I hate both political parties. They are scum sucking, money grubbing back stabbing worthless pieces of dog dung.

Even I would challenge that as a rather biased comment James! The problem with effectively a two party system in government is that when they both get as bad as each other, there is no practical third choice. At least in the UK we have provision for a coalition in that case, as do some other countries. Once people get turned off from politics and politicians it is very hard if not impossible to change their minds. Both the USA and the UK have tried to introduce a third party i.e. the Tea Party and UKIP, but they have both become the protest vote.

So tell me James, is it the parties and their policies that you so strongly disagree with, or the individual people that run those parties and policies. If you would like to see the back of the whole lot of them, how would you suggest that the country is run instead? You could scrap central government and devolve the whole lot to the State Governors (some think thats been done already!) But we left Lords of the Manor behind in the Middle Ages.

Its the parties and policys on both sides or I should say the lack of policys. Its also the lack of compromise by both parties. And the lack of respect by both.
Id love to see a strong 3rd party. I have voted for some 3rd party candidates in the past that ended up being a wasted vote.

It used to be you voted for the person you thought would do your local,State, or Nation the best job. Now it seems like yo have to choose the weasle who will stick it you the least.
I firmly believe we need term limits. Your in one time and then out. And you dont get a big ass retirement package for the one term either.

And the thing that galls me the most is all the folks who on furlough the idiots who let it happen still get paid. Id like to see all the scumbags in congress and the senate not get a paycheck when ever they let the budget slip by them. But they are all rich to start with and wont even miss thier paltry government check.

One party wants to make everything your responsibilty. The other party wants to take away all responsiblty.

I have been taxed since 1970 with the promise that when I retire I can get social security. Im not sure what I will get in 2017 when I can say im done working. I can tell you I dont like what im getting from my politicions now though. It called a great fisting.

---

[/quote]

Old James

I have not seen this addressed anywhere. Some Government payment are issued monthly on the first, does that mean those ***** didn't get a check until this mess is resolved.
I hope so. But then again, they have money in the bank, that poor Joe doesn't.
So no skin of their back.

All non-essential government entities stop receiving a paycheck. However, after the last shutdown in '96, the entire government (both GOP and Dems alike) voted to back-pay themselves for the entire outage. They'll likely do it again this time.

I have been taxed since 1970 with the promise that when I retire I can get social security

I think from your statement that Social Security in the USA means something different to here in the UK. Over here Social Security is a government funded system to pay people a basic income whilst out of work, or to top up a minimum income to basic levels. The UK has a state pension scheme for retirement.

It is my understanding that Social Security is our basic government-supported retirement fund to provide at least a basic level of income after retirement. I don't believe it was ever meant to be something to rely on as a sole form of income though.

We have a separate unemployment fund for those out of work. I believe there is a one year maximum on receiving checks.

For the overseas crowd ...

Social Security's, technically FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act), main purpose is to act as a pension plan. It also has provisions to pay disability income if you become unable to work before retirement age. Pension payments from Social Security are taxable income.

Medicare is a health insurance program for retired persons. Payments are made directly to doctors / hospitals.

Medicaid (Medical in California) is a program to provide low cost / free medicare care for poor persons. Payments made direct to doctors / hospitals.

Unemployment Insurance is a program funded by employers to pay a tiny stipend for 26 weeks (length has been extended up to 99 weeks depending on the political winds) while you find another job.

Employment Training Tax is a program funded by employers to retrain workers for a different job.

Workers Comp is insurance your employer pays for to cover you if you are hurt at work, including lifetime disability payments.

Health Insurance was traditionally provided by your employer. Coverage was optional as was how much the employer contributed to the cost (part of your compensation). It is also individually available.

Emergency Room is available to anyone. You will be treated even if they never will be paid for the service.

---

I never expected or trusted any government to fully fund my retirement, I made damn sure that I took care of that myself. I paid into a company pension scheme for 30 years, paid my National Insurance for the full State pension, and also paid into a smaller occupational pension scheme for 8 years after I retired, and worked part time. I can manage reasonably well, but I certainly won't be holidaying in the Bahamas or running a Ferrari!

