Obama plays BrickBreaker ... on a military-grade smartphone

What's getting out of hand are sore losers like you.

Did "Obamacons" specifically tell you you wouldn't need to keep paying off your mortgage or buy fuel for your car, that this was one of the things he would change?

Obama sits down for a few minutes of gaming on a phone he always has on hand. Bush would take a week off at his ranch. Which is worse?

Wow, way to miss my joke. I was attempting humor by drawing comparisons between the seriousness of the immense growth of government and corresponding government funded programs to the less serious growth in casual gaming (something that many fanboys would view as being more serious than the acts of the government, hence the joke). I was not suggesting that Obama was slacking on the job, but rather the fact that he, as some may claim, is helping to destroy the hardcore gaming market by playing casual games. There was no allusion to Bush in my comment.

Although, I find it fascinating that you Bush haters are still bashing him, even though he's out of office. Why not just start complaining about how the English Parliament was taxing the colonists without representation?

hmm, didnt hyperlink...

http://www.citizenslim.com

maybe?

First clip was a cool listen with ignorant commentary, second clip was a typical mish-mash of conspiracy fodder, third clip was a bunch of weirdly enthusiastic and devotional admirers. *yawn*

How quaint.
He's already the President, so you are essentially charging that he wishes to turn the US into a dictatorship. So please, George, do describe for us which part of the Recovery and Reinvestment act you believe constitutes a suspension of private ownership and a dissolution of the separation of powers. Or which part of it will set the stage for such a takeover.

I think you meant this to be a reply to Gareson, but in some ways it's better that it showed up here as a blanket rebuttal - trickle-down economics is a failed ideology.
This does not mean the nutjobs here can't criticise Obama's plans - I think we can all agree with him when he says they're not perfect - but what it does mean is that they actually have no alternative ideas that are demonstratively better.

The legacy of the Cold War is that in America it seems to have framed socialism (effectively the philosophy that communities should pool some measure of their collective resources to alleviate suffering - an idea around long before Marx) as the philosophy exclusively underlying communism, and permanently at war with capitalism, and the value ascribed to individual success and enterprise.
Tax cuts will always be recommended by such people, for any ailment, as long as taxes remain above 0%, because taxes are the simplest and oldest form of appropriating and redistributing a measure of the peoples wealth - socialism.
Suffering these days of course comes in a wide variety of forms - redistribution doesn't just mean the literal placing of wealth in the hands of others (ie. welfare) - it means putting money into social programs, and maintaining working, public infrastructure for emergency response, medical care, transportation, education, and national security. Nations have large scale administrative costs, and without such things it will collapse of a thousand paper cuts.

This is why the mere mention of raising taxes is enough to have Republicans (surprisingly even the poor ones that deserve help, such is their devotion to ideology) screaming "SOCIALISM!" - it is socialism. What these Americans haven't yet cottoned on to, is that it's not an either-or proposition, but a matter of degree which has always been necessary to maintain a community, especially a nation. Such people serve as a reason to applaud Obama for the funding he is directing towards education reform.
This is why tax policy is a debate about degree, not whether taxes should exist at all. Republican/Libertarian readers might superficially contest that I have erected a straw man, and that you never said there should be no taxes, and that of course SOME taxes are necessary, but you are not engaging in an honest discussion about degree if your only "counter-argument" to the suggestion of higher taxes is to call your opponents communists. What you're doing at that point is throwing a tantrum, in which case you deserve to be treated like a child.
So let's be clear, bizarro right-wing Joystiq readers. Tax rates nearing 100% are communism - total appropriation of wealth and effective suspension of private property. In other words, nowhere near the current situation. Tax rates above 1% represent a degree of socialism. Low tax rates are not free from socialism, they are simply less socialist.
The only pure, socialism-free world is the "deregulated" world beyond all communities - nature, where the tax rate is 0%, there is zero infrastructure to protect you from theft, disease, assault or natural disaster, and you will last a few weeks at best.
Good luck with that.

@Robert Maynard

You make some good points, but I think you may be misunderstanding the ideology of Libertarianism.

If you want to split hairs, then yes any form of wealth redistribution can be considered mildly socialistic. However, we Libertarians don't have any problem with the redistribution of wealth at the national level when it is only used by the government to fulfill its intended role. However, that is not the case anymore, and hasn't been for a very long time. Interstate highways, national standards for aviation, defense against outside hostilities, and safety and judicial services that have national jurisdiction all are things from which we all can benefit, so that is fine with us. Once you start going beyond that is when we have a problem. We want the federal government to merely provide a safe and stable framework in which the individual states and their citizens can operate.

So yes, if you want to consider any amount of wealth redistribution to be socialistic, then our beef is the degree to which our country operates under socialist tenets. Socialism promotes a strong centralized government. A powerful national government may be able to represent the interests of its people in smaller nations, but with over 300 million citizens spread over a very large landmass, we aren't all likely to want to live under the same set of laws. Since most people live and work within a relatively small area compared to breadth of the nation, we Libertarians feel that the central government shouldn't have nearly as much impact on the day-to-day lives (for better or worse) as the governments more local (e.g. state, county, and city gov'ts) to each citizen, thus our opposition to the expansion of socialism.

