Pardon my ignorance, what law was passed that allowed the government to take over two car companies? Fire the elected CEO's? Dictate how they must run their businesses? Government is supposed to be seperate from private enterprise by LAW.

You not hearing about it doesn't surprise me, try more reliable sources of news. It happened. I suggest you go through the archive on my blog, and on draginols, and leukis, they all have links to various news stories as they broke.

You can also start here: http://www.nakedemperornews.com/

And in an interview he and his advisors mentioned that they want to introduce mandatory civil service at 18 like in europe, with the obama force being one of them... It is amazing what you can find in old videos of politicians.

PS. everyone in germany believed it could never happen to them either.

Interesting. Here, Wolfang Schäuble has similar ideas for the police - but he is very conservative. The ones who criticizse too much power for the police or intelligence services are the liberals and the green party.

The US government didn't take over the carcompanies because they wanted to control that industry. I thought GM and Chrysler were all but bankrupt.. without nationalization thousands would have lost their jobs, and that would have been worse. As soon as they are back in business they can privatize themselves again, same as the banks who paid back the money they recieved and can do as they please again. I don't understand your fuss about it. It wasn't done due to the political ideology of a planned economy.

I suppose you could have let the market regulate itself all the way, but I bet that you would have a much higher unemployment rate than 10% right now. No president would have let that happen, regardless from which party he came from. It would have been political suicide to let the economy crash to see what happens.

I don't compare Chavez with the rest of the intelligent world. I don't understand how he failed to learn the lesson from history. But the Federal Republic Germany has social components in its economic structure since 1949, and I wouldn't describe it as a socialist dictatorship. The theory is called "social market economy" or ordoliberalism.

I don't understand the paranoia connected with the word social. You know, it does not automatically mean a communist dictatorship or loss of freedom in any form. From my european/german perspective, you all sound somewhat crazily paranoid on this issue.

That is a very big misconception.  bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears.  It does mean a resstructuring, so some people lose their jobs - which happened anyway (both declared bankruptcy).  What did happen because of Obama is that the normal process was circumvented so that millions of people lost billions of dollars (not even including the American Taxpayer).  Bond holders were deprived of their money when in most normal bankruptcies, they would have gotten some money.  And of course Obama then dictated everything the companies did - from what they could pay their top executives, to what cars they made.  Obama did not call it nationalization, but it quacked, swam, and waddled like a duck.  So it did not take a genius to figure out it was a duck.

Ford was the only company that refused to bite the poisoned apple.  And guess which company is now riding very high?

Yes it was.  Clearly neither the bank TARP or the Auto money did any good other than to allow the government to dictate policy.  Banks still went out of business, GM and Chrysler still went bankrupt, and millions still lost their jobs.  So what was the purpose of the money other than to gain control of the businesses?  The Banks (that are able) are paying back the money as fast as they can, and still declaring billion dollar losses.  Why?  To get out of the control of Obama.  Yet now he is trying to change the rules and say "if you ever took", not "if you have now". 

I hate nazi comparisons, but this one is very appropriate.  When Hitler was subtly taking over parts of Europe, was he telling the world "This is my first land grab"?  No, he was saying "this is my last land grab".  And clearly the former was correct, the latter was a lie.  So if you listen to Obama, you notice the same thing.  he says one thing, and does another.  More so than most politicians.  They lie during the campaign and then break promises.  Obama just lies all the time.

Again incorrect.  Most presidents would have passed a real stimulus package, but any honest person will tell you that the one Obama passed was pure pork, and not stimulus.  They thought they could pass the pork and that the recession would be over soon anyway, and of course it was not (proof is in the fact that in the first year, only 17% of the money was spent).  So unemployment would have gone to 10% with another president not nationalizing half the US economy - if they had passed a real stimulus as well - but it would be falling now, not waiting for the double dip.

