What appear to be three infant skull, at least one with what the FBI has called 'bite marks', have been discovered in the office of Mike DeWine (R-OH). DeWine has headed the Republican Never-Ate-A-Baby Committee since 1998. More on this story as it develops.
We had huge discussions over the DMCA, you fuckwad. We also had dicussions about that idiot, Tipper Gore, and her little 'Let's label everything under the sun' campaign.
But you're an anonymous coward, so have only been here the last two hours for all I know.
Anyone, doing anything, is the fault of the Democratic party. Someone make comments about how they don't think bin Laden's that bad? That's what Democrats think. Someone make a video mocking Bush and post it on YouTube? That's what Democrats think. Someone publish personal information about a congressman mother and urge poeple to harrass her? That's what Democrats think. A random blogger make a comment about how thinks only idiots would join the military at this moment? That's what Democrats think.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, people like Limbaugh and Malkin can say and do whatever they want, because they're not representive of the Republican party at all and the Republican party has nothing to do with them. Hell, actual Republican elected officials, if they get caught doing something evil, can just blame it on alcohol or cry some and it obviously doesn't reflect on the Real Republicans.
Um, not quite. The House sends the Bill of Impeachment to the Senate, the Senate holds the trial. The House can send as many Bills of Impeachment to the Senate as they feel like, the Senate does NOT have to convict.
The House can issue suppoena that require the Administration to show up and testify. That's all that's needed. We're not talking about obscure issues where something might possibly be wrong, we're talking about the President having admitted lawbreaking as policy.
You really think anybody in the Senate is going to vote their conscience rather than the Party line?
Hey, they're barely holding on to the Senate as it is. Something like 7 races have legitimate Democratic challenges that, really, shouldn't have based on past state voting patterns. When you consider there are only 33 races, total, and some of them already have Democrats, that's an absurdly high number.
While I doubt Democrats will take the Senate, if they manage to uncover enough dirt (And, frankly, they don't need to 'uncover' it, it's just laying around.), the Senate will be in an even more precarious position for the next election, and they know it. It's already politicial suicide to be next to the president, and that's before we have people testifying about their lawbreaking under oath. (Or, more fun, lying about it under oath.)
More to the point, at some point the GOP itself will figure out that fighting the Democrats removing the president is a good way loss all relevency for the next decade, because they'll be saddled with Bush. Much better to go the Nixon route and attempt to distance themselves. But if that doesn't happen, however, I full expect at least a dozen Republican senators to jump ship because they'd be completely fucked in the 2008 election if they fought Bush's removal from office.
This, of course, is assuming the Democrats actually gain a spine and attempt oversight of the Executive.
And it's also, like I said, assuming the Democrats don't take control of the Senate, in which case we'll be in a constitutional crisis in about two months, when they vote to withdraw from Iraq and Bush refuses.
But...but...then any survivors would be war veterans, and war veterans get the best healthcare possible from the state. They're heros! I mean, they'd be rioting in the streets if soldiers came back from war without any sort of treatment.
What will help everyone, and especially those in the lower income range, is of course good, free services. It will also make it easier for them to get out of that position. Contrary to to common belief, most of the help-receivers do want to get out into productive work, and it is a ridiculous waste of resources to not help them realize that.
Seriously, what kind of fucked up country can't providing homeless shelters? It's not like they're very expensive.
However, there's one thing that Congress can do without any Executive control at all. In fact, it only needs one branch of Congress.
ISSUE SUBPOENAS.
The Democrats are going to storm into, at least, the House this Tuesday. They have a large list of legistaltion to pass. If they don't take the Senate, they will be stonewalled there, if they do, the president will stonewall them, or just issue 'signing statements', aka, break the law.
But they can call an investigation and require the executive branch to testify under oath about the lawbreaking they've already admitted to, and even without the Senate they can impeach the president, although the Senate's required to get rid of him. Although after repeatedly being charged with violating the law, even a Republican Senate probably won't have enough political capital not to impeach him.
And, please, everyone note: You can impeach and remove the President and Vice-President from office at exactly the same time, by putting it in the same vote. Thus stopping any last second 'I appoint Backup Neocon #4 as my VP!' between their impeachments, in whatever order they happen.
Also note that while you have to impeach the president and vice-president to get them out of office, you can impeach almost anyone in the executive branch, like, oh, Donald Rumsfeld, and have them tried in the Senate. Or anyone who was in the executive branch.
