Nader can suck on my hairy balls

Thanks Tippster for saving me the time.

Most of Nader's stuff is a dream. The biggest problems I see are financial. Capitalism has put our economy where it is today. There is financial incentive to be better than the other guy. (in business terms) Capitalism creates competitiveness, and drives innovation, but the drawback is that the losers are left behind. Nader basically wants to take from the rich and give to the poor so that everyone is happy. Our government does this to a large extent already, and I don't feel it should go to the extremes that Nader supports.

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Originally posted by Walter Sobchak

If you think you want to vote for Nader, please tell me exactly what that vote will accomplish?

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This year? Nothing because he is running as an independent.

2000? Could have gotten the Green Party into the major debates.

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Electoral reform is an issue that's brought up every fucking year. The problem (just like term limits) is that the system in place put these lawmakers in power. No one wants to gut their re-election chances, so many words are spoken, yet not much happens.

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And every fucking year somebody makes the same excuse and nothing changes.

I would have to agree with Roo that Aria would be a better choice than Ralph when it comes to hairy ball-sucking-type activities.

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Originally posted by iceman
I would have to agree with Roo that Aria would be a better choice than Ralph when it comes to hairy ball-sucking-type activities.

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I thought that after the package shaving thread that everone was going sans hair on their balls this year. I'm sure I read a memo.

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Originally posted by bad_roo
http://ottoperuna.altervista.org/spo...vanni_s016.jpg

Aria Giovanni can suck on my hairy balls but hey, whatever floats your boat.

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You do know Aria used to be a guy, don't you?

A vote for Nader is, for all practical purposes, a vote for Bush.

My mom voted Nader to make a "statement" last election. I talked to her this weekend--she learned her lession. She's so disturbed by our current administration, she said there is no way she's voting Nader again. Thank god too, 'cause she lives in a swing state.

Unfortunately, my vote in Utah counts for sooo little. :( (stinky electoral college) I'll vote anyways though.

And if you think that both parties are the same--well, I don't know where you've been for the last 3+ years. There have been SO many ill-informed, unilateral, "we-know-better-than-you" decisions that this administration has made that would NEVER have been made if a Democrat were president. Or even if McCain were president.

I dearly hope "W" follows his father's footsteps. One and out.

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Originally posted by SLCFreshies
My mom voted Nader to make a "statement" last election. I talked to her this weekend--she learned her lession. .

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Yes I would have to agree that Nader is a lesion on this country :p

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Originally posted by Walter Sobchak
You're just following a vision that either refuses to accept or doesn't understand political reality.

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No, we're not talking about Democrats. :p

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Originally posted by Walter Sobchak
So what? Then you'd have a 7-10 percent minority party in an electoral system that has no way for minority parties to gain any meaningful power. And I'll ask again, what exactly would this accomplish?

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Well, at the very least with 3 parties participating in a debate we would get 2 answers for each question asked.

Note: I don't even like Nader that much, I just hate the two party system.

He sucks more than your hairy balls. He cleans your pockets too.

