Today's Republican Party

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
While I agree there are a lot of crazy Tea Baggers my mother isn't one of them. She is a backer of the Tea Party Movement and I can understand why. Of course that doesn't mean I am going to ever watch Glenn Beck or go to his Restoring Honor thing next weekend. I will however give my mom a smart trip card and drop her at the metro so she can go. She has the freedom of speech and that's one of things she feels she is protecting with this movement.

Writing is not my forte and I truly hope I articulated this well enough. God knows there are times when I don't and people don't quite understand where I am coming from and jump all over me as if I intended to come across as gruff or impossible. Neither of those are the case here.

I have family member just like your mom. I too took stimulus energy efficiency money when my HVAC needed replacing - hey, a tax credit is a tax credit, right? - even though I would have made the replacement no matter what. I don't see how my fixing a broken hvac system was stimulus, and neither do my family who are riding buses from out of state to join Glen Beck this coming weekend (we are running the hotel

A lot of people upgraded their HVAC when they would have otherwise sat on it a year or two longer, because of the stimulus. Is that not obvious to you?

Nope, not obvious because I myself would never spend 8 - 10K to replace something that was still working like my hvac system. I would seriously wait until it broke. Windows and doors I understand, maybe even insulation.

Many HVAC problems are not total failures, making replacement a total necessity. Yours might have been broken, but there are a lot of people who have old HVAC units that keep losing freon. They know this but they limp along, getting recharges every few years. (And meanwhile the thing ices up in hot weather and it costs them a bundle in electricity, but they probably don't even know that). Many of those people took the credit, ended up doing now what they would have done a few years out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
While I agree there are a lot of crazy Tea Baggers my mother isn't one of them. She is a backer of the Tea Party Movement and I can understand why. Of course that doesn't mean I am going to ever watch Glenn Beck or go to his Restoring Honor thing next weekend. I will however give my mom a smart trip card and drop her at the metro so she can go. She has the freedom of speech and that's one of things she feels she is protecting with this movement.

Writing is not my forte and I truly hope I articulated this well enough. God knows there are times when I don't and people don't quite understand where I am coming from and jump all over me as if I intended to come across as gruff or impossible. Neither of those are the case here.

I have family member just like your mom. I too took stimulus energy efficiency money when my HVAC needed replacing - hey, a tax credit is a tax credit, right? - even though I would have made the replacement no matter what. I don't see how my fixing a broken hvac system was stimulus, and neither do my family who are riding buses from out of state to join Glen Beck this coming weekend (we are running the hotel

A lot of people upgraded their HVAC when they would have otherwise sat on it a year or two longer, because of the stimulus. Is that not obvious to you?

Nope, not obvious because I myself would never spend 8 - 10K to replace something that was still working like my hvac system. I would seriously wait until it broke. Windows and doors I understand, maybe even insulation.

Call me silly, but if they know they have a freon leak, and pay for a recharge or two every year instead of fixing and pay higher energy costs as a result, are they really going to pay $8 k today and wait for a $1500 rebate in their tax bill? Honestly?

Many HVAC problems are not total failures, making replacement a total necessity. Yours might have been broken, but there are a lot of people who have old HVAC units that keep losing freon. They know this but they limp along, getting recharges every few years. (And meanwhile the thing ices up in hot weather and it costs them a bundle in electricity, but they probably don't even know that). Many of those people took the credit, ended up doing now what they would have done a few years out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
While I agree there are a lot of crazy Tea Baggers my mother isn't one of them. She is a backer of the Tea Party Movement and I can understand why. Of course that doesn't mean I am going to ever watch Glenn Beck or go to his Restoring Honor thing next weekend. I will however give my mom a smart trip card and drop her at the metro so she can go. She has the freedom of speech and that's one of things she feels she is protecting with this movement.

Writing is not my forte and I truly hope I articulated this well enough. God knows there are times when I don't and people don't quite understand where I am coming from and jump all over me as if I intended to come across as gruff or impossible. Neither of those are the case here.

