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Or you can have you PAC pay everyone in your family members just about any amount you want. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-J...

Funny you should say that since the Libs want to:

- control what I do in my bedroom
- control my social life
- control what I talk about
- control who I do business with
- control what I believe
- control what business I'm allowed to engage in

It's time to reassess your opinion on who wants to to micromanage your life.

When by "source" one refers to any number of articles that have published the word "GamerGate" beside the word "harassment"... citing instances of harassment that never even pretended to come from GamerGate... and when these sources completely omit mountains of evidence of corruption and collaboration in media whilst never provide a whit of actual evidence.... One would be wise to question them.

Here is a timeline of GamerGate. It includes most, but not all, of the grievances the diverse GamerGate community has.
Here is a discussion of an email list wherein journalists colluded to spread a particular narrative. Some say it's "a few out of context emails". Those people are misinformed.
Here is a discussion of the journalist who was fired for being too noisy.
Here is a discussion of hidden conflict of interest. Here is another.
Here is an upload from an indy developer discussing press collusion.
Here is evidence of inappropriate promotion of Quinn's game.

I have more. GOD do I have more. You may have noticed conspicuously lacking from my post the following words: sjw, feminist, woman, female. That's because contrary to every major media piece ever written on GamerGate, it has not one fucking thing to do with feminism. Or harassment. or threats.

So ask yourself why someone interested in writing an article about GamerGate would completely ignore all of this and focus on the 1% of tweets about Wu, or on threats that never pretended to support GamerGate. Or on a very few very marginally related trolls. Hell, ask yourself why they would report only on threats against one side.

For my two cents people supporting GamerGate have a damn good reason to mistrust the media. So does anyone not supporting GamerGate.

Republicans are hardly anti-H1B: GOP Leaders Clamoring for More High Tech Immigration if Party Wins Back Senate

If you are an illegal alien and you have your paperwork to show up in court, you may use that to board the airplanes past the TSA with no additional trouble.
If you are a legal citizen, I'm not sure how its possible.

story Note: you will notice Breitbart.com ran this story, the TSA claimed it was false, and months later admitted they lied and its true. The story has letter from TSA stating it lied to the public about this.

The person the above poster is mentining is a filmmaker/journalist named James O'Keefe. Here is an article on the project: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-G...

He did this at least in New Hampshire, but maybe in more states, to show how easy is to take advantage.

This is the same James O'Keefe who exposed, and helped get ACORN de-funded a few years back.

What are you talking about? Name the left wing equivalent of the Koch brothers if you think it exists. It doesn't. You are the "low information voter."

LOL! Sure, buddy, sure. Here you go.

And what about Charles and David Koch — the two men whose right-leaning philanthropy is supposedly single-handedly destroying the political process? Where does their company, Koch Industries, rank? Number 36, with $2.66 million, well below AT&T, Comcast, Goldman Sachs and General Electric. Among individual donors, David Koch ranks 90th with $382,000, below a pair of Las Vegas figures. Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, rank 83rd with $391,000, and Wynn Resorts Chairman Steve Wynn ranks 84th with $390,000.

Truth hurts? Or will you try to dismiss the facts with ad hominems and excuses like "Oh, well, it's okay when my side does it."

It's not dying because all the editors in the crappy gaming-journalism industry are literally colluding to push their social agenda. Quinn just triggered their grand ambition of changing the world for the better. They have their own mailing list where everyone who didn't agree to help purge gaming of sexism was heckled and kicked out.

Gamers are competitive and won't let them win. Pragmatically, this is a terrible method if your goal is to address gender issues in gaming. Top-down moralizing from corporate-owned gaming sites angered the readership. When people wanted to find out what GamerGate was about every "legit" site told a heavily biased story that didn't allow readers to decide for themselves. So now these review sites aren't trusted at all, and they aren't even trying to win back their audience.

Oh, and another reason this will go on for a long time is that 4chan was pretty much killed during this fight. moot fired most mods and purged the board of all GamerGate discussions, driving Anonymous out to start competing imageboards with less moderation. The FBI must be furious that all of the interenet's mischief-makers, neatly localized to one site, is now scattered asunder.