So did my dad, but lost the whole thing during the 2008 crash. Thank goodness for his state pension. If he'd solely relied on the private sector he'd be destitute.

---

Reality Internet Personality

I've met you dad, he is a nice man. I'm sorry to hear what happened.

Well the social safety net was put there for a reason. I find it disgusting that so many are so keen to destroy it. I guess the Tea partiers won't be happy until they have Hooverville tent cities again.

---

Reality Internet Personality

I guess the Tea partiers won't be happy until they have Hooverville tent cities again.

Another DEM/Libber EXTREMIST Whacko Statement.

Cuppa?

Corn Corn Corn Corn.

---

May we All have a METAMORPHOSIS. REASON. GOoD JUDGEMENT and LOVE and ORDER!!!!!

update:

Congressional leaders met with President Obama at the White House and afterward offered no suggestion of progress on the shutdown.

Watching from Canada it looks to me like them Talabaners
have taken control of the Tea Party. If Osama is still alive,
and he very well may be, then he is smiling with great glee.

---

Like Somalia the USA does not have a functional government.

---

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution." - John Adams, 1780

---

Join the PACK!

Gettysburg Address!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvA0J_2ZpIQ

---

Looking at the political make up of the USA from the outside, all I can say it's long past time that a 3rd political party is badly required.

Cheers.

update:

Congressional leaders met with President Obama at the White House and afterward offered no suggestion of progress on the shutdown.

Again both sides pointed at the other and said that side was at fault because they would not compromise. Begins to remind me of a labor contract after a strive vote. Everyone outside knows they will have to meet somewhere in the middle. Since neither is willing to give even a dime ... all republican house members and all democratic senators should be thrown out of office, have their pensions seized and then be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

---

update:

Congressional leaders met with President Obama at the White House and afterward offered no suggestion of progress on the shutdown.

Again both sides pointed at the other and said that side was at fault because they would not compromise. Begins to remind me of a labor contract after a strive vote. Everyone outside knows they will have to meet somewhere in the middle. Since neither is willing to give even a dime ... all republican house members and all democratic senators should be thrown out of office, have their pensions seized and then be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

+1
It seems we the people need to pressure the dolts to add another ammenment. One that states that if the house and senate cant get a budget passed in time they lose pay at the rate of one month for every day a budget is not passed.
And 2. all laws passed apply to all members of both houses and judical and executive branches.

---

[/quote]

Old James

If they fail to reach an agreement by midnight (04:00 GMT Tuesday), the US government will be forced to close all non-essential federal services. More than 700,000 staff could be sent home on unpaid leave, with no guarantee of back pay once the deadlock is over.

The shutdown would be the first in the US for 17 years.

So it's happened before then?

Yes, the winter of '95-'96. The GOP (Republicans) took a black eye for that one. Soon after that incident we had a fully balanced budget.

Not only did we have a fully balanced budget, but the Clinton administration also ended with one h&^ell of a budget surplus, which Bush totally depleted with such things as tax reductions to the rich (1%ers) and the totally senseless Iraq war.

---

I don't buy computers, I build them!!

My second paragraph is very sequitur.

If you can't make the connection, I don't care. Besides, what do you have to worry about, you're not in this country.

No according to you I am a slave in communist dictatorship. That's how out of touch with reality you are.

Look, it should be no surprise this was going to happen again. We haven't had a budget since Obama took office. We've been funding the government with a series of continuing resolutions (CRs) since he's been in office because we can't even agree on a budget. The democrats love the CRs because they hide how much is being spent and where it's being spent. The last CR/debt ceiling deal made was so the latest CR would run out at about the same time the new debt ceiling was reached. Since we've reached the end of this CR and the debt ceiling is now calculated to be reached a couple weeks later tells me that the republicans have successfully reduced government spending by a little bit. This is good news to me.

