Honestly... it will be hard to accomplish that for the democrats. And honestly, with how Lieberman has been, its hard to really pen him as either right now as he likes to saddle mostly with the Dems, but sometimes will come out with the republicans.

Even 538.com, predicts that the Dems will end up with about 56 total seats, including the independents as democrats since they have historically have sided with the dems. Still not enough for a "super majority", but enough to pass many things through.

Am I afraid of a "liberal" supermajority? Not at all. Far less afraid then if it were a "Conservative" supermajority.

I wish that we could dismantle the two parties we currently have, or at least bring up some viable parties that can compete with the big 2 parties here. So many assume that you are either a republican or a democrat, but many are independents, or a part of some small time 3rd party. One thing I want this election to do, is to shake up our 2 party system and systematically dismantle those who claim to be a republican/democrat, when their party hasn't reflected their ideologies completely for many years. If we can move past this 2 party system, we could finally see congress do things for the good of the people.


Oh, and also get rid of lobbyists.... Completely.

That particular tax only works because you can write off state taxes when paying federal taxes.

Those oil companies aren't actually paying anymore in taxes then they normally would.  It's just going to the people in Alaska.

Compare the oil companies profit margins vs the average companys and you'll see that they really aren't "raking in the cash" but actually performing fairly normally.

The problem with a windfall tax of any kind is that it limits the amount of profit one kind of company can make... making people less likely to invest there.

Why ingest in Oil if a law makes it so you can only make an 11% growth without it being reduced drastically afterwords, when most companies actually have a much higher output in general?

Well.. Honestly, I haven't researched profit margins for Oil companies all that much... In normal times, this is about their profit margin..

That's in 2005.   Before record oil prices and gasoline prices here in the US and the World.  So a bit over 8%.

Do I think that they are actually higher now, or at least, the past year?  Possibly.   The oil companies haven't gone drilling away and have not increased the number of refineries at all, so I have to question it when their profit margins increase, but they don't seem to have a huge increase in their overhead?  Unless of course, we are talking about the companies who buy the oil from somewhere else, and still have to pay the inflated amount.

Well, I will admit, that you may be right, but I'd have to do alot of research to figure that out.  ;)

If I find something with recent analysis, I will post it. ;)

Doesn't that graph kinda prove my point?  Outside of the "All industries" a lot of groups have bigger profit margins... including things like food industries... which is... well food.

Though i do believe it's actually around 11-12% now... and just average for the S&P 500.

The reason it's higher is because Oil and Gas companies store gas.

If they didn't, and a big stop in production happened they'd be screwed, with how screwed up a lot of the areas with gas are... this can be a worry.

As such when gas is cheap... they tend to buy a lot more then they need and just let it sit in tanks.

Then when gas is more expensive. They buy less and let some gas out of their stores back when it was cheap.

Just how oil speculators work. Or atleast that's how it works to the best of my knowledge.

A liberal super majority would be great news.  They fixed the Great Depression in 1933, and they would do a lot of good now.

And whats wrong with giving citizens in Washington DC a respresentative?  This is a democracy and everyone deserves to have a representative so their voice can be heard.

Why would republicans want to exclude D.C.?

I don't know man, I don't know.

I do favor DC representation.  It is a solid Blue EC vote anyway so what would be the difference?

McCain is against it.  People have to choose between McCain and Obama.  Not between Steven787 and Halogamer.

McCain is actually one of the filibusterers: http://dcvote.org/media/release.cfm?releaseID=300

Under certain proposals the Democrats could possibly gain one House seat and two Senate seats. I find the prospects of DC gaining statehood to be unlikely, but it could possibly be retroceded to Maryland.

Or they might get House representation (which actually would be three house seats, due to population size) but no Senate representation - seating them under VA, MD, and WV. and allowing those district to vote for those state's Senators.