Made up? Nobody made up the charities she slandered and ripped off.

Exactly.

Misogyny is bad, but when a whole bunch of different "gaming journalism" sites start pushing one social issue because all the editors and writers conspire (no exaggeration) to re-engineer their community people will complain.

Many of the people being blasted as misogynists are just gamers who made the mistake of expecting gaming journalism to follow some sort of professional journalism ethics. They aren't sending death threats to anyone, just protesting the smearing of the gamer community. Gaming review sites are just corporate owned, cargo-cult shadows of what real journalism is, and they didn't create the communities they make up their readership. It doesn't matter whether the message they are shoving down gamer's throats is a positive, inclusive one. That's no excuse for shaming gamers en masse and subsequently failing to save face when their readers revolt by admitting they did anything wrong. Instead these "journalists" began mustering social justice warriors across the internet to battle the greatly-exaggerated boogeyman of misogynistic gamers that they created.

Intel is smart to listen to their core market, people who buy games.

No, this is all about some pretend thing in their heads that they're special enough to kill and yet smart enough to be hidden. The truth is most people are aware of how unimportant they are as a target and don't even attempt to hide themselves.

Do you think that journalists and aid workers are so unimportant as to not be targets? It seems that ISIS disagrees with you.

Jihadi John: FBI 'identifies' Isis militant who 'beheaded' British aid worker David Haines and US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff

If they can be targets, why not CIA/NSA/FBI officers?

And it isn't just an overseas threat.

Oklahoma Beheading Suspect Shared Photos of Himself Giving ISIS Salute

The CIA/NSA/FBI all take advantage of this, have a certain level of loathing of the "sheep", and don't want to be placed into the same category because it fundamentally goes against their feelings of superiority of not being so "stupid".

Maybe what it actually goes against is their attachment to their head?

Honestly, "operational security", "ongoing investigation", and "national security" are the words of cowards more often than a real and meaningful thing used to actual protect the populace at large. And I should know as an Anonymous Coward, right?

Even though they can be and have been abused at times, what they are in fact are genuine issues that have to be dealt with by people in responsible positions in government. The fact that you don't deal with that demonstrate your post is disingenuous nonsense.

The difference between Islamic fundamentalism and Leftist programs like Common Core is merely one of degree. They only disagree on the methods, not the objectives they want to achieve.

What we need are better lies during campaigns. We need people with a secret agenda of protecting the constitution and its ideals, but whenever asked, say they don't care, and explain that they're going to fix the economy, protect the second amendment but also get guns off the streets, hate various groups for being immoral or wrong-colored but will protect their rights, will end pollution and protect our industries but not interfere with the free market, will protect us all from ourselves but respect our privacy, and bomb terrorists but not get into wars. Their slogan should be "yes we can, but we promise we won't." Then on inauguration day, forget all that, and start repealing a couple centuries of ridiculous corrupt laws which serve no political purpose at all.

Some people think that what Rand Paul is up to. Rand Paul Vows to Repeal Every Prior Executive Order if Elected President

If companies were greatly limited in how they can hire foreign workers and even outsource. With the news that all net job growth since 2000 went to immigrants the real question is how many H1Bs are actually doing exceptional work versus simply being cheaper? I bet if we outright eliminated the H1B visa and added some padding to the O visa (exceptionally talented, rare skill sets) we could free up several hundred thousand jobs that should be going to Americans.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit noted that when his local government in Tennessee cracked down on immigration violations, suddenly businesses that relied on low and unskilled workers had to find ways to entice young black workers at legal wages to take them. Guess what? Black unemployment dropped even though not a whole lot of jobs were actually created--if any. It was simply a political matter of forcing businesses to obey the law (imagine that).

The solution is aggressive immigration control, especially deportation of most immigrants at this point. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter. We don't need them. Our country is demonstrably not better off with them, especially the lower skilled ones (in fact anyone who supports mass immigration of lower skilled/unskilled immigrants implicitly hates the black and lower class white communities).

We don't need your xenophobia, or ham-fisted lame-brained-ness.

