....unqualified minorites. While many minorities there are certainly qualified, these institutions do in fact pride themselves on the way they rig the rules to admit minorities who would not otherwise qualify. This is part of what makes the scheme so nasty.....it introduces doubt on all the fully-qualified minorities who attend on their own merits. Bush, like all other recent Presidents, authorized the university to release its records on him. What is Obama ashamed of? What's he hiding? What are we not allowed to know about him? Do we even know his real name? There is absolutely nothing in Obama's college years, absent a release of records, that tells us anything about him or his qualifications.
Why has Obama prevented a release of his college records?
What were his grades? What were the admissions criteria he used to get admitted? How did he pay for his Ivy League education?
Let's see, Obamabots claim his Harvard education is proof he is a genius (there's no other evidence) but his records are sealed and his supporters claim that Bush's Ivy League education proves nothing because Ivy League Schools make exceptions....they claim that Bush is obviously a chimp!
The only chimps in American politics are the Obama supporters who can keep those two contradictory ideas in their noodles at the same time without seeing how dumb they look while doing it
Um, Sorry but Bush was flying the F-102 which pre-dated the moon landing. This is important because the Apollo guidance computers were (under the direction of Neil Armstrong) adapted by NASA to become the early experiments in making USAF jets eventually the super-computerized fly-by-wire wonders they are today.
In case you are thus-far missing my point, the jets Bush flew were the old-school heavy-metal fly-it-right-or-die machines which were designed with a lot less aerodynamic knowledge, not the modern computerized craft computer game players fantasize about. Furthermore, the US Military does not put a pilot into a jet until he is fully trained and qualified (including an education in aerodynamics). Think it's easy? Sign-up and prove it! Or are you dumber than a chimp?
A Third party in will never exist in America as a significant entity. We are a democratic republic. Third (and fourth, and fifth...) parties can work in a parliamentary system where power is shared in coalitions, but in the American system things are more winner-takes-all. Any third party here is either not significant, or it becomes a spoiler. Any third party that actually became big enough to win (only happened once), would quickly cause the smaller of the two original parties to vaporise. This is exactly what happened when a new upstart third party (the Republicans) arose to challenge the two big parties (the Democrats and the Whigs) 150 years ago. Those pesky oddball whacko right-wing extremist nuts who actually wanted to inject morality into politics (sound familiar?) by claiming that blacks were people and slavery was wrong (the morals issue of that day) actually managed to elect a poorly-educated stupid hick from the wilderness (sound familiar?) Abraham Lincoln as president and with the well-educated super-wise intellectual Democrats (ring any bells?) firmly supporting slavery (after-all, morals should not be in politics, right?), the Whigs did not just recede to be the smaller of three parties...... they evaporated. The Democrats back then of course went completely insane over the hick oddball gun-toting Republican (Palin-Derangement-Syndrome on steroids) and dragged the country through a bloody civil war. Not too many people look forward to such a massive political shift. To be fair, those times and people do not compare well with these times and these people, BUT too many who have grown-up in relative peace and prosperity and who slept through History classes have a remarkable ability to imagine that political upheaval could never happen here (even though we have proof it can) and/or would be smooth and happy (even though we have proof if might not be).
People in our system divide between the two most-viable parties based mainly on the big issues of the day. Whigs who could adapt to the concept that blacks were people, merged into the Republican party; those who could not, merged in with the Democrats. There are still people in the Republican party who insist that morals should not be in politics, but they stay Republican because the party is also to the right on economics (which they admit to caring about more than the pesky morals stuff). There are still people among the Democrats who are to the right on economics, but they stay with the Democrats because the Democrats have their preferred positions on morals and they value the morals issues over the economic ones. In picking a party, most people prioritize and go with the party more aligned with them on the thing or things most important to them, rather than trying to form a third party that would more-precisely align with their beliefs but which would never be more than a spoiler.
The simple fact is that if the Greens ever rose to be significant, they would replace the Democrats rather than becoming a permanent power-sharing source of left-leaning frustration.