It has been reducing under Obama anyway, by a lot. But heh, who wants facts to get in the way of a good story.

Actually to deficit has been reduced far beyond what the Rupubs wanted. The CRs were/is a Republican idea. The main reason that there hasn't been a budget since Obama took office is that the Republican led House has never sent a budget that could be passed through the Senate. The bills that they did send were so severe, that nobody could deal with them. Remember, all budget bills must originate in the House of Representatives not the Senate.

Obamacare was passed without a single republican vote and they even had to bribe a handful of democrat senators to get it to pass. The democrats are ruling by dictating.

I don't think you understand what dictating is. I'd say dictating is not getting what you want through the democratic process and then sabotaging everything in an attempt to get your own way.

True the Republicans did not vote for the bill but, if you had really been paying attention to what is happening, everything that the president has attempted to do for this country has been rebuffed by the Republicans. If President Obama got on TV and said that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, some Republican/Tea Partyer will say he's flat out lying. The bill was approved by both houses of Congress and signed into law. The Supreme Court which, by the way is considered to be a conservative court, said the law was/is constitutional. It amazing how the Republicans can be against the Affordable Care Act, since the greater majority of it came from the Heritage Foundation, and was fashioned after Gov. Rommey's bill/law in mass. This means that essentially the ACA is a Republican law. The moniker 'Obamacare' was started by Republicans to deride the act. Obama took it, turned it around on you, and owned it, because he cares about the uninsured in this great country of ours.

What's happening right now is nothing compared to what's going to happen October 17. I hope the republicans keep the government shut down beyond October 17. Beyond October 17 the government will be forced to spend only what they take in every month--hence a balanced budget.

You really think that is going to be a good idea? Really? You think that is what will happen?

The republicans will want to fund what is necessary to cause the least amount of pain on the population (the "must pays"); the democrats will want to fund only that which will cause the most amount of pain on the population (all the discretionary spending).

Blah, the Republicans are protecting the special interests who like things just the way they are because they can keep milking people endlessly.

What you're seeing in washington dc is the makers and takers duking it out. Luckily, here in the states, it happens inside the beltway and there's no shooting. The democrats are on the verge of a coup and I'm still not sure who's going to win. I'm willing to forego my monthly military retirement check for as long at it takes to put sanity back in washington dc. If I have to live without my military retirement check until the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, I'll do it. Unfortunatly, I'm not confident many others would be willing to do that.

I've been watching this crap for 23 years. I've seen it before and I'm getting ready to see it again. The bottom line is that the people want a communist nanny state and the people think, ...once again, falsely, in history..., that it'll work this time.

"People want a communist nanny state"

Nothing, absolutely nothing you have written supports that statement. Nothing in this debate anywhere supports that statement. I don't think you know what Communism is because there has been nothing discussed in Congress that could in any distant remote way be called Communism and only the sincerely deluded would a)call Obamacare communism b) think that shutting down the government because a certain party doesn't like the new law that congress passed using the democratic process, is in anyway a reasonable, sensible thing to do.

and using your method of arguing I am going to sum up by saying this clearly points to the obvious conclusion that Hitler makes casseroles on Tuesday nights for the local women's bowling team...and if you can't see that it doesn't matter because you're foreign.

and a communist.

OK, I'm going to get very blunt here and probably hurt a lot of peoples' feelings and will most likely get thrown off and banished, but here goes. Lets do a little bit of history first. The current Republican party arose from the 1950/60's during the civil rights era. The party at that time was a big tent party with a very large Afro-American presence. When the KKK was effectively shut down the southern Democrats that were segregationists had no place to go in their party and the Republican party sucked them up like a very large vacuum cleaner and the southern strategy went into full effect. President Obama is the Republican's worst nightmare. He is a black man that has fallen through the cracks, and the one thing that a good ole boy hates is for a black man to tell him what to do (to be in charge of things), now put that on a national scale and you have the Tea Party. The hate and venom that has been thrown at this man since he first announced that he was going to run for president has been fanatical.