And the process can, if Congress so wishes, disallow that person from hold any office of trust in the Federal government ever again.
Let's grab every single damn neocon who currently or formerly held office and bar them forever from this government. Who's with me?
Come on, now: there is no other reason to register hundreds and hundreds of fake people than to walk up to that precinct's polling place (where you don't have to show ID!) and then vote.
Did you not actually read the actual post I made? There's a perfectly 'good', or at least non-rigging-an-election reason, for that.
They got paid for each registration.
And, as was pointed out, the actual number of known invalid registrations by that group is unknown. You're just assuming that there are large numbers of invalid ones, and that the invalid ones came from ACORN, as opposed to a few invalid ones from ACORN and a bunch of really sloppy ones that could have come from anyone.
Which the examples, incidentally, bear out. You don't fill out a fake voter registration form as a 16-year old, because, duh, that's not going to make it past the person typing the info in. Nor do you forge forms from people who already registered. (Leaving aside the question of how you'd even manage to know their information, that wouldn't accomplish anything anyway.)
If, however, you're shoving forms at everyone instead of, you know, actually doing the slightest amount of work to weed out people who can't vote and people who have registered aready, that's the kind of crap you'll end up with. This is why paying people per forms-turn-in, vs. actual registration, is stupid.
That's not to say, if they were actually forging voter registrations, instead of just being sloppy, they shouldn't be punished for it. Hell, if an organization show a constant pattern of turning in clearly stupid registrations, like from 16-year olds and people who answered 'No' to 'are you a citizen?', they should have their right to register voters completely taken away. (That is, the right to collect forms. Everyone, IIRC, has the right to distribute them.)
But an assertation that ACORN is some sort of 'voting fraud machine' is completely without any sort of evidence.
Incidentally, your link is lying by implication about the one case I know of. While the Kansas City Star did say there were 300 people who could have voted twice, they used 'could' meaning 'it was possible for them to', as in, they were registered in two locations or twice in the same one, because the state screwed up and didn't remove older registrations. None of them actually did voted twice, and it wasn't any sort of fraud.
If the hackers on this page are so expert, why don't they come up with an ultra secure system, instead of endlessly complaining about fictitious stolen elections?
'This page'?
Anyway, 'these experts' have already come up with a proof that no computer can ever be completely secure. It's call the Halting Problem, and it's seventy fucking years old, which, in case you can't count, is actually older than electronic computers.
Everyone asserting there is some way for a computer to securely keep track of numbers is a liar, period. Everywhere else we use computers to keep track of numbers, we have backups and external checks on the system. There's no useful and easy way to do that for a secret election.
Hey, look at the JFK/Nixon election. Totally fraudulent, and yet a much better outcome.;)
But seriously, no, people wouldn't be complaining as much, in much the same way they wouldn't have been complaining as much if McCain had won. Why? Because of Bush's behavior since taking office.
No one really cares what happened if some likable or even nondescript guy ends up in charge. But people get pissed when they realize that, had they done something now, we wouldn't be in the position we are now.
9-11 was already mostly set up when Bush was elected, so someone hated us enough in the Clinton years to kill large numbers of Americans.
That talking point can't possibly work, considering the logical conclusion there is that Clinton failed to appease the terrorists enough.
That's not to say I don't agree with it, but I'm one of the tiny minority of Americans who ask 'Hey, wait a minute. Why are Muslims so pissed at us? Were we really stationing troups in their holy city for no apparent reason? Maybe we shouldn't do that, it's not like it's an important city to anyone else. Are the Israelis really holding a lot of Palestines without charge? Maybe we should try to get them to do something about that, too. Did we really randomly overthrow governments we didn't like? Well, we've already seen the results of that in South America, so perhaps we should just stop that in general.' Of course, a lot of the complaints were crap.
You can call that 'appeasement' if you want. It's something we should have fixed, or simply not done in the first place, before 9/11, though, and 9/11 wouldn't have happened.
However, you're not really correct to blame Clinton for that. Clinton basically left the middle east alone beyond trying to talk to Palestine and Israel. The roots of their hatred go back to the Iran-Iraq war and even further. Clinton managed to slow down the new hatred, but al Qaeda already existed. They attacked the WTC the first year he was in office too, remember?
That doesn't have anything to do with voting fraud. You pay people per-registration, guess what? Some fuckers make up registrations. Others do it slipshod.
No one is alleged to have voted or be planning to vote with any false registrations. No votes at all were made.