The Libertarians, likewise, will never manage such a rise; they would naturally replace the Republicans, but the biggest base of the Republican party is deeply attached to certain moral principles which override personal economics for them and keep them from ever participating in such a replacement. The people the Libertarians would need to add to the mix for a replacement (the sex and drugs libertarians) find a more natural home with the Democrats and are not a large enough block to replace the morals voters in the GOP. Even if the Libertarians did find a fantasy way to replace the Republicans, you would simply have a re-run of the old Whigs-and-Democrats system and the Libertarians(playing the role of the Whigs in this thought experiment) would collapse to be replaced by some new morals-based Republican party.
The interesting thing actually is the Tea party, which is trying something else: Form a non-party party and attempt to use it to steer the more-closely-aligned exist
I am stunned that a posting like this can get tagged "insightful"
Obama is better than W only because he has a normal IQ.
What is Obama's IQ? What is Bush's IQ? Are you really so certain Bush's is below normal? I doubt you have qualified to fly jets in the Air Force as Bush did, so does that mean you have a lower IQ? This is closely-related to the anti-Bush crap the left issued as part of the Gore and Kerry campaigns, until people compared college grades and Bush came-out looking better. I dislike many things about Bush, but this comment is without merit and lacks any insight.
As to his politics, he's a corporatist who's broken enough campaign promises (close gitmo! Stop military tribunals of suspected terrists! Get out of Iraq! End welfare for the rich!) to lose 3 re-election bids.
No, he is not a "corporatist", he's just a super-big-government guy, and unfortunately that leads either to a marriage of big corporations with big government, or a replacement of corporations with government. You weren't really gullible enough to think he could usher-in communism in America within his first two years in office did you? If not, then you should have expected that he would end-up fully in-bed with the corporate big boys.....that was a no-brainer. Didn't you notice how completely in-bed he was with the big drug companies? He railed against them in public, while they actually funded pro-Obama-care ads on TV! Any adult who was paying attention knew this before he was elected. All you had to do was actually listen to his words AND look at who was giving him all that money. He took far more money from Hollywood and Wall Street than any Republican ever has. If you were young and dumb and gullible, then you fixated on "hope" and "change" and some posters and t-shirts and you tweeted your adoration and you breathlessly encouraged everyone you know to vote for your new messiah........ and now you are disappointed and confused.
Nonetheless, I'll probably have to vote for him because the other side will be running some jackass like Palin, Pawlenty or Bachmann, and letting them get within 3 miles of the White House would be disastrous.
If you plan to vote for Obama again, be honest about it and say "he can do anything he wants and I will still support him anyway because I [am gay]|[use drugs]|[support abortion][fill-in other left-wing cause]." Just be completely honest with yourself and with those around you. Palin, Pawlenty and Bachman are each probably twice as smart as Obama, and probably ten times as ethical..... I'd take any one of them in a heart-beat. You disagree? Well, your post contained no "insightful" information which might have persuaded me; it was just a very un-insightful drive-by slam on some people you probably hate because they have different political positions (since you provided no substance to your slams on those three, I feel no obligation to rebut with substance). The left has long been stuck on a theme: "we're smart, so anybody who disagrees is stupid." That's how we get a society in which political discourse collapses. Want to label somebody as dumb? Prove it. Not with some minor verbal gaff (as when Palin recently swapped north and south Korea during a radio interview, and which she herself corrected moments later, or when Obama said he'd been to 57 states and had one more to visit) but with serious substance that is approximately equivalent to a test you would accept others applying to yourself and your political hero. On the off-chance that you were not attacking the three Republicans as stupid but were instead implying they were evil, Bachmann alone has raised quite a few foster kids and in doing so has probably done more to help society and humanity generally than 90% of the people who post here and who would so casually assault her in a web posting. You should try raising a dozen kids who were abondoned/abused by their parents, and after you have done at least as good a job of it as Bachmann did, then take-in some more. When you have final
This incident does of course bring up gun control and whether mandatory psychological evaluation should be required prior to access to the most dangerous forms weapons designed specifically to kill people. Even the idea of compulsory psychological evaluation of all people at late high school age to pick up on warning signs and initiate treatment or support when required to try to avoid these random very destructive events, is starting to look more acceptable. Quite invasive, fairly expensive but, would likely save many lives.