If companies were greatly limited in how they can hire foreign workers and even outsource. With the news that all net job growth since 2000 went to immigrants the real question is how many H1Bs are actually doing exceptional work versus simply being cheaper? I bet if we outright eliminated the H1B visa and added some padding to the O visa (exceptionally talented, rare skill sets) we could free up several hundred thousand jobs that should be going to Americans.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit noted that when his local government in Tennessee cracked down on immigration violations, suddenly businesses that relied on low and unskilled workers had to find ways to entice young black workers at legal wages to take them. Guess what? Black unemployment dropped even though not a whole lot of jobs were actually created--if any. It was simply a political matter of forcing businesses to obey the law (imagine that).

The solution is aggressive immigration control, especially deportation of most immigrants at this point. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter. We don't need them. Our country is demonstrably not better off with them, especially the lower skilled ones (in fact anyone who supports mass immigration of lower skilled/unskilled immigrants implicitly hates the black and lower class white communities).

After all these years, did he, or did he not get satisfaction? The double negative raises doubts, these decades on.

Read the IPCC reports

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are exactly the sort of people I was talking about — the ones, whose salaries and authority depend on Climate Change being a big deal. The conflict of interest is so glaringly obvious, it is comparable to the proverbial elephant in the room. They've been caught red-handed before.

The "reports" they produce are written by people appointed by governments. Few of them are scientists, and what few scientists there are seek not knowledge, but ways to confirm their pre-existing convictions — and when the data fails to do that, they "homogenize" it until it does... And though governments differ world-wide, they all have one thing in common: they are all convinced (often sincerely), that they "know better" and could "do good" if only they had more control over their subjects and their pretty little heads.

This is why you have never heard of any "green" measure, that would have reduced rather than increased the government's power over Individuals, have you?..

open borders, unbridled immigration, free transfer of money across borders and for the U.S. government to get out of their way so they can buy capital _anywhere_, transfer it anywhere else at anytime, reduce their costs to a minimum and increases profits to a maximum.

But they want to live in their cozy walled communities in the USA with the government providing full protection of their capital (money and property) and their personal welfare (read, they can sue anyone at anytime for whatever).

Inotherwords their attitude is that "government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy, shall not perish from the earth."

A new study by two American University professors has found that ordinary Americans have virtually no impact whatsoever on the making of national policy in the United States. The analysts found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape policy outcomes in our country.

ok - so hey - you are now playing a game called 'kill all puppies'. I task you with the following choices - a) kill 100 puppies b) kill 1000 puppies c) kill 1,000,000 puppies. what's that? you abstain from choosing a b c ? sorry! you are still playing the game

hey everyone! this guy plays a game called 'kill all puppies'!! what a horrible person!!!

tired of debating this point. if you choose to continue to believe things are a certain way, then so be it. for the rest of us, there's the reality that the fix is in.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-G...

I see. Well, I wonder, if the "Battlefield Hardline" will be free/cheap too...

Does anyone else remember when "America's Army" came out, just before the Iraq 'war'? It was a free first person shooter, and a very advanced game (for the time). Coincidence? I think not...

Well, in that case, what is the meaning of the new game, where you shoot members of the Tea Party? Celebration of tolerance? Respect for other people's opinions?

Please, don't hate.

painted a picture of a corporation overrun by the neverending quest for greater profit.

A typical anti-Capitalism drivel. The listed practices reduce profit and cause the company to either collapse or be taken over — unless it has powerful friends in government.

From the article: 'These employees told us the same stories over and over again: customer service has been replaced by an obsession with sales, technicians are understaffed and tech support is poorly trained, and the massive company is hobbled by internal fragmentation.

Yep, that's what leads to losing money. Few can survive it without being a monopoly.

Just tell them you are an illegal migrant operating the drone. Those people are allowed to break any laws and be upheld as the greatest citizens of the country. Its just you middle class, tax paying, law abiding citizens that the administration has contempt for.

Hell, if you are illegal you don't even need ID to get past the TSA to board commercial flights anymore. story. So the FAA doesn't apply its laws to illegals, just people who haven't broken the law.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-G...

http://dailysignal.com/2012/10...