There is no paranoia with the word social.  We all are social.  We live in a social society.  We socialize.  But socialism is about as social as a knife in the back, and there the paranoia comes in.  Socialism dictates that the fruits of your labor are the government's first and they then allow you to keep what they think is best.  Capitalism clearly is different.  You keep the fruits of your labor, but pay the government for maintaining social order.  Clearly Germany is not soclalist by their stated definition.  But in practice, they are approaching it.  As are most western democracies, the US included.  As Margaret Thatcher said "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.".  Indeed, Obama ran through all the money very quickly and has basically nothing to show for it.

I think that germans in particular don't like the use the nazi's as comparison for anything. Hitler is not a normal figure of history for us, nor are the 12 years of nationasocialist reign a normal historical period which can be talked about neutrally. Some people compared Bush to Hitler after he opened Guatanamo Bay. It is a concentration camp, if you will, where people were and are held against their will and without a trial. The legal loophole of enemy combattants doesn't really change that fact.. I am sure Hitler had artificially created legal circumstances that made the incarcarations of politicians, intellectuals, gays, priests in 1933 legal as well. The comparison is an unbearable insult though because Guantanamo is nothing like a german concentration camp nor are the prisoners innocent people. Even though I didn't like Bush I would not stand for that.

Aren't all prisoners of war (or otherwise) held against their will? This has to be the worst statement about Gitmo I've ever heard, but I'm not surprised by the type of thinking behind it, as even the US media makes it appear that way. The truth is people were not scooped up arbitrarily and sent there, they had a personal choice in the matter (by picking up a rife or planning an attack). They do no work (forced labor), the conditions are better than many US prisons. It is NOTHING like a concentration camp. Perhaps you'd like them put up at the local Hilton? Even well meaning comparisons, exasperate the issue needlessly. 

Loophole?

Oy Vey.

Easy with the horses. It is quite possible to describe it as such if you squint or just use facts without context that are convenient for your argument. I disagreed with the comparison in my post.

Enemy combatants appears very loopholish to me - either you are an enemy in a war, then you have soldiers who become prisoners of war, or you aren't - and then you have civilians. Picking up a rifle and planning an attack sounds very military to me, but I am no expert. "Encamping" civilians with disregard to their habeas corpus and constitutional rights to satisfy national security issues is illegal in the US and many other places around the world. Creating a third group to avoid being bound to existing law is fishy- it isn't even a loophole, more like a sleazy lawyeresque trick.

I realize that there is a dilemma when faced with an asymetrical threat like terrorism because you have criminal fanatical civilians who pose a military threat on a large scale with acts of terrorism like 9 11, and there is no precedence for that. Maybe Guantanamo had been a necessity in the years after 2001, but it is up to the legislature to deal with that new set of problems and to define and work out the necessary laws within the legal framework of the constituion.

The 'third group' in question here created itself, utemia.  No one had to 'avoid being bound to existing law' - 'existing law' (military tribunals) covers them quite adequately.  Pretending there is an absolute dichotomy (POW or civilian, no exceptions) is disingenuous at best.

I didn't know that military tribunals allow for detainees to be detained for months on end, even more than a year, before they have their tribunal.

I don't want to start a debate about military tribunals or enemy combattants and the rest of it. I still find it fishy, but that's my personal pov. I don't really think about the whole issue very often because Cuba is far away from Germany and the issue isn't very present here. All the different implications of the military commission act from 2006 for the tribunals themselves, for jurisprudence and legal philosophy are interesting when I hear about them, but that's just curioucity.

It's pretty straightforward, actually: You don't want to spend indefinite time @ Gitmo, don't get captured while engaged in jihad against the US or its citizens.

Ahh - thanks for clarifying all issues that might be viewed as problematic so elegantly. lol.

My pleasure.

Wow, this is so wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start.