That's fair enough Nick, it wasn't my intention to tar all Libertarians with the same brush, let alone simply group them with Republicans - as with any philosophy it is far from being a homogenised and rigid set of ideas.
As for the role and responsibility of government though, surely you must agree that in the 21st century, things like "defense against outside hostilities" are potentially quite ..expansive responsibilities. I mean, that would include pandemic infections, right? Including ones that arise inside the US?

The trouble seems to be that government's responsibilities in protecting citizens from "outside hostilities" are only limited by their ability to identify threats. This is how nanny states are born. :P
The question is, is it even possible to prevent such a trend, if civilisation is strongly trending towards knowing more rather than less?
For example, the EPA has been ordered by the Supreme Court to determine whether carbon dioxide can be classified as a pollutant which endangers public health and welfare. If it is found to be so (almost certainly), then on those grounds we should have stronger regulations of CO2 emissions, enforced at the federal level.
Let's imagine an alternate scenario: abstinence-only sex education has been found by multiple studies to be ineffective. This shouldn't be surprising, as it is essentially an ignorance-oriented educational policy - amazing on the face of it! It seems that America's high rates of teen pregnancy, abortion, and STD infections could be partly due to prudishness of this variety. Now, let's suppose that a definitive link was drawn between that policy and STD's, abortions, and teen pregnancy. Given these findings, it could be construed that abstinence-only sex ed poses a threat to public health and welfare. Does the government then have a responsibility to regulate education standards to ensure a mature and evidence-based approach to sexual education?
My basic point is that a strong tension exists between government's responsibility to protect citizens from "hostile forces", and the degree to which government is able to tell people how to run their own lives. It is my opinion that this tension is only going to get more strained, and in turn the basic conception of liberty eroded, for the following reason: People are entitled to their own opinions, but they should not be entitled to their own facts (nor, for that matter, should states). Frankly I don't think it should matter if "we aren't all likely to WANT to live under the same set of laws." What happens when legislation is written based on a solid framework of evidence? We don't get to choose whether we obey gravity, so on what grounds should we be permitted to choose to legislate in denial of other facts?
As alluded to in the cases above, the scientific method is allowing us to make more and more definitive statements about the empirical efficacy of policy. Research can't say whether a policy is "objectively" good or bad, but it can absolutely contrast effectiveness against intended purpose, to make a value judgment. This trend will definitely continue, and as it does, more people are going to have their toes stepped on. The "choices" that liberty affords us will become measurable, and more or less dividable between the true and the false.
Just ask a creationist who has tried to get their ideas taught in science class, or a mother that believes vaccines cause autism. They'll tell you all about their paranoid conspiracies, of elitists censoring the little guy, and the government siding with the enemy, if not being the enemy. Or ask a parent being charged for negligence because they chose to pray for their sick child instead of taking them to a hospital. For these people and many others the world is already less free, less open to their opinions, and less accepting of their freedom to live in accordance with those opinions - simply because an investigation of reality has led to a negative assessment of their claims.
So there is a tension there, and in general I think it's reasonable to expect that the more we know, the less freedoms we can in good conscience allow ourselves. This doesn't mean legislation and regulation should march in lockstep with science - practically everything seems to be carcinogenic if you take enough of it, for example. :P

But.. yeah..

..um, and that's why I find libertarianism to be untenable. So.. video games!

Urgh.. holy crap. Look at all that. I apologise fellow joystiq readers here to talk about video games, I can get a little long-winded. :|

You should. And every other member of the human race that lives under a government of any kind.

As for Libertarianism, my problem with that ideology is that they've too narrowly defined what the role of government is. Government is the people, it's role is what we the people define it to be. Or, if you live in the USA, more specifically, the role of government is (from the Constitution):

"establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"

What promotes the general welfare? A sound economy? Well maintained roads? Clean air? Access to affordable healthcare to all Americans (you know that whole "LIFE, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" as a right of all people)? If it's something that the majority of Americans deem to be beneficial to the common good, then it's the right (duty) of Government, which represents our wishes, to implement them.

Libertarians would argue that "heck, why not just have government own all our restaurants? Or make all our cars?" to demonstrate the slippery slope argument. My counter is, absolutely YES! Yes, if the majority of Americans decide that it's a good idea to have government make all our cars, then they can elect representatives that would put that policy in effect. And the beauty of our system is that if we change our minds, we can vote them out!

The other beauty is that the reality of our people is that we would NEVER want Government being the sole provider of goods and services, so the Libertarian argument falls flat, because that scenario will never happen.

So something like health insurance (NOT HEALTH CARE, you straw man argument makers, Obama's not saying do it the way Canada does) is something that is looks like more and more Americans are deciding would be a good thing for government to get into providing, given the mess/costs of a privatized system. Libertarians say that's improperly increasing the role of Government. My disagreement is that the definition of the role of government, as shown in the Preamble, is designed to be a malleable thing.