Pretty much. I'm sure people are going to froth at the mouth and all the rest until you post stories like this.

The annual number of H1B visas issued 85,000.

However, the number of H1B visas working in the USA is closer to 750,000 today.

(it was about 650,000 in 2009.
http://cis.org/estimating-h1b-...)

There are roughly five million STEM jobs including immigrant labor and native born labor.

So about 1/8 of all these jobs are taken by H1B visas.

Meanwhile, there are almost double the number of native born with STEM degrees.

There is not a shortage of workers. There is a shortage of workers willing to work for low wages.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-G...

Funny you should use the term chokepoint here. (My only cavil about the Brietbart link is that it ignores the fact that the Justice Dept. has had a mission to slander, smear, libel, defame, and attempt to entice into traps small players in telecom telecom and information services since the BBS days. From back in the Reagan era. And I could swear it's Verizon Fraud that keeps trying to get me in trouble the last few years. But I digress.) Gotta stack that deck. Can't have any level playing fields here. And those personal tracking devices, er, smartphones, are just the perfect fraud platform. The keys to the kingdom, in so many ways.

What else is new?

Among the first instances of swatting I was aware of were conservative bloggers like Aaron Walker, Erick Erickson and Patrick Frey, all of whom were working to expose convicted felon and "Speedway Bomber" Brett Kimberlin.

There may have been earlier instances, but those are the first I'm aware of.

You don't even need to click on the TFA to see the glaring text: "The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so"

That's really lame scaremongering. And especially bad timing:

"The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSID), with the support of the NASA Earth Sciences, just announced that Antarctic sea ice has expanded to all-time record levels for April. " http://www.breitbart.com/Big-P...

Demonstrating "proper table manners" isn't a reasonable pre-qualification to queue to board lifeboats. Or do you think it is?

What a very nice link. Here is one for you.

Exclusive--Texas AG Abbott to BLM: 'Come and Take It'

Now maybe you could tie any of this into interstellar travel and why mere earthlings shouldn't be allowed to do that?

it's not the bigotry, its the fact they have no zoning laws and some megacorp can build a fertilizer plant next to residential housing and kill people when it explodes
or build some oil refinery next to someone's home and poison their air and water

While I'm sure that Texas has totally managed to avoid the scourge of zoning laws, the California approach has its own drawbacks that are becoming apparent, especially as California is now practically speaking a one party state run by Democrats with super majorities able to pass whatever they want.

California: CEOs Rate It Worst U.S. Business Climate For 8 Years Running
Hundreds of Thousands Flee Democrat-Run California
Just How Bad is California’s Business Climate?
California, a bad bet for business - Why would new enterprises come to a state like this?
Texas v. California: The Real Facts Behind The Lone Star State's Miracle
State leaders closely watch migrating millionaires

Really.

Name an ACTUAL GOP official that's said Obama's a "Kenyan Marxo-islamic fascist communist"

I won't hold my breath.

Now let me show you ACTUAL DNC officials who've called the GOP racist

http://www.breitbart.com/Breit...

http://content.usatoday.com/co...

These two crappy articles say you're right. I'm not convinced they knew what they were doing.

"It was intense going through it," said the 18-year-old high school student who played the waterboarding victim. He asked not to be named.

Given that he'd supposedly just been subjected to drowning torture, that he described it as 'intense' seems rather... odd. The people Hitchens went to, actually knew what they were doing.

Would they volunteer, say, for a blowtorch on the balls?

Well put. Idiotic students trivialising the matter just makes it seem they're pushing for a broader understanding of 'torture', rather than convincing anyone that waterboarding is torture.

Perish the thought.