And, yes, it keeps happening, which shows that paying people for registering voters without any verification is a fundamentally stupid idea.
Of course, you have to make sure the scanner is accurate.
If you watched the documentary, they had a fun little scene where they demonstrated you can rig a memory card to say 0 votes, plug it into the scanner to store the vote totals on, and have it store a completely wrong answer on the card.
Before I saw that, I was advocating exactly the same thing as you. Machines print them, voters verify them, machines count them.
Now..fuck that. I'm okay with computers to printing a completed ballot.
But I don't want a piece of machinery to touch them after that. I want human beings to count them, and make marks on the wall that everyone can fucking see, exactly like we've been doing since time immortal.
It'd be a lot easier if we'd stop gerrymandering House and local districts.
What if almost every county in the US was in one district? One ballot for the whole county, plus an extra one for each city.
Or, alternately, if the county was too populated, it would have multiple districts in the same county.
Yes, in practice you'd need more different ballots than you'd hope, but you'd still need a hell of a lot less than are currently used, where they might have the House district three miles wide and weaving through three counties and the state district weaving the other direction and the cities overlapping all that randomly.
I want the US to pass a constitutional amendment saying that Federal districts must follow existing political boundaries of counties and cities whenever possible. If that's not possible, because, for example, a district and a half live in a single county, they must follow rivers and lakes and other physical boundaries, and failing that they have to be decided with straight east-west lines so there's no screwing around. And I'd like each state to follow with their own rules for their local districts.
If marriage is solely between a man and woman, by divine defination, then what the hell are they worried about with gay people getting married? That seems akin to worrying about people leviating under their own power or walking through walls.
If it is, in fact, impossible, than why are they worrying when people claim to be able to do it?
Why am I getting flashbacks to Dogma all the sudden? If God is wrong about what marriage is, we get a general protection fault and the universe ends?
Surely, instead, it would be the government that was wrong. The government has admittedly been wrong about quite a few marriages, like the second and every additional marriage of bigamists.
Seems to me the correct solution would be to just let the government and gay people do whatever the hell they want, and laugh at them because they believe something which is clearly impossible, that people of the same gender can get married, just like I'd start laughing if the government let people get unicorn hunting licenses.
More to the point, aren't marriages performed by other faiths and civil marriages equally invalid in the eyes of God? Or at least marriages by non-Christians? If two Hindus can get married, surely God doesn't care what gender they are...they're both heathens.
No shit. I'd pay 100 dollars for a laptop for someone, especially if they'd do that little 'Here is the laptop you paid for, along with a picture of the village it's in.' thing they do with kids.
I can't afford 300 dollars for something I couldn't use, though.
Jesus also explicitly said not to pray in public, yet those asshats keep pushing for public prayer in schools and, in fact, all sorts of places.
Jesus did say something really important abut sex, or at least about marriage. He said 'Don't get divorced, ever.'. He said it quite clearly.
Of course, in my universe, women are now their own property, thus rendering a lot of the rules about marriage and sex completely irrelevant, and we have child support and DNS testing, rendering even more of the rules irrelevant.
But, yes, the right sure has fun ignore the few explicit rules about behavior he actually said: Don't get divorced, care for widows and children, don't pray in public, etc. Not a word about sex outside of marriage, not a word about homosexuality, not a word about quite a lot of things.
Ah, yes, the Great Liberal Evil: Some guy that said something at some time, and thus represents all the liberals.
We must fight liberals at all costs, who knows what that guy will say next! He'll probably cozy up to Hugo Chavez or something.
Please continue all your random assertions that liberals didn't care at all about the Weavers and that the murder was somehow the fault of liberals, instead of just being an example of the FBI being out of control.
You're not a fucking independent, you asswipe. You're someone who's tracked down a fucking stupid and evil thing the Clinton administration allowed to happen, and was mostly ignored by America, not 'the left', and pretending that somehow invalidates concerns that the government now is acting that way, or worse, in a systematic manner.
There is a rather fundamental difference between the police getting out of control once, or even twice, and killing innocent people, and the government enacting a policy that they can do whatever they want to anyone without any courts. The first, sadly, happens, and there's not a lot we can do about it except oversight and punishment. The second doesn't happen in America, at least not an America I'm a citizen of.
And it's possibly relevant to note that the healthcare sector expanded makework. It didn't actually provide more medical care to anyone. Instead, it worked at filling out more paperwork and providing less care while costs and industry employment continued to rise.
