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ROFL rofl

yeah it did. Deficit spending on military. Military action, contrary to selling hardware, does not actually net the US treasury a return. Financially it is a bad investment. Tanks don't appreciate in value. Soldiers with expensive training finish their tours and wish to return to civilian life, necessitating the expensive training of more soldiers. Contrary to common misconception, war is NOT good for the economy. This wasn't World War II where the entire industrial infrastructure retooled to spam out military hardware. A few companies (Halleburton, Black water) have and will profit immensely from this war, and all we had to do was mortgage our GDP to China in order to achieve this.....

Thanks, Bush!

Or it pisses off the citizens of the invaded nation, to the point where they want to continue the conflict.

China has no reason to start a war with the US...but there's a lot of things that can change.

You're right that China and the US are too tied together. They have been fore a while. Starting about the time when the CIA mysteriously ceased all support of Tibetan independence.

Iraq though, is different. Post war Japan became closely tied to the US, but I don't think that could ever happen with Iraq. Besides, assisting Iraq in economic development and industrialization and modernization was NOT on Bush's to do list. Bush and his oil connected family will prosper off the chaos and instability in the mid east for years to come.

not hearsay but rather speculation, actually. If you take a look at all the crap that has happened in the past 8 years, and add to that a cynical suspicion that the capitalists have been plotting how to undermine the ideals of the founding fathers for a hundred years, and it all seems to make sense.......

our political system is a royal feudal system in disguise, where people have rights in name only, and only the money has access to the law.

Our philosophies of freedom and of the republic, of equal opportunity, are no longer true but only serve to give people a feeling of investment in society, so they are motivated to follow the rules and play the game.

The Protestant work ethic, the American Dream, etc have become a joke that capitalists play on the middle and lower classes in order to fool us into working our tails off while forever chasing the carrots of materialism, upward social mobility, and economic independence while simultaneously harrasing us with the sticks of bad credit scores, vagrancy laws, and collection agencies.

The Miranda rights are an excellent example of rights in name only. An indigent defendant will be assigned a public defender. Public defenders, by large a a joke compared to private lawyers.

A public defender is overworked and has little time to devote to any one case. An expensive private attorney is busy, sure, but they are busy with far fewer cases and have way more time and energy to devote to a single case.

A public defender is usually not as skilled as a private attorney. Sure some of them may opt to be a public defender because they believe in it, but the overwhelming majority are those that did not make the cut to get into a highly paid law firm, meaning that private lawyers are generally more skilled.

A private law firm has access to more resources and personnel.

Rich private lawyers generally have connections and friends in the system as a lot of judges were once lawyers. Not to mention the networking effect where the super rich tend to all go to the same parties.

The net effect? A system in which poor people are convicted at a greater rate than rich people. A system in which poor people, who have sub-par representation, get harsher punishments than rich people who have committed the same crime.

So yeah, we all feel like we are protected by Miranda, but the truth is, money wins.

poor people do not commit more crimes...at least not that much more.
Rich men beat their wives too. Serial killers are usually from middle class backgrounds. People who abuse cocaine tend to be in the upper tax brackets. Also there seems to be a tendency for the system (coincidentally) to punish the type of crime a poor person is likely to commit much more harshly than the types of crime a rich person is likely to commit.

popularity might get you off the hook. But seriously dude...money always wins. First of all, jury selection is one of the places where a skilled/expensive attorney wins a lot of cases. The ability to select a sympathetic jury is of vital importance.

second, many legal battles are won in the technicalities. All the motions and objections that extend trials, exclude evidence, and otherwise make impossible drawn out trials that public defenders just don't have the time for have nothing to do with the jury. In all but really high profile violent crimes, a skilled defense attorney can often win a legal battle by just extending the trial date again and again and again until the prosecutor's office no longer wishes to peruse the matter because it becomes a waste of tax dollars.