Not sure about what you mean though, ‘social democracy’ usually refers to the sort of thing non american western left wing parties aspire to. Welfare state, progressive taxation, state run health care, that sort of thing. It’s sort of the bastard child of Marx and Smith, if you like. There is US constituency for that, but it’s the left wing of the Democratic party.

The retarded right wing ideology I was talking about is the reagan/thatcher neo liberalism and supply side stuff.

Quoth will happily tell you that free markets aren’t really right wing. And he’s quite correct. “free markets” is an incredibly loaded term to my mind. As I see it, a market needs rules, ( to define contracts, company law, employment law, property rights and so on). Can’t function without them.

So a ‘free market’ is just one that has the bare set of rules that the speaker happens to agree with.

A communist would tell you that unrestricted private property rights are a gross distortion from a free market. An anarchist might tell you that limited liability companies are an abomination that are just an example of the State protecting some individuals from their creditors. Another anarchist will tell you something else again, and a randian libertarian will say that almost all taxation is theft and that private property rights are the most important thing.

All of the above will say that their system has never really been tried. I think only the anarchists are really right in that claim, in that the others tried, they just haven’t been able to make it work.

So ‘free market’ to me is almost as meaningless as ‘left’ or ‘right’. I don’t mean that they are useless terms, they are not. But often people have very different ideas about they mean in any given context, (none of them ‘wrong’), which makes for confusion and most of blogging.

Social democrats tend not to talk about free markets, but rather what sort of rules the market should have in order to promote whatever it is that society needs at any given time. Which is quite obviously the proper and natural way to look at it and deviations from that are simply evil and retarded, etc

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

He’s an inde journo and author of a number of books. Focussed on the militia movement in the 90′s and has kept a running watch ever since.

Down his left sidebar are a number of series outlining his basic approach and areas of interest. Mostly about how the rhetoric of the far right gets pitched (catapulted) into the MSM, and how that both trivialises it for the mass audience through desensitisation, and at the same time motivates the actual extremists by causing them to think that they are not extreme.

Nicely summed up by Bob Altemeyer who somebody linked to the other day.( Can’t relocate, so here’s the link again.) Entire book as a pdf.

It’s not rocket science. Worth a peruse. Neat exlpanation for the truthout musings.

Maybe I’m bringing up an old argument that should be left to rest.

I do enjoy Jon Stewart! Have been watching him daily for a while now. Was gutted when they stopped access to the full episode viewer in NZ, and most of the rest of the world. Now I have to watch it within 24 hours of it hitting the net. The time on tv isn’t convenient for me.

Interesting point, he is quite big in Iran.

So far it doesn’t look like they will.

How can such a technologically advanced country churn out such a preponderance of backward individuals?

for the big offensive- sound familiar?

yet again we would be kept in the dark till the bodies come back

All because the final tallys show Franken ahead when the election night tally showed Coleman ahead.
The rest of the right wing noise machine is even crazier

And with this result that leaves the GOP with 1 jewish member in House and Senate combined and zero blacks.
What is it about the party of Lincoln in this century

http://www.truthout.org/041009R