Hardly something to be happy about, and certainly not something to base an economy on.
In fact, the first civilization, period, developed in the easiest place on the planet to live, the Fertile Crescent, where you could live naked almost all year round and the river kept bringing topsoil for free.
That's exactly right, except you left off the fact that, of course, Blanco didn't need the loaned troups under Federal control, she asked for them under her control, as the National Guard would normally be.
The White House, however, realized she was a Democrat, and refused her request, instead demanding she turn over all the National Guard troups to the WH. (Even her own Nat Guard troups.)
About this time, a hurricane coincidentally hit(Of all the crappy luck), and thus it was a few days before Blanco replied.
Yeah, it sounds like that, except at no point during that was any State incapable of maintaining public order. And that didn't involve 'insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy'.
And the president not mobilizing the national guard was his own damn fault. The president can ask for the national guard whenever he wants, and send them anywhere ready to help under the control of a governor. What he cannot do is operate them himself, in a state, without permission, but he can certainly say 'Hey, governor of Arkansas? Can you send your national guard guys to report to the Louisiana governor?'.
This is, of course, pretending the little 'No on declared a state of emergency' meme is right. Sadly, the governet of Louisiana did ask for a declaration of a state of emergency, before Katrina hit.
There was absolutely no legal obstacle to the national guard being there, and being there in advance, and the fact the Feds screwed around with people, like those firefighters who volunteered and got shipped to Atlanta for 'training', demonstrates they just weren't fucking trying to help.
The very cynical would suggest they weren't trying because they wanted a 'failure of emergency' so they get assigned more power. So this little bill could get slipped through later, to try to stop the American insurgency half the damn country sees coming.
I thought the queen had a literal 'self-destruct government' button, where she can just magically dissolve parliament, or at least the House of Commons, and force new elections at any time.
Imagine how many more recruits an insurgent group would get if the government, say, used tanks and artillery to destroy an apartment building where a suspected insurgent was hiding.
I'm pretty sure we don't need to 'imagine' that anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
I just saw this on CNN:
What appear to be three infant skull, at least one with what the FBI has called 'bite marks', have been discovered in the office of Mike DeWine (R-OH). DeWine has headed the Republican Never-Ate-A-Baby Committee since 1998. More on this story as it develops.
We had huge discussions over the DMCA, you fuckwad. We also had dicussions about that idiot, Tipper Gore, and her little 'Let's label everything under the sun' campaign.
But you're an anonymous coward, so have only been here the last two hours for all I know.
No, you don't understand.
Anyone, doing anything, is the fault of the Democratic party. Someone make comments about how they don't think bin Laden's that bad? That's what Democrats think. Someone make a video mocking Bush and post it on YouTube? That's what Democrats think. Someone publish personal information about a congressman mother and urge poeple to harrass her? That's what Democrats think. A random blogger make a comment about how thinks only idiots would join the military at this moment? That's what Democrats think.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, people like Limbaugh and Malkin can say and do whatever they want, because they're not representive of the Republican party at all and the Republican party has nothing to do with them. Hell, actual Republican elected officials, if they get caught doing something evil, can just blame it on alcohol or cry some and it obviously doesn't reflect on the Real Republicans.
Um, not quite. The House sends the Bill of Impeachment to the Senate, the Senate holds the trial. The House can send as many Bills of Impeachment to the Senate as they feel like, the Senate does NOT have to convict.
The House can issue suppoena that require the Administration to show up and testify. That's all that's needed. We're not talking about obscure issues where something might possibly be wrong, we're talking about the President having admitted lawbreaking as policy.
You really think anybody in the Senate is going to vote their conscience rather than the Party line?
Hey, they're barely holding on to the Senate as it is. Something like 7 races have legitimate Democratic challenges that, really, shouldn't have based on past state voting patterns. When you consider there are only 33 races, total, and some of them already have Democrats, that's an absurdly high number.
While I doubt Democrats will take the Senate, if they manage to uncover enough dirt (And, frankly, they don't need to 'uncover' it, it's just laying around.), the Senate will be in an even more precarious position for the next election, and they know it. It's already politicial suicide to be next to the president, and that's before we have people testifying about their lawbreaking under oath. (Or, more fun, lying about it under oath.)