But through all of this, this country under the Obama administration been pulled up by its boot straps and has had an improving economy since he took office. The economy, even though sluggish, has gotten better each and every month and just think how much faster it would have grown if he got even a smidgen of help from the other side. When the Democrats had control of the Congress more major bills were signed that helped this country then all the bills signed by both Bush's and Clinton combined. Now that the Republican/Tea Party has control of the House, not a major bill has been sent to the president to be signed. If a lot of people would get their heads out of Faux News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. and spend some time in the real world you might get a different perspective on a whole lot of things.

The biggest gripe that the Republicans have with the country as a whole is that they think that there is too much debt. BIG NEW FLASH!!
This country has always, and will always thrive on a healthy amount of debt. The massive construction effort that pulled us out of the great depression lasted for seven years and would have gone on much further if it wasn't for the Republicans getting scared, even though the economy was improving. When they got their way the depression slipped again and it took ten years longer than necessary to get out of it. The coast-to-coast interstate highway system almost never got off the ground, but Eisenhower fought his own Republican party and won. I could go on, but you wouldn't believe me anyway.

The highways and bridges in this country are in deplorable shape and President Obama had a plan to put the construction workers back to work to repair/rebuild our infrastructure, but the Republicans shot it down when it could have put thousands/millions back to gainful employment and raise the economy even faster and higher. Every job plan that Obama has tried to put together to put the people back to work has failed, because the Republican/Tea Party has spread enough lies and misinformation to stop them.

This has happened every time Obama has attempted to get something started. The ACA will give millions the opportunity to get affordable health care. The other side has tried to bend heaven and earth to stop it and it didn't work. So what do they want to do, shut down the government because they don't like a law that is basically theirs to begin with only a black man, who they hate with a passion, put it all together and made it a law. And the sad thing about it is that many low-income people, especially those with skin of color, in the south will not be able to get the much needed help because the Governors in those states will not extend the Medicaid.

One of their biggest arguments have been that people will lose their health insurance, but what they don't want you to know that it has been a trend for a little over ten years that if your spouse is on your policy at your job and he/she also works and has health insurance, there is a good chance that they will be taken off of yours. Employers have been doing this to cut down on their own insurance costs way before the ACA.

Even with all of the lies and misinformation about the ACA, if you were to ask people on the street about specific parts of it, they say that they like them. If you were to ask people which they prefer, the would pick the ACA over Obamacare the greater majority of the time, even though they are the same thing, and most people don't know it.

It's bad enough that we have had to go through the sequestration, which by the way has hurt the economy badly, the house of Representatives, led by a Tea Partyer who has his sights on running for President in 2016, has closed down the government, hopefully the rest of the Republicans in the house will come to their senses and stop this madness; demanding the ACA be defunded in order to open the government again. The first and only priority for the Republicans in congress, since they couldn't make him a one term president, is to have history put an asterisk by his name as if he didn't even count. This country has never defaulted on its loans, it is the reserve currency for the entire world. Every country in the world invests in the currency of the U.S.A., and you want to through it all away. If those of you that feel that badly to forfeit the very prestige and honor of this country, don't let the door hit you in the a@@@ on the way out.

---

I don't buy computers, I build them!!

If you were truly watching during the Clinton era, then you know that what was a $17T deficient, was turned into a $1T+ surplus when it ended. The budget battles that went on it the Democratic presidency and a Republican Congress was monumental, but they worked together to GET IT DONE! The speaker of the house, Nutt Grinrich, shut down the government, costing about $100 million a day, and his reasoning was in his own words, and you can find them if you look hard enough, is that he felt disrespected for having to exit from Air Force One from the rear exit. You know how that turned out, who did the general populace (liberal and conservative) blame for the shutdown. Bush got elected in the next election and immediately blew it all away.

If you really, really want to know why Democrats have spent so much money over the decades, then you have to do two things 1) Get rid of your partisanship and 2) this is really going to be hard for conservatives, but trust the facts. They have to attempt to clean up the mess that the Republicans make before them.