Occupy Leaders Apparently Involved in Bridge Bomb Plot, Suspects Named
‘Occupy Wall Street’ Doc Accused Of Stockpiling Bomb-Making Materials, Weapons

The US invaded Afghanistan in a legitimate act of self defense after a series of attacks on diplomatic posts and military units culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

Wait, I'm confused. Which Afgan war are you talking about? In the one we were the country with the secret spys providing stinger missiles to shoot down aircraft to a gorilla group that did not represent the legitimate government of that country and later became the Taliban... In the other the Taliban were generally assholes but no more than any other theocracy in the world and being poor and impovrished had little choice when the US said "Hand over Osama" and when the US did invade we didn't capture him anyway. But at least we installed our own "just" government and they're free of the Taliban now right? So twice we've armed groups that did not represent the people in a war that mattered little to the people and even justified the second war by saying we needed to throw out the ones we install during the first?

As to Iraq, maybe you could explain to me why you think ordinary Iraqis would want to continue being subjected to Saddam's government?

It's none of our God damned buisness why Iraqies put up with Saddam. Maybe if it were Canada we'd have more of a say... but Iraq? That's so far outside our moral jurisdiction I can't even bother to reply. If the ENTIRE middle east, the whole of Islam thought it wasn't their place to interfere, how on earth could we claim that it was our own? Oh, that's right, we were invovled in the coup that put him in power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

For Christs sake. We cannot trust our government. They should not be involved in this crap. We should stay the hell out of it. We do harm... that's it. Saddam was a horrible person but our invasion killed more Iraqis than Saddam ever did and the country is falling right back into the same morass it was before he left. Now Al Qaeda is flying flags over Fallugha! http://www.breitbart.com/Big-P...

The only way to win the game is never to play in the first place.

Would you trust, Say, Fox News to report honestly on Exxon if high-ranking Fox News people had relatives working in Exxon's boardroom?

Then why trust reporting when their relatives and spouses work as advisers for the White House?

Remember, JournoList had more than 400 members who were working to give mainstream news coverage a left-wing slant.

Oops... we shouldn't forget "energy" spending. Solyndra, Evergreen, Beacon, SunPower, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The politics is similar to a Guantanamo Bay Naval Base

The politics of the Crimea crisis are in fact very similar to the Sudetenland Crisis. Look! People of our blood live there and our being mistreated! We must rescue them (please overlook the many other benefit we receive from "the rescue." )

The propaganda is right out of the Soviet Winter War against Finland. Look! There are fascists there too! We must defeat the fascists (please overlook the many other benefit we receive from "defeating the fascists." ) If only Russia could do something about the growing fascist movements within its borders.

The origins of the crisis is basically NATO and the US want to surround and contain Russia.

The West was happy to have Russia rejoin the family of nations after the fall of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately Russia's current leadership has looked to the past, to the Soviet Union for how they want to behave. They are rehabilitating Stalin. They have resumed probing Western defenses with bombers and submarines as the Soviet Union did. The FSB and related agencies are regaining the powers of the KGB that had been stripped from them in the interest of a freer society. Russian military spending is increasing dramatically as they reform and rebuild their military.

The empire building is under way, and they are trying to gain back key pieces of territory.

Putin Seeks to Create Post-Soviet 'Eurasian' Economic Union

Russia is creating the same need to contain it as the Soviet Union did. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is their choice.

So you're arguing the GOP hasn't proposed cutting social programs?

You're trying to change the argument. Do you remember this?

LOTS of social programs would be gone entirely

Reducing the rate of growth is not elimination. Changing eligibility is not elimination.

The Democrats are quite happy to promise more than there is budget for. Democrats make trade-offs too, including cuts to existing benefits.

With Election Over, Obama Announces Medicare Cuts to Fund ObamaCare

I took a 2 year sabbatical and went back to UW-Madison to learn Chinese. Nice to be able to do that at 45. :-)

What I found despressing is the graduating kids in the Mechanical Engineering told to "head to China" because the building boom will last over their for the next 20 years at least and that jobs in the USA were truly few and far between with almost no investment in bridges, building etc.

Which, is pretty clear to see as most of our cities are in ruin.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/19/Detroit-A-City-In-Ruin-And-A-Warning-For-America

-Hack

Maybe it's not pure donkey meat.

More people have been persecuted, hounded, ruined, tortured, burned, murdered, and just exterminated en-masse because of a book called the Bible than any other document in human history including Mein Kampf and Das Capital put together.

Just sayin' .