More to the point, at some point the GOP itself will figure out that fighting the Democrats removing the president is a good way loss all relevency for the next decade, because they'll be saddled with Bush. Much better to go the Nixon route and attempt to distance themselves. But if that doesn't happen, however, I full expect at least a dozen Republican senators to jump ship because they'd be completely fucked in the 2008 election if they fought Bush's removal from office.
This, of course, is assuming the Democrats actually gain a spine and attempt oversight of the Executive.
And it's also, like I said, assuming the Democrats don't take control of the Senate, in which case we'll be in a constitutional crisis in about two months, when they vote to withdraw from Iraq and Bush refuses.
Well, yes, if you define 'success' as 'does exactly what it actually does' instead of 'does what it is intended to do'.
But...but...then any survivors would be war veterans, and war veterans get the best healthcare possible from the state. They're heros! I mean, they'd be rioting in the streets if soldiers came back from war without any sort of treatment.
What will help everyone, and especially those in the lower income range, is of course good, free services. It will also make it easier for them to get out of that position. Contrary to to common belief, most of the help-receivers do want to get out into productive work, and it is a ridiculous waste of resources to not help them realize that.
Seriously, what kind of fucked up country can't providing homeless shelters? It's not like they're very expensive.
However, there's one thing that Congress can do without any Executive control at all. In fact, it only needs one branch of Congress.
ISSUE SUBPOENAS.
The Democrats are going to storm into, at least, the House this Tuesday. They have a large list of legistaltion to pass. If they don't take the Senate, they will be stonewalled there, if they do, the president will stonewall them, or just issue 'signing statements', aka, break the law.
But they can call an investigation and require the executive branch to testify under oath about the lawbreaking they've already admitted to, and even without the Senate they can impeach the president, although the Senate's required to get rid of him. Although after repeatedly being charged with violating the law, even a Republican Senate probably won't have enough political capital not to impeach him.
And, please, everyone note: You can impeach and remove the President and Vice-President from office at exactly the same time, by putting it in the same vote. Thus stopping any last second 'I appoint Backup Neocon #4 as my VP!' between their impeachments, in whatever order they happen.
Also note that while you have to impeach the president and vice-president to get them out of office, you can impeach almost anyone in the executive branch, like, oh, Donald Rumsfeld, and have them tried in the Senate. Or anyone who was in the executive branch.
And the process can, if Congress so wishes, disallow that person from hold any office of trust in the Federal government ever again.
Let's grab every single damn neocon who currently or formerly held office and bar them forever from this government. Who's with me?
Come on, now: there is no other reason to register hundreds and hundreds of fake people than to walk up to that precinct's polling place (where you don't have to show ID!) and then vote.
Did you not actually read the actual post I made? There's a perfectly 'good', or at least non-rigging-an-election reason, for that.
They got paid for each registration.
And, as was pointed out, the actual number of known invalid registrations by that group is unknown. You're just assuming that there are large numbers of invalid ones, and that the invalid ones came from ACORN, as opposed to a few invalid ones from ACORN and a bunch of really sloppy ones that could have come from anyone.
Which the examples, incidentally, bear out. You don't fill out a fake voter registration form as a 16-year old, because, duh, that's not going to make it past the person typing the info in. Nor do you forge forms from people who already registered. (Leaving aside the question of how you'd even manage to know their information, that wouldn't accomplish anything anyway.)
If, however, you're shoving forms at everyone instead of, you know, actually doing the slightest amount of work to weed out people who can't vote and people who have registered aready, that's the kind of crap you'll end up with. This is why paying people per forms-turn-in, vs. actual registration, is stupid.
That's not to say, if they were actually forging voter registrations, instead of just being sloppy, they shouldn't be punished for it. Hell, if an organization show a constant pattern of turning in clearly stupid registrations, like from 16-year olds and people who answered 'No' to 'are you a citizen?', they should have their right to register voters completely taken away. (That is, the right to collect forms. Everyone, IIRC, has the right to distribute them.)
But an assertation that ACORN is some sort of 'voting fraud machine' is completely without any sort of evidence.
Incidentally, your link is lying by implication about the one case I know of. While the Kansas City Star did say there were 300 people who could have voted twice, they used 'could' meaning 'it was possible for them to', as in, they were registered in two locations or twice in the same one, because the state screwed up and didn't remove older registrations. None of them actually did voted twice, and it wasn't any sort of fraud.
If the hackers on this page are so expert, why don't they come up with an ultra secure system, instead of endlessly complaining about fictitious stolen elections?
'This page'?
