Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) says Washington Democrats’ unprecedented decision to cancel this year’s budget will wreak havoc on our economy and make it even harder to put people back to work.
The House Budget Committee’s top Republican, Ryan says Democrats’ plan to continue their out-of-control ’stimulus’ spending spree and raise taxes on middle-class families is a “recipe for disaster.”
He also challenges President Obama and Washington Democrats to stop running out the clock and “make the tough choices they promised they would, put moral obligation before political expedience, and focus on what’s in the best interests of the next generation, not the next election.”
With economists saying immediate fiscal discipline is needed to create jobs, Ryan notes that Republicans have already identified $1.3 trillion in specific spending cuts that could be implemented right now.
Rep. Ryan is in his sixth term representing the people of Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District.
Duration : 0:3:20
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http://house.gov/paul
http://CampaignForLiberty.com
Congressman Ron Paul addresses the crowd at the South Republican Leadership Conference, April 10, 2010. Dr. Paul lost the straw poll to Mitt Romney by a single vote.
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Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com
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Vice Presidential Candidate Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) at the Republican National Convention.
Duration : 0:45:45
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America elected you on a promise of hope and change. America regrets it. In 2010, we are taking our country back. Blue collar democrats, libertarians, independents, and conservatives. We love our country. We are proud of our founders. And we will fight for our traditions. We don’t want your revolution!
Duration : 0:3:11
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First in a series of 12 Parodies of the Mac/PC ads.
http://www.britethorn.com
Starring Aaron Sjoholm and Shawn Girvan.
Directed by Jeff Hadick. Written and Produced by John T. Kramer.
Duration : 0:0:38
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This is why Republicans shouldn’t throw stones at Democratic houses. Clean up your own first!
Duration : 0:3:34
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Joe Barton and Al Gore exchange remarks at a congressional hearing (Mar. 21, 2007)
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On November 20, 2009, Sarah Palin visited Columbus, OH as part of her book signing tour for “Going Rogue.” When her supporters were asked broad questions about why they thought she should be president, the responses were vague: She’s “real.” She’ll “stick up for America.”
THERE ARE UNINFORMED OBAMA SUPPORTERS, TOO
It has been said in comments that we would find similarly talking point-driven, substance-less supporters at an Obama rally, and we agree. But no politician has emerged on the national stage as undefined and unqualified as Sarah Palin, and her public persona–which is anti-intellectual by definition–discourages substance. Instead, we get winking. One could hardly imagine her giving a complex speech about race in America, or speaking eloquently about our country’s relations with Islam. Not just because she couldn’t write such a speech (Obama has speech-writers, of course) but because she wouldn’t–such necessarily academic discussion is antithetical to the persona she’s created for herself and that her supporters have come to love.
CHERRY-PICKING
As for accusations of cherry picking, which are commonly thrown at interview-based videos, it simply isn’t what we did. We interviewed only a few more people than ended up in the video, not hundreds, and what was cut was done for time purposes. The people were selected at random–some offered to be interviewed–and we were only there for about 90 mins (it gets dark early and fast in Ohio right now). What didn’t make it into the video was just more footage of people talking generically or about taxes/spending, drilling, and abortion, and we constructed blocks in the piece to represent those issues. Of course the piece was edited to be entertaining (this is YouTube, after all, where the currency is cat videos) but we don’t believe we misrepresented the attitudes of the people at that signing in any way.
This NEW LEFT MEDIA film was produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviews) and Erick Stoll (camera).
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Duration : 0:8:22
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At the recent 5-day Integral Institute seminar on Integral Business Leadership,
Ken Wilber was asked, by a senior Zen teacher, “What do you think of the Republican convention?”
Ken responded by giving an overview of what a truly integral politics might look like, and used that to compare and contrast with the Democratic and Republican conventions, both of which are less-than-integral. We think that this twenty-minute summary is brilliant, insightful, deadly serious, and wickedly funny, all at once. But by all accounts it is an extraordinary account of why all politics today are considerably less-than-integral, along with certain features that almost certainly would have to be included in the future in any truly integral politics.
In this synopsis, Ken focuses on three items that all political theories have attempted to address but none have managed to fully integrate. These are the tension between (1) the individual and the collective; (2) the source of the cause of human suffering: is the individual primarily to blame or is the society primarily to blame?; and (3) the different levels of development that the different political parties tend to represent: any truly integral politics would include and represent all of them, and yet how on earth do you do that?
Due to time considerations, Ken did not discuss two other equally important ingredients in any integral politics. One. In representational democracies, people have a right to be at whatever stage of development they are at, and generally speaking, within free speech, a right to express the values of whatever stage they are at. Traditional-fundamentalist (blue) has a right to be traditional, modernist (orange) has a right to be modernist, postmodernist (green) has a right to be postmodernist, and so on. This is generally modified in practice, to the extent that the center of gravity of a culture will tend to impose its values on others, especially if they are first-tier (or less-than-integral) values. Nonetheless, in democratic societies, there’s a general background understanding that people have a right to be, and a right to express, whatever stage they are or whatever belief system they possess.
Two. They do not, however, have a right to act on those beliefs. This is generally handled in representative democracies by a separation of public and private, and by a similar if more specific principle of the separation of church and state. This means that, for example, in the privacy of my blue-meme mind, I am free to believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior and that nobody achieves salvation without a belief in Jesus. In public behavior, however, I am not allowed to burn at the stake somebody who disagrees with me. In terms of integral psychology, this means in the interior of an individual (i.e., the upper left), the person can believe whatever they like; but in their public behavior (i.e., the upper right), they must behave according to laws drawn from a worldcentric or higher level of development (lower left), or else they are charged with civil or criminal behavior and removed from society if necessary (lower right).
This separation of church and state, or more generally what Max Weber called the differentiation of the values spheres, is one of the great and enduring contributions of the Western enlightenment, a contribution almost entirely misunderstood by extreme postmodernists, who in fact are operating under its protection while bitterly condemning it.
(The most common version of this is the aggressive attempt to reduce “I” and “It” to “We,’ or the attempt to reduce art and science to a social construction, which can therefore be deconstructed. As it turns out, this reductionism presumes precisely what it denies, but then, deconstructive postmodernism has been little without its performative contradictions.)
A truly integral politics exists nowhere on the planet at this time, principally because not enough individuals have emerged at the integral levels of consciousness, and hence no governments anywhere have integral representatives as members (except rarely and by accident). Its principal challenge is to create some form of governance that allows each stage to be itself within the constraints of not harming others (i.e., to let red be red, and blue be blue, and orange be orange, and green be green, etc—precisely because, as we saw, this is a right in virtually all free societies), and yet to govern from the highest, widest, deepest, and most encompassing levels of development emerged to date (starting at yellow). Most representative democracies do this anyway, except their center of gravity is not yet fully integral, and they do it implicitly, not explicitly.
Duration : 0:17:45
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