As long as your meaning is, "They were persecuted for believing in Judaism or Christianity," or for owning a Torah or Bible, very possibly.

Beginnings of Christian Martyrdom

In their very deaths they were made the subjects of sport: for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights. Nero offered his own garden players for the spectacle, and exhibited a Circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the dress of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot. For this cause a feeling of compassion arose towards the sufferers, though guilty and deserving of exemplary capital punishment, because they seemed not to be cut off for the public good, but were victims of the ferocity of one man."

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES

A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

League of Militant Atheists
North Korea Ranked No. 1 for Christian Persecution
Persecuted and forgotten: Egypt's Christians
A Global Slaughter of Christians, but America’s Churches Stay Silent
Christian Persecution in China Despite Supposed Religious 'Freedom'
The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity

UNDERSTANDING ANTI-SEMITISM AND ITS HISTORY

The list is obviously much longer.

Since someone is practically certain to object along two lines, lets dispose of them now.

Yes, the Spanish Inquisition was terrible, it was also limited in scope.
The Crusades were a long delayed response to Muslim invasion of the Holy Land.

OTOH, if the NSA can't protect it's data from rogue insiders ... maybe we should assume our tax returns were sold to the highest bidder long ago.

Who says they need to be sold? As of late they've been doing some strategic (and illegal) leaking:

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/13/the-irs-admits-to-targeting-conservative-groups-but-were-they-also-leaking/
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/04/National-Organization-of-Marriage-Chairman-IRS-Leaked-Info-About-Group-s-Donors-to-Liberal-Groups
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/06/04/report-irs-leaked-conservative-groups-confidential-info-to-opponents/

And yes... I did pick the partisan sites deliberately in this case.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/12/U-N-Maps-Show-U-S-High-In-Gun-Ownership-Low-In-Homicides
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/gun-homicides-ownership/table/
http://tewksburylab.org/blog/2012/12/gun-violence-and-gun-ownership-lets-look-at-the-data/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/14/schoo-shooting-how-do-u-s-gun-homicides-compare-with-the-rest-of-the-world/
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since-1993-peak-public-unaware/
http://gunowners.org/op0746.htm

Apparently there are repercussions for criticizing the "most transparent administration ever" cover ups.

For months, White House and State department officials searched for @NatSecWonk, a hunt that intensified after he repeatedly expressed doubts about the official administration accounts about the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi.

So, why did they force survivors to sign secrecy agreements?

BenghaziGate: At Least 5 CIA Employees Forced to Sign Nondisclosure Agreements

The balance of power shifts even more

I was able to register fairly early (around the 3rd) - when the site was still undergoing the initial onslaught of gawkers....

Wow, this is kind of like seeing an endangered species or something.

Only Five Iowans Have Signed Up on Obamacare Exchange - 10 Oct 2013
Hawaii Relaunching Obamacare Exchange After Not Selling Any Health Insurance Due To Software Problems - October 10, 2013
Good news: Maryland has successfully enrolled 326 people in ObamaCare - October 7, 2013

Just 51,000 Americans Have Enrolled in Federal Obamacare Exchanges? - Oct 11, 2013

Double Down: Obamacare Will Increase Avg. Individual-Market Insurance Premiums By 99% For Men, 62% For Women

It's the Republican Representatives that refuse to bring the budget bills to a vote.

Nonsense. Congress — where Republicans hold a majority — passed the budget bill weeks ago. Senate and President simply don't like it and would rather have the show-down, than accept the will of the people. Yes, the will of the people — not just the RethugliKKKans in Congress, but the clear majority of citizenry want to be rid of the program, that the Republican-passed bill would not fund...

And I've seen nothing that indicates it was Obama that shut down everything.

What exactly to shut-down and how to enforce it is up to the Administration. The memorials, for example, were never closed — not during any of the shut-downs we already had. That the President made sure, such places are closed — despite it costing more to enforce the closures, than to simply leave them running — is clear evidence of viciousness.

But, wait, some can still get to enter the National Mall — and even hold a rally... Must be nice to be on the President's good side... And though ordinary federal employees are warned, working would be a "federal offense", the Administration is Ok with federal officers picking up trash left by the rally.