When Obama came into office, the economy was much worse then originally thought. The Bush administration was losing 800k+ jobs a month, the Bush tax cuts for the rich drew the influx of earnings down so low that it still is affecting what is being taken in by the government. If you would do some honest research you will find that the economy was at its highest and the debt at its lowest when we had a high tax rate for the 1%ers. Even conservative economists will tell you that. The Republican have starved the governmental earning so much during the last 30+ years, starting with Reagan, and continuing with the tax cuts from both Bushes, its no wonder we having economic problems.

You say its the Democrats that are shutting down the government, then why are so many conservative Republicans like Joe Scarbough, and even several members of the same party in the House of Representives are saying that the Ted Cruz / Mike Allen Tea Party strategy of demanding the defunding of the ACA in order to get a bill passed is foolish and stupid. You even got that Norville character, you know the own I'm talking about; the one that convinced the Republicans to sign a pledge to not allow any new revenues had come out against what your prized Tea Party is doing. Right now there are at least 19 Republicans that have publically said that they will vote for a clean spending bill, without anything attached to it concerning the ACA, if it comes to the House floor. The only reason that it hasn't been done so far is the hold that the Tea Party has on the rest of the Republican members. The speaker of the House is so afraid of losing his chair, that he won't stand up to the 30~40 Tea Party members. All it would take is a simple majority vote (50%+1).

Actually, it's the Republican/Tea Party that has shut down the government. You have a law that was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law during Obama's first term. The Republicans took it to the conservative Supreme Court, which said that the law was constitutional. The Republican/Tea party, I hate to lump the two together because the Republican party did have some redeeming values before the Tea Party faction took it over; did not like the results of the second election, which I might add was won by 26 million votes. They have done everything in their power to stop the ACA and they can't. Even shutting down the government will not stop it. You can't defund it as the money is non-discretionary, it is not a line item. If the Democrats are the one shutting down the government then why are Republicans saying that we got what we wanted and are so cheerful about it.


Yes, the ACA is essentially a Republican law. Like I said, if you stop spending all/most of your time watching Faux News and listening to people like Rush Limbaugh and do some honest and thoughtful research, you will find that the greater majority of the things in the ACA came from the Heritage Foundation, which I believe is an ultra-conservative think tank. It was also based on Gov. Romney's bill, almost a clone, which from what I have been reading is doing quite well. He went against it because if he didn't he'd have been primary'd and he would never had gotten as far as he did, the Tea party would have dropped him like a hot potato.

Since when is caring for your fellow human being, makes some one a communist? Since when is a law that affords everyone, rich or poor, an opportunity to get health care a communist act. If memory serves me right the same thing was said about Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. One of those acts was put in place by a Democratic president and the other by a Republican, does that make them communists? I don't think that Bush the senior would like you calling him one. I remember a time that that was a key point in Republican values, and they looked out for the poor and sick. I am a member of the Democratic party, although a conservative one, and many, many years ago even though I'm black, I thought about going to the Republican party, but after I took a good hard look at it and saw how it was changing for the worse, I decided not to. The party has lost most of its values that it once stood for and has become a party of grumpy old white people that dreams it was still the 1950s. The world is changing, the country is changing and the party is still living in the past.

As for the ACA being crammed so far up your posterior, you don't have to take advantage of it if you don't want to. Seeing that you are retired from the military, btw, from one vet to another thank you for your service and welcome home; if you are still working and have health insurance you can keep it and do nothing. I don't know if you are getting Social Security or not, but you can use the ACA as your supplemental health insurance. But then again it's shoved so far up there you may not be able to get to it. As far as the Affordable Housing Act, it is already taken, and guess what it was put in by a Republican president, George Herbert Walker Bush, the smart one.

---

I don't buy computers, I build them!!

Im thinking China must really love what is going on. They are probally just drooling over the nonsense in D.C.

What better way to cripple this nation then to watch us default and then call in all the bonds they have bought from us to keep us afloat.

And they wont even have to fire a shot.

---

[/quote]

Old James