Anyway, 'these experts' have already come up with a proof that no computer can ever be completely secure. It's call the Halting Problem, and it's seventy fucking years old, which, in case you can't count, is actually older than electronic computers.
Everyone asserting there is some way for a computer to securely keep track of numbers is a liar, period. Everywhere else we use computers to keep track of numbers, we have backups and external checks on the system. There's no useful and easy way to do that for a secret election.
So fraud is OK as long the person you like wins?
Hey, look at the JFK/Nixon election. Totally fraudulent, and yet a much better outcome. ;)
But seriously, no, people wouldn't be complaining as much, in much the same way they wouldn't have been complaining as much if McCain had won. Why? Because of Bush's behavior since taking office.
No one really cares what happened if some likable or even nondescript guy ends up in charge. But people get pissed when they realize that, had they done something now, we wouldn't be in the position we are now.
9-11 was already mostly set up when Bush was elected, so someone hated us enough in the Clinton years to kill large numbers of Americans.
That talking point can't possibly work, considering the logical conclusion there is that Clinton failed to appease the terrorists enough.
That's not to say I don't agree with it, but I'm one of the tiny minority of Americans who ask 'Hey, wait a minute. Why are Muslims so pissed at us? Were we really stationing troups in their holy city for no apparent reason? Maybe we shouldn't do that, it's not like it's an important city to anyone else. Are the Israelis really holding a lot of Palestines without charge? Maybe we should try to get them to do something about that, too. Did we really randomly overthrow governments we didn't like? Well, we've already seen the results of that in South America, so perhaps we should just stop that in general.' Of course, a lot of the complaints were crap.
You can call that 'appeasement' if you want. It's something we should have fixed, or simply not done in the first place, before 9/11, though, and 9/11 wouldn't have happened.
However, you're not really correct to blame Clinton for that. Clinton basically left the middle east alone beyond trying to talk to Palestine and Israel. The roots of their hatred go back to the Iran-Iraq war and even further. Clinton managed to slow down the new hatred, but al Qaeda already existed. They attacked the WTC the first year he was in office too, remember?
You idiot.
That doesn't have anything to do with voting fraud. You pay people per-registration, guess what? Some fuckers make up registrations. Others do it slipshod.
No one is alleged to have voted or be planning to vote with any false registrations. No votes at all were made.
And, yes, it keeps happening, which shows that paying people for registering voters without any verification is a fundamentally stupid idea.
Of course, you have to make sure the scanner is accurate.
If you watched the documentary, they had a fun little scene where they demonstrated you can rig a memory card to say 0 votes, plug it into the scanner to store the vote totals on, and have it store a completely wrong answer on the card.
Before I saw that, I was advocating exactly the same thing as you. Machines print them, voters verify them, machines count them.
Now..fuck that. I'm okay with computers to printing a completed ballot.
But I don't want a piece of machinery to touch them after that. I want human beings to count them, and make marks on the wall that everyone can fucking see, exactly like we've been doing since time immortal.
It'd be a lot easier if we'd stop gerrymandering House and local districts.
What if almost every county in the US was in one district? One ballot for the whole county, plus an extra one for each city.
Or, alternately, if the county was too populated, it would have multiple districts in the same county.
Yes, in practice you'd need more different ballots than you'd hope, but you'd still need a hell of a lot less than are currently used, where they might have the House district three miles wide and weaving through three counties and the state district weaving the other direction and the cities overlapping all that randomly.
I want the US to pass a constitutional amendment saying that Federal districts must follow existing political boundaries of counties and cities whenever possible. If that's not possible, because, for example, a district and a half live in a single county, they must follow rivers and lakes and other physical boundaries, and failing that they have to be decided with straight east-west lines so there's no screwing around. And I'd like each state to follow with their own rules for their local districts.
If marriage is solely between a man and woman, by divine defination, then what the hell are they worried about with gay people getting married? That seems akin to worrying about people leviating under their own power or walking through walls.
If it is, in fact, impossible, than why are they worrying when people claim to be able to do it?
Why am I getting flashbacks to Dogma all the sudden? If God is wrong about what marriage is, we get a general protection fault and the universe ends?
Surely, instead, it would be the government that was wrong. The government has admittedly been wrong about quite a few marriages, like the second and every additional marriage of bigamists.
Seems to me the correct solution would be to just let the government and gay people do whatever the hell they want, and laugh at them because they believe something which is clearly impossible, that people of the same gender can get married, just like I'd start laughing if the government let people get unicorn hunting licenses.