Such selective enforcement of its own rules by the Administration is yet another evidence, it is deliberately trying to make things as painful as possible for the ordinary citizens — in the hope, that would put pressure on the opposition...

First, before anything, let me sincerely thank you for working in the military. I know you could likely get a better job that pays more in the civilian world. I am grateful to all the people who serve or have served in the armed forces.

Now, having said that: It's not the Republicans that are fucking you over. It's the Democrats. And I personally hold President Obama as the most responsible, as "The Buck Stops Here" refers to him right now.

This is the 18th government shutdown. None of the previous 17 have been as viciously handled. Never before has the World War II monument been closed... in the past, signs were put up saying "nobody is on duty here because of shutdown" but now the government erected temporary fences around an open-air area and is paying people to keep our veterans out. Never before have privately-funded historic sites on government land been commanded to close their doors. Never before has the Amber Alert federal website been shut down (while the First Lady's "Let's Move" website is still up). People have been forced out of their homes! And, oh yes, this weekend the President was able to play golf at a golf course on Federal land... that wasn't closed (I guess it is an "essential" golf course).

This administration is determined to make this shutdown as painful as possible for the common people, in hopes that common people will be so clueless that they will blame the Republicans for the pain.

The Republicans in the House are attempting to use the power of the purse, which the Constitution gives to them. The budget situation is FUBAR anyway because the Senate hasn't passed a budget in over four years, despite that being a clear Constitutional duty of the Senate. And the Republicans keep passing bills to fix the worst of the pain: bills to immediately pay soldiers, to let the National Institute of Health look after kids with cancer, etc. And the Republican Party has offered the money to pay for staff at the memorials. All of these offers are rejected by the Democrats... in other words, the Democrats have chosen to keep the pain as high as possible, and you are personally feeling that pain.

The previous shutdowns have pretty much ended in compromise. This time around, President Obama has publicly declared that he will not compromise at all ever, and he and the other top Democrats have used the most incendiary language possible. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/wallace-grills-jack-lew-your-history-is-wrong-obamas-refusal-to-negotiate-unprecedented/

So the Republicans are trying to get a one-year delay in implementing Obamacare. We have Obamacare websites that don't work, we have waivers granted to many large companies, we have a one-year delay in corporate obligations under Obamacare, This thing isn't ready to go. And yet President Obama and the other top Democrats are choosing to maximize the pain of the shutdown while at the same time proclaiming that they will not compromise at all ever.

If the Republicans back down at this point without getting anything, they are screwed several ways. As far as I can tell, this is exactly what President Obama wants. Therefore he wants the common people to feel pain, to blame the Republicans for the pain, and to demand that the Republicans cave. (You may feel that this is over the top. Ask yourself: when was the last time a President tried to talk the stock market DOWN? That's unprecedented but Mr. Obama did it.

A couple of problems with your scenario. First, the purpose of many of the park closings (and other closings) is to inflict pain for political purposes, not because it costs the government money to leave them open or accessible. They are actually spending money to erect barricades and to close parks and monuments that have been left open or accessible in previous shutdowns. Call it the "Chicago way." Just look at the fact that a growing number of government web servers are still up and running, but the web page says "we're closed." A few will let you get past the to see data or forms you need, but not many that I've seen today. Did the data change? No. So they are just being jerks - paying money to not only put up the warnings, but to also make the servers refuse to provide useful information despite the fact that they are still running. Like I wrote - the "Chicago way."

Obama Forcing Shut Down of Parks the Feds Don't Even Fund

Second, a lot of US defense spending is for personnel and readiness. The US has an all volunteer military that pays wages competitive to the civilian sector. Most other countries have mainly relied on conscription. US soldiers make a lot more than soldiers in other nations that are drafted. There are also disparities since the US is a first world nation and many others either aren't, or are much poorer. An American corporal makes as much per month as a Chinese or Iraqi general. The same goes for weapons purchases. Big cuts in the defense budget will eat into capacity. Some people may be OK with that, but eventually it will bite the US.