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Public Shakedown Artist

"Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes."
- Dave Barry
Crystal Lewis hadn't the slightest idea what "MOPIRG" was. Each semester, she says, the mysterious phrase was listed on her tuition bill at Meramac Community College in St. Louis, Missouri, and each semester the school billed her six dollars. Then she read the fine print. "If you opt not to support MOPIRG, please deduct this amount from your payment," it said.
But her tuition bill gave no explanation of what exactly MOPIRG was.
In researching this piece, I got similar reactions from students at colleges across the country. PennPIRG, MASSPIRG, and CALPIRG - students in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Colorado and California had been paying small fees to all of these groups, and almost none of the students knew at first what it was they were paying for.
If you're putting a kid or two through college, or putting yourself through, there's a good chance you're donating to a PIRG, too.
And Ralph Nader would like to thank you for your support.
Yes, the same man who rails against corporate welfare - because it coercively takes money from taxpayers and funnels it to corporations - has set up a rather ingenious, if underhanded and manipulative, way of coercively taking money from college kids - and funneling it to Ralph Nader.
The PIRG scam is short for "Public Interest Research Group," and there are well over a hundred chapters of the organization spread out across the country. The scams vary from campus to campus, but it basically works like this:
Each time your kid registers for classes, the local PIRG chapter has arranged with the school to tack a fee on to his/her tuition. On most every campus, the PIRG chapter has made attempts to make this "contribution" as secretive and misleading as possible. Just how secretive and manipulative the method depends on how much resistance each chapter has met in trying to get the scheme implemented. At most schools, they first attempt to make the fee both mandatory and nonrefundable. If that doesn't work, they lobby for as underhanded and sneaky a scheme as the school will allow.
This has been going on for twenty-five years.
Eight years ago, I was sitting in my fraternity cafeteria at Indiana University when representatives of the then-startup INPIRG group entered with a petition. They were starting a new student group on campus, they told us, and they'd like our support. We were assured that the group was one hundred percent apolitical. It was merely a group that would advocate for Indiana University students. They needed our signatures, they said, to get the organization up and running.
What they didn't tell us was that our signatures were in effect an endorsement of a "reverse check" system, whereby every single Indiana University student (and there are about 40,000 of them) would automatically donate three dollars to INPIRG each semester, unless he or she specifically knew to "uncheck" a box on the computer screen giving authorization for the contribution.
The INPIRG method has since changed. Today, the group solicits signatures from incoming freshmen - again under the "apolitical" rubric - who, once they've signed, will then contribute each semester for the remainder of their college careers at Indiana. Students say it's almost impossible to remove your name from the list once you've signed.
But at least students at Indiana have the option of not contributing.
On about 1/3 of the state college campuses in New York State, a student's PIRG contribution is mandatory and nonrefundable. The University of Wisconsin and University of Oregon also require mandatory, nonrefundable contributions to PIRG.
You want to go to one of these schools? You pony up to Ralph Nader.
At other schools, such as Trinity College in Connecticut, students not interested in supporting the local PIRG are required to go a Bursar's office or a student activities office, fill out a form, then take the paperwork to a campus PIRG officer to get a refund. That's quite a bit a work for three or five or eight dollars - and that's assuming the student ever notices the charge on his tuition statement to begin with. Not surprisingly, most PIRG chapters don't go to great effort to publicize the refund option. They rely on college student indolence, and they're making a killing.
What's worse is that most of the time, the money these chapters shake out of college students doesn't even stay on the campus where it's generated. This is particularly true in the Northeast. At many New England schools, most or even all of the money coerced from college students goes directly to the state PIRG chapters, where it's used to pay political lawyers and statehouse lobbyists, or is used as "seed money" for further fundraising efforts. And about 10% of campus-collected money goes to the national chapter, USPIRG.
The irony in all of this is that the PIRGs disguise their scam under the "free speech" mantra. The USPIRG site makes the incredible claim that forcing students to pay for causes they don't support is protected by the First Amendment. Yet this same organization, on its campaign finance reform website, claims that voluntary contributions to political candidates isn't protected. Go figure.
PIRG chapters claim that their funding schemes are protected under the recent Southworth v. University of Wisconsin decision, decided by the Supreme Court last year. But Southworth says only that political organizations can receive student dues as disbursed through a general fund. It says nothing about reverse checkoffs or mandatory fees earmarked for political causes. In fact, the opinion stresses the importance of "viewpoint neutrality" in mandating student fees. That is, organizations from all ends of the political spectrum ought to have a crack at the funds. Despite their claims of political agnosticism, few could make the claim that PIRG's policy positions are "viewpoint neutral."
Craig Rucker works for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, an advocacy group that helps grassroots organizers oppose environmental extremists. Rucker estimates that PIRG chapters on at least 70 college campuses have some sort of funding scheme that's either mandatory, or puts the onus on the student to pursue a refund.
PIRG chapters are operational on at least 140 campuses nationwide, and if not funded by mandatory fees, most either employ deceptive sign-up campaigns similar to the one used at Indiana, or lobby usually left-leaning student government bodies to grant them disbursement from more general "activities funds."
Like most of Ralph Nader's puppet and satellite organizations, state PIRGS are notoriously reluctant to divulge financial information (more on that below), so an exact figure on just how much they're collecting is tough to compute. Nevertheless, Rucker estimates that PIRG chapters nationally manage to collect somewhere between $10 and $20 million dollars from college students to advocate for Ralph Nader's causes.
So just what are these "apolitical," "student-oriented" issues PIRG chapters advocate for?
Well, the USPIRG's 2001 annual report demands a moratorium on drilling for oil in ANWR. It criticizes the Bush administration for weakening forest protections. It also advocates for tougher CAFE standards, and it criticizes the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation for "not going far enough" toward publicly-financed elections.
If these issues are "apolitical," one wonders what PIRG considers "partisan."
The practice of forcing or tricking college students into financing causes they might not otherwise support seems particularly sleazy when coming from someone like Nader, a "citizen activist" who has always claimed to be on the side of the "little guy" - a public advocate who rails against the injustice of, for example, ATM fees.
Yes, it's sleazy and it's hypocritical, but it's also typical. Nader's public advocacy has always been at odds with his private business practices.
In the 1970's, for example, the labor-loving Nader busted up an attempt by workers at one of his organizations to unionize - an effort instigated by Nader's management style. The website Real Change quotes former Nader lieutenant Jim Turner:
"We spent a hundred years trying to clean sweatshops out of our system and what happens? Along comes the first major reformer of any impact, and he starts doing the same goddamned thing. ... My wife had to tell Ralph once to stop phoning after midnight."

