lots of money, and We The People continue to swallow the crock.Thanks for the good post.Neil