I have family member just like your mom. I too took stimulus energy efficiency money when my HVAC needed replacing - hey, a tax credit is a tax credit, right? - even though I would have made the replacement no matter what. I don't see how my fixing a broken hvac system was stimulus, and neither do my family who are riding buses from out of state to join Glen Beck this coming weekend (we are running the hotel

A lot of people upgraded their HVAC when they would have otherwise sat on it a year or two longer, because of the stimulus. Is that not obvious to you?

Nope, not obvious because I myself would never spend 8 - 10K to replace something that was still working like my hvac system. I would seriously wait until it broke. Windows and doors I understand, maybe even insulation.

Call me silly, but if they know they have a freon leak, and pay for a recharge or two every year instead of fixing and pay higher energy costs as a result, are they really going to pay $8 k today and wait for a $1500 rebate in their tax bill? Honestly?

Many HVAC problems are not total failures, making replacement a total necessity. Yours might have been broken, but there are a lot of people who have old HVAC units that keep losing freon. They know this but they limp along, getting recharges every few years. (And meanwhile the thing ices up in hot weather and it costs them a bundle in electricity, but they probably don't even know that). Many of those people took the credit, ended up doing now what they would have done a few years out.

Yes, because it makes economic sense. You may be surprised to find that while individuals may do confusing things, at the macroeconomic level, people respond to financial incentives. In this case, unless they an scoot by for another 5 years on the existing unit, it is in their economic interest to take the incentive and replace the unit. I base this on the useful life of an HVAC, the cost of maintenance trips on an old unit. The energy savings is not included because it is difficult for individeualw to predict in advance and so people may not be incented by the energy savings.

[Anonymous]

Dumb conservative ideas:

1) Invading Iraq
2) Drill baby drill
3)Evolution is a theory
4)Guns don't kill people
5)Separation of church and state is a bad
6)Flat tax
7)Global warming is a hoax
8)military spending shouldn't count towards deficit
9)It's ok to discriminate against gays and muslims
10)Obama was born in kenya
11)We can solve the healthcare crisis with a barter system

[Anonymous]

The image problem with the Tea Party is similar to the image problem Islam has in the USA. Basically, any jackhole who does stupid things can hijack the entire movement, and there's no real centralized authority to slap the idiots back into line.

[Anonymous]

As a liberal Democrat, i see the tea party - religious right as having a lot in common with the mulah's and talaban.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a liberal Democrat, i see the tea party - religious right as having a lot in common with the mulah's and talaban.

Really?? How many people have the tea party bombed? And when did this happen? Where are they stoning people?

Seriously, I used to be a democrat but now I am embarassed to be affiliated with that party. It's only because they can never come up with a valid argument. For any political issue, their argument is always that the conservatives are racist, sexist, or they hate the poor. I rarely hear of any intelligent argument from them anymore. They used to be a party for the people! But now it's like they only want to play victim. It's so sad and disappointing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a liberal Democrat, i see the tea party - religious right as having a lot in common with the mulah's and talaban.

Really?? How many people have the tea party bombed? And when did this happen? Where are they stoning people?

Seriously, I used to be a democrat but now I am embarassed to be affiliated with that party. It's only because they can never come up with a valid argument. For any political issue, their argument is always that the conservatives are racist, sexist, or they hate the poor. I rarely hear of any intelligent argument from them anymore. They used to be a party for the people! But now it's like they only want to play victim. It's so sad and disappointing.

It's total BS. The vast majority of discussion about racism and sexism is coming from the right, as they squeal about how they are being oppressed by new liberalism. In real life, nothing has changed in race relations or gender issues since the election.

In any down economy, people want to know who to blame. Conservatives want to blame PC liberals because they are out of power and this is their bogeyman. But this PC has nothing to do with the government's handling of unemployment, nothing to do with the cost of health care, nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan, nothing to do with the banking crisis. It has nothing to do with whether we save or trash the auto industry, whether we give tax credits for cars or homes. It has had no tangible affect on how we have treated the prisoners of the Iraq war, or whether we aggressively pursue terrorists here or abroad. It has not changed the number of cruise missiles we send out to kill Taliban. It did not change what we did to clean up the oil spill in the gulf.

So when you said "their argument is always..." which critical issues did you actually mean? What's left, the Arizona border debate? Is that the source of all our problems?