First, we were told by the administration that we had to do the stimulus packages because if we didn’t unemployment would go to as high as eight percent. This is true, because every time we have had a bad recession we never got higher than eight percent unemployment before things started moving in the right direction. That is to say that if we did nothing we would peak at around eight percent and the market would correct itself and things would get better, this usually takes about five to nine months.

What president pencil dick did was perpetrate a fraud on the American people. He said that if we act now, right away and give him the money the unemployment rate would not top six percent. Historically when government stimulus is done correctly, that is what happens.

So doing nothing we have eight percent and doing something we have six percent at best. Usually we peak at eight percent no matter what we do because the market self-corrects regardless what the government does.

Our fearless leader took that basic information and used it to get a pile of money he could spread around to get votes and maintain power. What he did to expect was when he injected himself into the free market system he stopped the market from correcting itself. Businesses became frightened and started shedding jobs to protect the businesses. This caused a cascading effect that started with real estate and moved into banking, and insurance. We went from between four and five percent unemployment, which is statically everyone that wants a job has a job to officially ten percent unemployment unofficially it is closer to twenty percent. During the great depression, we had twenty-five percent unemployment. We are still shedding jobs so we are not too far from that right now. All because President Obama wants to take control of the private sector. The president and his advisors have no clue how business works, they seem to think that you just order money from a business in the form of taxes and they get the money with no effect on the business because they are all rich and can afford it. He is finding out now only now that his foolish beliefs on how business works might be a little flawed. He believes that big business is doing this to HIM on purpose just to make him look bad and the American people are starting to see that they have a better grasp on how things work than he does.

The government does not need to get its hands involved in business. Each time they monkey with the system the make things worse. When asked by CNN Money, (an extreme right wing news organization) how this happened the administration finally told the truth. Worse case scenario was eight percent and they thought they could not get any worse than that. Meaning that they knew that doing noting would only hurt the country for a few months never more than sixteen months, and they could blame Mr. Bush for that and claim the glory of fixing it. When they started to take over the private sector, they caused a ripple effect that has prolonged the recession and spinning us into a depression. They had no idea that this would be the result but people in business did. They ignored them and that is why we are at seventeen percent unemployment with the government saying it is only ten percent.

The reason social security is bankrupt is because they tried this same game in the 60’s with President Johnson. There was a trillion dollar surplus in social security, they took it and placed IOU’s to cover it. Now those IOU’s are due and Congress says we don’t have the money. The banks were told in the last decade that Congress would cover their losses if they loaned money to people that could not pay it back. When the people defaulted, the banks ran to Congress and Congress said the banks were greedy and refused to honor their agreements as prescribed by the laws they wrote. This is why banks are failing now. The foolishly trusted our Congress to honor their agreements. Ford asked for money to help them for a few months till they could get back on their feet. In fact all three big auto makers did this. GM and Chrysler accepted the money and are now bankrupt. Ford saw the writing on the walls and opted out. They are now at the top of the heap, and proof that doing things Mr. Obama’s way will lead to ruin.

The liberals in Congress have no concept of how things work. During Mr. Clinton’s administration, they found that with the tax cuts of the Reagan era, they were projected a ten trillion dollar surplus. That was a trillion dollars a year for the next ten years. They spent it all in one year, changed the tax codes, and raised taxes. The problem is that the projections were based on no administrative changes for the next ten years. Once they made changes like raising taxes those projections were void. Congress borrowed money against those projections and are surprised that they are taking in less money. Did they say oops we made a mistake? Nope! Tax cuts don’t work we need to raise taxes again to make up the shortfall.

I will take your bet because I am old enough to see what happened 40 years ago and watching it happen again only ten times as worse.

Blame that on the Geneva Convention.  They "defined" what a POW was.  And basically if you are not in uniform, then the GC classified you as a spy (or comparable) with NO RIGHTS.  Given the treatment of the guests at Gitmo, I would say the US has gone above and beyond the call of duty there to protect these people from a firing squad.  Even Obama now agrees with that, although he will not say it directly.