>I'm not aware of any "violence" he perpetrated towards Obama

If you interpret the phrase "violent criticism" as perpetrated violence, you are clearly doing whatever you can to interpret my argument in the worst people way. Allegory and metaphor are figures of speech anyone should understand when put forwards so plainly and with no other possible interpretation.

>The reference to 'Hitler' was only to describe a process where politicians rile up people who are not normally involved in politics. The BP oil spill was one of those opportunities. I don't think it's weird to make notes on the tactics of Hitler, or even compare those.

If you sincerely believe this you need study the run-up to WW2 in more detail. A politician trying to make the common person conscious of a real crisis which affects their lives and is representative of a serious systemic problem where greater public conscience is necessary is in no way comparable to the peddling of lies and conspiracy theories in order to drum up hatred against minorities in order to justify atrocities. If you honestly think this and go around repeating it, you are doing a great service to fascists all around the world by equating their methods to the way a democracy needs to operate.

>And the process to 'accept' $20B from BP, without due process, under implied threat of the possibility regulatory impositions (which the President is in a good position to influence) was definitely an authoritarian move on Obama's part IMO.

No, it was not. 20 billion dollars is far less than what BP should have paid for the oil spill. It was a deal he cut with BP so that the environmental crisis could be paid for without going through a decades long process by which time BP could have completely offloaded their assets or would have lost them due to the uncertainty of a ~100B$ fine hanging over their heads. It's exactly the same thing as a plea deal, except the perpetrator was caught doing the crime in broad daylight in front of thousands people.

> It's not the environmental mitigation that is questionable, but rather the process by which the funds were obtained and I think your representation here is intentionally misleading.

The process by which the funds were obtained is absolutely normal in the United States. If you have an issue with how lax regulation in the US is, you can say that instead of doing Hitler comparisons.

>Oh definitely. The bottom 2% would be the biggest winners of eliminating minimum wage, because minimum wage essentially outlaws employing anyone who can generate less than minimum wage worth of value to an employer. But it's true, the top 2% would win too and so would everyone else. IMO it would be one of the most important tools to lift people out of poverty.

No, they would not, and we both know this. There is a necessary amount of unemployment in any capitalist economy. If the bottom two percent magically got employed with a sub-minimum wage, the entire economy would suffer greatly from reduced wages and higher barriers to entry, or another 2% would find themselves unemployed anyways. A reserve army of labour is absolutely necessary. Reducing the minimum wage would hurt those people, because now on top of being unemployed, they also have much lower prospects once they do find employment. This is evident to anyone who thinks beyond incredibly simplistic supply-demand graphs whose interpretation contradicts itself.