Good idea. We could screen all teenagers and if we find any who might grow-up to be liberals we could send them off to be re-educated, or we could drug them, we could prevent them from getting weapons or cars, or jobs....
Do you see a problem with that? Does that scare you when aimed at liberals but excite you if aimed at conservatives? The American idea is liberty and freedom and minimal intrusion by government, not nanny state big-brotherism that pretends to be able to protect you from everything.
A government big enough to give you everything you want (including safety) is a government big enough to take from you everything you have (including freedom and liberty), Do not ask for the former unless you are willing to suffer the latter.
I have to disagree. I know that would be nice and fair in theory, but in practice the right wing really is much crazier. There is nothing to compare in rhetoric or in practice. Who is the left's Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter?
Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Bill Maher, Kathy Griffin, Al Franken, Joy Behar, Arianna Huffington, Randi Rhodes, Janeane Garofalo, etc. etc. etc.
You're right, there's no comparison. The lefties routinely label people they dislike as "worst person in the world", and express the wish (often in expletive-laden rants) that people they dislike would die, whereas people on the right (like the super-evil Glenn Beck are always telling people not to use violence). The left likes to physically-assault their opponents (how many times have lefties thrown pies at Coulter???) to try to prevent their speech rather than engage in an intellectual debate. Yup. There's no comparison.
Many more liberal people on slashdot also have libertarian leanings... so I guess that means his ties to slashdot are just as solid as his (non-existent) ties to the Tea Party, right?
My first clues that this guy is not tied to the Republicans, the Democrats, the Tea Party, the Greens, etc was probably his rants about government-mind-control-through-bad-grammar...
A pox upon any person who tries to turn this crazy drug-addled evil freakish murdering bastard into a cheap partisan political attack.
Like many politicians on both sides of the aisle (including team Obama), Palin "targeted" political opponents in a campaign. Politicians also frequently try to "beat" their opponents. Democrats have spent many months trying to twist campaign rhetoric like that to try to make it sound like threats of physical violence in order to rev-up their political base. Most Americans are smart enough to see through it, but I guess it works for energizing a largely young group of supporters who lack the common sense that comes gradually with age.
Palin used a map with cross-hairs on it (not cross-hairs over faces) to show her supporters where to target their strategic political acts. If this use of cross-hairs is a threat of physical violence then I presume we should all call-out the bomb squad whenever some liberals on the web call for a "money bomb" (high-explosives wrapped in quarters and dimes to have grenade-like effects?)
As for screwed-up statement that "The government is giving Trillions ("T", plural now 2.1) to the wealthy", I barely know where to start. There is a huge difference between giving somebody money and deciding not to steal money from him. If you think that leaving tax rates as they are constitutes "giving to the wealthy", then I have news for you... I have decided not to steal $1 million from you, wow, I guess that makes you $1 million richer right? Get ready to pay your new millionaires tax...
They're blaming nutbag teatards like you because of things like GIffords being threatened for voting for the so-called "Obamacare" bill
Typical slashdot idiotic group-think. Most Democrats eat chocolate. Most Americans die before they turn 100. Some Democrats buy their chocolate
from stores run by Republicans... so obviously Republicans are using chocolate in an evil plot to kill Democrats! Run for your lives! Get a foil hat!
The shooter was a pot-head; hardly a stereo-typical Palin supporter/TeaPartier. And just because he was a pot-head, that does not even mean otherpot-heads are to blame.
Giffords had recently been blasted by liberals for not supporting Pelosi and failing to be sufficiently liberal. Her actions in opposing Obama's tear-down of NASA's manned spaceflight activities earned her an additional serving of scorn from Obama supporters. By your severely-flawed attempt at reasoning, I presume pot growers or HuffPo or Kos are responsible, or maybe it was the evil people at SpaceX who wanted to make money hauling astronauts on their rockets... Maybe global warming made his brains too hot, so it was really the evil George Bush who is to blame!