More to the point, aren't marriages performed by other faiths and civil marriages equally invalid in the eyes of God? Or at least marriages by non-Christians? If two Hindus can get married, surely God doesn't care what gender they are...they're both heathens.
No shit. I'd pay 100 dollars for a laptop for someone, especially if they'd do that little 'Here is the laptop you paid for, along with a picture of the village it's in.' thing they do with kids.
I can't afford 300 dollars for something I couldn't use, though.
Jesus also explicitly said not to pray in public, yet those asshats keep pushing for public prayer in schools and, in fact, all sorts of places.
Jesus did say something really important abut sex, or at least about marriage. He said 'Don't get divorced, ever.'. He said it quite clearly.
Of course, in my universe, women are now their own property, thus rendering a lot of the rules about marriage and sex completely irrelevant, and we have child support and DNS testing, rendering even more of the rules irrelevant.
But, yes, the right sure has fun ignore the few explicit rules about behavior he actually said: Don't get divorced, care for widows and children, don't pray in public, etc. Not a word about sex outside of marriage, not a word about homosexuality, not a word about quite a lot of things.
Ah, yes, the Great Liberal Evil: Some guy that said something at some time, and thus represents all the liberals.
We must fight liberals at all costs, who knows what that guy will say next! He'll probably cozy up to Hugo Chavez or something.
Please continue all your random assertions that liberals didn't care at all about the Weavers and that the murder was somehow the fault of liberals, instead of just being an example of the FBI being out of control.
You're not a fucking independent, you asswipe. You're someone who's tracked down a fucking stupid and evil thing the Clinton administration allowed to happen, and was mostly ignored by America, not 'the left', and pretending that somehow invalidates concerns that the government now is acting that way, or worse, in a systematic manner.
There is a rather fundamental difference between the police getting out of control once, or even twice, and killing innocent people, and the government enacting a policy that they can do whatever they want to anyone without any courts. The first, sadly, happens, and there's not a lot we can do about it except oversight and punishment. The second doesn't happen in America, at least not an America I'm a citizen of.
And it's possibly relevant to note that the healthcare sector expanded makework. It didn't actually provide more medical care to anyone. Instead, it worked at filling out more paperwork and providing less care while costs and industry employment continued to rise.
Hardly something to be happy about, and certainly not something to base an economy on.
They aren't France Fries, they're French Fries, and from what I understand a goodly portion of Belgium speaks French.
In fact, the first civilization, period, developed in the easiest place on the planet to live, the Fertile Crescent, where you could live naked almost all year round and the river kept bringing topsoil for free.
That's exactly right, except you left off the fact that, of course, Blanco didn't need the loaned troups under Federal control, she asked for them under her control, as the National Guard would normally be.
The White House, however, realized she was a Democrat, and refused her request, instead demanding she turn over all the National Guard troups to the WH. (Even her own Nat Guard troups.)
About this time, a hurricane coincidentally hit(Of all the crappy luck), and thus it was a few days before Blanco replied.
Yeah, it sounds like that, except at no point during that was any State incapable of maintaining public order. And that didn't involve 'insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy'.
And the president not mobilizing the national guard was his own damn fault. The president can ask for the national guard whenever he wants, and send them anywhere ready to help under the control of a governor. What he cannot do is operate them himself, in a state, without permission, but he can certainly say 'Hey, governor of Arkansas? Can you send your national guard guys to report to the Louisiana governor?'.
This is, of course, pretending the little 'No on declared a state of emergency' meme is right. Sadly, the governet of Louisiana did ask for a declaration of a state of emergency, before Katrina hit.
There was absolutely no legal obstacle to the national guard being there, and being there in advance, and the fact the Feds screwed around with people, like those firefighters who volunteered and got shipped to Atlanta for 'training', demonstrates they just weren't fucking trying to help.
The very cynical would suggest they weren't trying because they wanted a 'failure of emergency' so they get assigned more power. So this little bill could get slipped through later, to try to stop the American insurgency half the damn country sees coming.
I thought the queen had a literal 'self-destruct government' button, where she can just magically dissolve parliament, or at least the House of Commons, and force new elections at any time.
Imagine how many more recruits an insurgent group would get if the government, say, used tanks and artillery to destroy an apartment building where a suspected insurgent was hiding.
I'm pretty sure we don't need to 'imagine' that anymore.