A rich man earns 3 apples a week by selling his products to consumers. The rich man demands that he keeps all 3 apples for himself and pays what he arbitrarily decides to pay his workers. But too many of his potential customers can no longer pay for his product because their jobs have been moved overseas and the infrastructure is falling apart. Soon, the rich man is only earning 2 apples and then 1 apple and then no apples. If only the rich man had been willing to give up one of h...

Conservatives like to say "We just want to be left alone". Except when they don't want to be left alone. Without the government you would be a slave to someone else. It is only because of the government that people have any rights at all. Leave capitalism unchecked and one corporation ends up controlling everything.

Today Bush outlined that US interrogators need to be able to use torture in order to get information out of captives. A lot of interrogators say that torture isn't effective, they'll just lie.  What torture does do is erode the already low standing that America has in the rest of the world.

Any non partisan person who visits JoeUser long enough will get the feeling that the site is a right wing leaning site. They'd be right. Part of the reason has to do with many of the better writers here just happen to be conservatives. But another reason is that some of the right wingers act like packs of predators, baiting and chasing off anyone who dares espouse other points of view. The way they do it is simple, they piss them off. Whenever a progressive post is written, a pack of mean-spi...

In an era where Republicans paint their foes with the big brush of "liberal, terrorist-loving, unpatriotic, welfare supporting losers" these same folks have remarkably fragile feelings when Howard Dean points out the obvious. Republicans, by and large, are predominantly the party of white Christians whereas the Democrats represent everyone else. Fox News and other conservative media only manage to trot out one meaningful statistic, that Bush got 40% of the hispanic vote. Does that mean what D...

Listen to Rush Limbaugh or any prominent "conservative" these days with an open mind and you'll start to notice a change in what they're all about.  It's not about principles. It's about winning. Period. The Republicans control the house, the senate, and the Presidency. They've got everything they want. And what are they doing with it? Squandering it.  What ever happened to all the big, principled ideas that the right always claimed they had? Remember the Contract with America? How ...

Those who think that the right of American politics is all about Jesus should think again. Conservatives have a religion they are much more faithful to despite far more evidence that it's a fraud. That religion is free trade. Free trade as a concept is fine. Eliminate trade barriers between countries to allow both parties access at the other's market.  But in practice, it doesn't work so well when one party's par capita GNP is massively higher than the other. That's where you get Ross Pe...

    On raining evenings such as tonight I visit favorite websites like JoeUser and time after time I see Draginol (webmaster of JoeUser) sharing his right wing techie thoughts of the world. Hey, good for him. It's a free country and it's his site. I'm delighted that JoeUser.com is now open to others to contribute to it. I can still get the pure, unadulterated Draginol stuff on his home page . Even better, thank goodness, that other points of view can make their way to the home pag...

    Thanks to some bad luck and the free market, we nearly destroyed our planet in the 20th century. No, I'm not talking about atomic bombs, I"m talking about how we seriously nearly died. Hardly anyone knows about it because it's not "sexy" news.    One man named Mr. Thomas Midgley invented two things in his illustriious (disastrous) career: 1) Chlorofluorocarbons and 2) Leaded Gasoline     Today, we enjoy his two inventions on a daily basis. There is roughly 700 times more lead in...

    Bush and the Republicans have betrayed their own neo-con brethren. And for what? Do they think progressive America is gullible enough not to see their clumsy attempts to buy their votes? Prescription drug benefit? How about just a big government hand out to the drug companies? Help for farmers? More like subsidies for agribusiness. Tax cuts to stimulate the economy? More like a huge hand out to rich people to cover their losses from when they screwed the pooch during the dot-c...

    The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's a cliché. One that Republicans despise and have put forth considerable effort to disprove. They disprove it through a perversion of statistics. "Statistics can be used to prove anything that's remotely true." said the philosopher Homer. Homer Simpson that is.     Bush got some good news on the economic front. That is, what we are told. A closer look reveals a mere continuation of the trend that the c...

    Some people say that Israel gets treated like a second class citizen in the family of nations. That's probably true. But it isn't without reason. I read the pro-Israel articles posted here and using the power of JoeUser , I'm taking advantage of the equal time this site provides to give a different point of view.     The nation of Israel was a gift. Yes, Jews lived there at the time of creation and those particular Jews have a historical claim to the regi...

    The problem with rich people in the United States is that too many of them think buy into the line that they are truly self-starters. That they "did it on their own". No American "does it on their own". Being rich means, first and foremost, that you happened to be lucky enough to be born in the United States. Think about what the United States provides a would-be rich person... The world's largest single language common market The world's largest, m...

    What is it with rich people and their greed? Obviously it takes some sort of love of money to make someone work so hard at accumulating material wealth. But they lose sight of the bigger picture: Life. You really see that when they bitch about taxes. Oh, the poor rich guy who makes $300,000. He's going to lose half of it to taxes. Oh boo-hoo. That's only $150,000 left. How can he live on that?     Tax moaners, especially on the right, give lip service to the ...

    Mackubin Owens writes in this week's National Review an article that tries to convince people of the validity of the so-called "Bush Doctrine". His thesis could be described as follows:             American predominance as a hegemonic world power is not just good for the United States but for the world.  American hegemonic power promotes global stability because no other country or combination of countries at present can rival the United States economically or militarily and thus discou...