Those fed up with Nader's tactics have found that taking on Nader, while difficult, is not a hopeless fight. Regents of the state university systems in California and Montana have shot down PIRG requests for mandatory support from student fees (though California schools now use the freshman-pledge approach used at Indiana). And several years ago, the efforts of student activists and local legislators nixed a mandatory scheme at the University of Texas. Rucker says his organization regularly works with local politicians and activists to fight the schemes at the state level, and that they're having some success.

The problem, mainly, is awareness. Campus PIRG chapters can implement their fee scams through petition drives, through student government organizations, or through university administrators, and they generally opt for the method they feel will provide the least amount of resistance. Once instituted, the fees then understandably get lost in the line item listings of various student athletic, health, housing, laboratory and various other academic fees.
So parents rarely notice them. And neither do students.

Char,

you already get two answers for each question asked. Kerry uses each side, depending on political expediency.

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Originally posted by mr_gyptian
Char,

you already get two answers for each question asked. Kerry uses each side, depending on political expediency.

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And Bush doesn't.

Thank you!!! You've been a wonderful crowd!!!! Thanks for supporting your local comedians!!!!

Our whole government is a corporation sucking big business (MultiNational, Inc.) cock . . . there, I said it.

Reform . . . it's going to take each of us, that means all of us, not some Republican or Democratic tool. With our vote, feet and $$$ we could change the face of this nation - progress toward the future responsibly. Right now it's business as usual in DC, and it will remain the same under Bush or Kerry.

Nader is not the bearer of news my friends, it's old news, really. This shit has been falling apart for a while. He's the only one with the balls to tell them, "fuck you, independents need a voice." Yes, he's fragmenting the Democrat vote, so what . . . its a DEMOCRACY right. It's not about voting Kerry in to beat Bush; it's about everyone doing the right thing for each other, not what's best for a few, elite corporate/govt prop dolls. ACTION is change, again, not Kerry or Bush.

Big issues to tackle in our wonderful country, any real leaders out there that are not TOTAL spineless TOOLS? Please advise.

Ah shaeighte, my reality TV is back on - back to the couch and Wendy's!

Regards - Passive American Moron:p :mad: :mad:

Okay, back through the commercial break. I love this country, our history, the GI generation. Our justice system does work, even though it needs work (tort reform). But any new ideas would be welcome, and it doesn't seem to be coming through the liberalist media, or DC . . . who are the great thinkers of our time, now?

Government needs to be de-Enron-ized. Such redundance and pork, sad, so sad!

Gotta run, back on.

Yours truly, Lazy American hiding behind young americans fighting for OUR freedom.

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Originally posted by HyRUPz
Our whole government is a corporation sucking big business (MultiNational, Inc.) cock . . . there, I said it.

Reform . . . it's going to take each of us, that means all of us, not some Republican or Democratic tool. With our vote, feet and $$$ we could change the face of this nation - progress toward the future responsibly. Right now it's business as usual in DC, and it will remain the same under Bush or Kerry.

Nader is not the bearer of news my friends, it's old news, really. This shit has been falling apart for a while. He's the only one with the balls to tell them, "fuck you, independents need a voice." Yes, he's fragmenting the Democrat vote, so what . . . its a DEMOCRACY right. It's not about voting Kerry in to beat Bush; it's about everyone doing the right thing for each other, not what's best for a few, elite corporate/govt prop dolls. ACTION is change, again, not Kerry or Bush.

Big issues to tackle in our wonderful country, any real leaders out there that are not TOTAL spineless TOOLS? Please advise.

Ah shaeighte, my reality TV is back on - back to the couch and Wendy's!

Regards - Passive American Moron:p :mad: :mad:

Okay, back through the commercial break. I love this country, our history, the GI generation. Our justice system does work, even though it needs work (tort reform). But any new ideas would be welcome, and it doesn't seem to be coming through the liberalist media, or DC . . . who are the great thinkers of our time, now?

Government needs to be Enron-ized. Such redundance and pork, sad, so sad!

Gotta run, back on.

Yours truly, Lazy American hiding behind young americans fighting for OUR freedom.

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Dude...you forgot the cardinal rule again. It's:

1. Read
2. Think
3. Post
4. Smoke Crack

In THAT order, no exceptions.

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Originally posted by mrw
[BLess government is good government. [/B]

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That's always true until you're the one who needs something. Then the story always changes (ever hear of conservative votes after a natural disaster turning away government assistance?).

Tippster . . .

It's read, think, post and take action ;), then snappers

My apologies if I offended - thought to spew trash, that is all.

Big topic.

I'd rather be skiing.