The simple truth is that a nutjob tried to kill a member of congress and succeeded in killing some innocent bystanders including a child. Only a sick, twisted, whackjob would try to turn this into a political act that may be blamed on a third party. Blame it on Palin, or Obama, or Beck, or Kos, or Fox, or CNN, or Hitler, or Marx, or Buddah, or anybody else and you are beneath contempt.
As for the rest of your obnoxious post, I guess I am gradually becoming aware of just how far our educational system has fallen in the past few decades. You seem to lack any historical understanding of either politics or economics in the US and substitute expletives and ranting for facts and reason. Very sad, really. I have no connection to the Tea Party, but they may have a point about what's been happening to the country...
Hatred of the 2nd amendment is much more closely-tied to hatred of the 1st, which it protects, than most like to admit. It's no surprise that the same leftist judges who approve of gun control laws also tend to approve of limits of free speech, warrant-less e-mail searches, warrant-less use of GPS devices to track the vehicles of citizens, etc. Our founders gave us all ten of the amendments in the Bill Of Rights together as a group, and it should arouse a very healthy dose of suspicion when any American wants a full-scale repeal of any one of the ten.
Consider that land-of-enlightenment Canada, where gun rights are reduced and, oh yeah, you can go to jail for saying or writing something if it makes some protected group of people unhappy.
Note that one of the other "targets" on Sarah Palin's map had his home's propane line cut. Fortunately, no other damage occurred.
The rhetoric of "targeting" in politics has been used for decades (it particularly arose post-WWII when so many Americans became familiar with terminology related to strategic military activity resulting in large successes) and the vast majority of the population, having more than a couple of brain cells to rub together, never used to confuse this form of strategic planning rhetoric with personal acts of physical violence. Democrats used to talk about "targeting" Republicans and then some nutjob shot Reagan; but that did not make any of those Democrats responsible for the shooting. Yes, Palin (and others) "targeted" Democrats recently and now a nutjob has attacked one of her "targets" with a gun, but she's no more responsible than Obama will be if anybody he "targeted" becomes the victim of some random nutjob violence.
The problem isn't guns - it is a political movement that pursues eliminationist goals.
Here, you are actually almost right; it is not the instrument (the gun), but then you go doubly-wrong (it's not any "movement" nor is any significant American political movement including Palin's "eliminationist"). The problem is entirely with the individual who carries out the act. If no German is willing to kill a Jew, Nazism is incapable of the holocaust. If no Russian will abuse his fellow citizen, the Gulags do not exist. If no American had been willing to "own" a black person or defend the supposed right of others to do so, the American civil war would have not only never happened, but it would have been un-necessary. If there were no Muslims who were willing to blow themselves up in an effort to wipe-out innocent men women and children, Bin Laden would just be another creepy dude in a cave. The most foul and obnoxious rabble-rousing criminal or political leader cannot achieve a significant bad result without the actions of individuals who are willing to take individual acts. Each individual is completely responsible for his or her own acts.
Jesus died for sombody's sins but not mine
Funny, but also wrong. It is a matter of historical record (even secular records) that a Jew named Jesus did exist and did die. His followers made many claims about why and there's no more reason to question their statements about his motives (though it might be rational to believe those motives were invalid) than, say, to question the contemporary accounts of why any Roman (for example) of the same era did whatever he is said to have done. Your opinion on the matter approx 2K years later has no impact upon either the event or the motivations a person at that time may have had. It may be an open question as to whether what he did would, or would not, have any effect on your particular sins, or you may claim to be sin-free, but your contemporary opinion cannot change the motivation of somebody when he took certain steps centuries ago. Your rejection of a gift also has no effect on whether or why the gift was offered. Your parents could leave you a house in their will and you could reject the house, but it would not mean they had not left you a house, nor would it mean they had not left it for your use. If you want to use an anti-Christian tag-line, try to at least come up with something that's rational;-)
"gun violence" statistics are junk. Guns are inanimate objects that function as enablers/force multipliers. As a result, "gun violence" lines-up more with illegal activities and other violence than with concentrations of guns. In rural areas where many people own ten or more guns you generally see lower "gun violence" rates than in big cities where most people own no guns. Look at where drugs crimes, robberies, prostitution, etc are more frequent (not making a moral point here just listing activities banned by law) and you will see higher rates of "gun crimes". People who are already breaking the law are simply more willing to add a gun to the mix either for intimidation or to directly aid in their law breaking.
