UPDATE (11:24 PM Eastern): Officials now estimate that a crowd of 30,000 turned out, three times what they had originally anticipated. Some in attendance may have been accompanying actual applicants even if they were not applying themselves. 13,000 applications were handed out.

The large numbers indicate a huge demand, but there is literally no supply. The housing agency director "stressed that none of her agency's 455 housing aid vouchers is available at the moment."

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Concern is rising that a similar scene could occur Thursday when the housing authority of this small city begins accepting the completed applications. Wednesday's event was only to hand out the paperwork. The housing authority will begin accepting applications at 9 a.m."

CONTINUED

America's biggest -- and only major -- jobs program is the U.S. military.

Over 1,400,000 Americans are now on active duty; another 833,000 are in the reserves, many full time. Another 1,600,000 Americans work in companies that supply the military with everything from weapons to utensils. (I'm not even including all the foreign contractors employing non-US citizens.)

If we didn't have this giant military jobs program, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 11.5 percent today instead of 9.5 percent.

And without our military jobs program personal incomes would be dropping faster. The Commerce Department reported Monday the only major metro areas where both net earnings and personal incomes rose last year were San Antonio, Texas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. -- because all three have high concentrations of military and federal jobs.

This isn't an argument for more military spending. Just the opposite. Having a giant undercover military jobs program is an insane way to keep Americans employed. It creates jobs we don't need but we keep anyway because there's no honest alternative. We don't have an overt jobs program based on what's really needed.

CONTINUED

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=K9sPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TI0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7075,322664&dq=the+decline+of+america&hl=en

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hq ... rica&hl=en

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=u_ ... rica&hl=en

NineOneFour wrote:

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=K9sPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TI0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7075,322664&dq=the+decline+of+america&hl=en

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hq ... rica&hl=en

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=u_ ... rica&hl=en

Nice try. Do you believe in global cooling as well?

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:

NineOneFour wrote:

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=K9sPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TI0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7075,322664&dq=the+decline+of+america&hl=en

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hq ... rica&hl=en

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=u_ ... rica&hl=en

Nice try. Do you believe in global cooling as well?

My, you're clever.

GreatApe wrote:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

David Frum (whose writing I greatly admire)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:I don't agree that America is devolving into a third-world country.

Therefore I think that global warming is a hoax.

Impeccable inferences.

NineOneFour wrote:Says the guy who thinks he's clever by posting three ancient newspaper clippings from the 1970s, without any previews or summaries apparently in a futile attempt to discredit the thread in the first place.

Strontium Dog wrote:

NineOneFour wrote:Says the guy who thinks he's clever by posting three ancient newspaper clippings from the 1970s, without any previews or summaries apparently in a futile attempt to discredit the thread in the first place.

Fair is fair - if you're going to post contemporary diatribes from homeopaths predicting that the US is due for imminent collapse, it's entirely appropriate for someone to point out that doomsayers have been saying the same thing for more than 30 years now, a prediction that has yet to be borne out.

NineOneFour wrote:1. As far as I know, Robert Reich is not a homeopath.

NineOneFour wrote:2. Finding three articles claiming American decline is not much of a case.

NineOneFour wrote:Fair IS fair, and fair would be posting things that actually DEBUNK what I post.

Strontium Dog wrote:

NineOneFour wrote:1. As far as I know, Robert Reich is not a homeopath.

It was a general comment about the homeopathy-loving Huffington Post.

NineOneFour wrote:2. Finding three articles claiming American decline is not much of a case.

Are you talking about your post or Jeffersonian-marxist's?

NineOneFour wrote:Fair IS fair, and fair would be posting things that actually DEBUNK what I post.

To my knowledge, none of us has a functioning crystal ball, so it is impossible to debunk predictions of what will shortly happen.

However, in the circumstances, it's entirely appropriate to point out that every similar prediction in the past has been debunked by the passage of time.

crank wrote:
I agree, there are a few conservatives out there who aren't in the bat-shit brigade, routinely pointing out the craziness they see all around them in their party. I can think of Frum, Mark McKinnon and David Brooks off hand. I'm relatively conservative in a lot of my views, but the name has gotten so distorted and warped I don't know what use it is other than as a synonym for crazed-willfully ignorant duplicitous douchebaggery.

NineOneFour wrote:Fair IS fair, and fair would be posting things that actually DEBUNK what I post.

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:

NineOneFour wrote:Fair IS fair, and fair would be posting things that actually DEBUNK what I post.

I typed "decline of America" into Google, and I noticed that many of the articles were concentrated in the 1970's and early 1980's. Not surprisingly, these coincided with a period of economic stagnation and recession. Flash forward to depressed 2010, and we hear similar cries of the decline of the US, and its irreversible downward spiral. I'm not saying everything that everything's fine, or that we're going into a golden American century, but I don't need to in order to "debunk" the claim that the US is becoming a third world nation.

NineOneFour wrote:That's great, but it's not my claim, it's Huffington's. As I stated, before you obsessively derailed the thread, I'm using this thread to post stories about the decline of America. If you don't think America is in decline, then post some articles that refute this claim.

Jeffersonian-marxist wrote:

NineOneFour wrote:That's great, but it's not my claim, it's Huffington's. As I stated, before you obsessively derailed the thread, I'm using this thread to post stories about the decline of America. If you don't think America is in decline, then post some articles that refute this claim.

I never said it was "your" claim, I am very careful about those sorts of things. And I haven't "obsessively derailed" this thread. I, admittedly with the intention of being satirical, posted some stories about the decline of the US from decades back. It was you who called me a global warming denialist for doing so.

You seem to be confused about what it means to "refute" or "debunk" some statement. All that is necessary to do so is show why it is not reasonable to believe that statement to be true. I don't need to create a counter-narrative that seems more reasonable in order to "refute" your narrative. I don't believe what the Huffington Post is saying about the decline of the US because people have been saying the same for decades, and the people who have been saying such either make a good deal of money for doing so, or their ideology would be assuaged by such a decline.