If you find a magic wand that will eliminate all guns, you will quickly find criminals resorting to knives, clubs, or worse like bombs. The problem is not the tool, but rather the person who holds the tool.
The "Fox News crowd and other right wing paranoid freak tea baggers" as you put it are simply being more rational than you apparently are.
Most gun violence in the US is tied to alcohol, or drugs or other criminal activity (such as robbery which in turn is also often tied to drugs) and is not related to politics, a desire for smaller government, or any other activity of decent law-abiding hard-working tax-paying citizens. We lose tens of thousands of people each year to drunk driving, so presumably we should ban alcohol and cars too as we ban the guns? The tea party people you slimed with your gay sex rhetoric have little in common with this gunman who was a pot-head loser who liked leftist rags The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf (Tea partiers reject the philosophies of both the old union of soviet socialist republics, and the old national socialist workers party).
There's something particularly nasty about the way that some on the left will use any crime they can to try to justify taking away the 2nd amendment rights of all Americans. If we are to use individual acts of murder to eliminate one constitutional right for all, then we may also use individual acts to justify removing other rights like the 1st amendment rights from all, or 4th amendment rights from all. Our society has already done too much of this (as with the underwear bomber becoming justification for TSA grope-fests)
If you want to protect your country from the government join the army...
I already served in uniform, have you? That service has nothing whatsoever to do with the 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms. The military role is the protection of these United States from external threats as directed by the congress and the President. The 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting and little to do with external threats; it's about the citizens having a check on government. The founders wanted to do two things: first, prevent the federal government from needing a huge standing army that could be used to oppress the citizens (by having the citizens themselves be available as local voluntary militias for repulsion of invaders) and second, guarantee not just the right but the ability of the people (as a whole, rather than as individuals) to rebel should a tyrant ever arise. They also believed individuals had the absolute right to defend themselves, their families, and their property from criminals though this was obvious common-sense to them. Read a little history (not the pre-chewed, pre-digested grade-school pablum most get in school, but rather the actual writings of our founders). I would not choose to live in a country whose government did not trust me to keep and bear arms. Such a government would not view me as a responsible adult and, in turn, would not deserve my trust. If you want to live in such a country with a government that trusts and respects you so little, you have many choices. Do not be so eager to mess up this last, best hope of man on Earth
Anybody who joins this effort will be playing directly into her hands.
She is a lot smarter than her critics claim. She needs attacks and schemes like this in order to win. She is counting on them, and the angry left has such a long track record that she can reliably depend upon them to leap into the trap. Every attack like this provides a conservative with more validation with middle-class Americans. It's counter-intuitive to the left, but these attacks actually provide a certain type of gravitas; many in the middle-class see these things as proof that the left fears a candidate and that this, in-turn, means the candidate being attacked has enough substance to be worthy of the attack. The standard line of attack by big-city liberals against conservatives is that they are dumb and they use hick language. This was the line used against Reagan, Bush41, Bush43, some on the left even used it against Eisenhower (the same line was used by the left in France against Sarkozy). While her critics blast Palin as an obvious moron, she is busy cleverly immunizing herself against this attack with large portions of the population. Indeed, every time she speaks and is well understood by vast swaths of the middle class (who are quite familiar with the parenthetical style of speech she uses) and then is ridiculed by left-leaning pundits who claim she is unintelligible, much of middle-America has a reaction her critics cannot fathom; her critics are the ones who are seen as too dumb to understand even such common speech patterns. Palin's supporters remember well that the left was so panicked about her that people resorted to criminal activity to try to take her down and even then could find no dirt, ending up attacking her teenage daughter as a fall-back position. You might disagree with her about every single thing, and you might hate her style, but you make a big mistake if you become lazy and cling to the standard childish liberal line that anybody you disagree with is a hate-filled idiot. It's intellectually lazy and could backfire. I had to laugh recently when a left-leaning pontificator blasted Palin for reading children's books when she said she was reading C.S. Lewis, the attack said a great deal about the illiteracy and general ignorance of the attacker.
Remember, in 1980 the supporters of Jimmy Carter (who told us he was a super-genius Naval Academy grad and Nuclear engineer) were begging for the Republicans to nominate Ronald Reagan (the obviously stupid B-actor, former Hollywood cowboy and co-star to Bonzo the monkey) so that the incumbent super-genius do-gooder Democrat would be re-elected in a land slide. That folksy-cowboy actor, we were told, was probably illiterate and had become famous by reciting other people's words from scripts. The American people, however, where quite comfortable and familiar with Reagan and were sick of the Carter train-wreck.
Simply saying Obama is a genius does not make him so (he never released his records so we do not know how he got into college, how he paid for it, what grades he got, how he got onto the Law Review, etc.), claiming he was a Constitutional Law Professor (when he actually was only and adjunct prof teaching one course on community organizing) does not make him a font of wisdom. The man is clueless about how jobs are created and maintained in the private sector (having never even run a lemonade stand). Obama's young gullible supporters might have convinced themselves that this empty suit was a messiah by passing around a bunch of dopey hope-and-change slogans and posters, but the man's actual record has firmly established him as a moron. If unemployment is still high in 2012 (as is projected) and if Obama is still "staying the course" on his disasterous policies, still appointing extremists to government positions, still completely clueless on the differences between common criminals and terrorists, still caving-in to dictators and tyrants, continuing to spend us into deeper debt than all the presidents before him combined, then much of the country wil
The low estimates of Iraqi casualties in both cases are about 100,000...
Junk accounting by a political activist writing in the Lancet. These numbers were part of a political act to bash Bush and/or the US by opponents of the Iraq war and used methods not generally viewed as legitimate. First, not everybody who dies during a war is a war casualty (some number of people will die from age, disease, malnutrition, crimes, etc in a given country even in peacetime). Second, civilians who have other disagreements and kill each other may have done it under the cover of the war, but the war id not to blame (for example, if a man decides to murder his wife and does it while thieves are in his house robbing him, he is still responsible for the murder (burglary is not responsible)). Third, a war technically ends when the opposing governments agree to end it. If unlawful combatants (persons not in uniform in the lawful service of their nation) kill people after the war has officially ended, they (not the war) are guilty for the killings.
1) Saddam Hussein from 1980 to 1991 while he was an official ally and client of the United States.
Not so much. The US did not put him in power. His Iraqi supporters and not the US kept him in power. His alliance was actually with the Russians, and not the US, during the cold war... which is why his weapons were almost entirely Russian and so easily destroyed both times that the US fought him (and why there was concern about Russian "advisors" in Iraq becoming casualties and possibly triggering US-Russian difficulties when the US invaded Iraq.
2) The Iran-Iraq War, which was supported by the United States after we removed Iraq from the State Sponsors of Terror list in 1982.
The US did not start that war. The primary role of the US in that war was that the US gave some intel to a nasty little tyrant (who we generally ignored) while he was fighting against Iran which was both an enemy of the US and one of the world's leading terrorist sponsors. A bit like tossing a small treat to a junkyard dog while he is fighting another bad dog. This talking point always looks great on a protester's poster but there's not much significance to the so-called support.
3) Embargoes from the UN from 1991 until 2003 which were pushed and supported by the United States.
Sorry, but the embargoes were entirely the fault of Iraq; they were put into place by the international community to enforce the terms of the cease fire that ended to war which Saddam started by invading Kuwait. In fact, the international community went to great lengths to make sure they allowed in everything needed to keep the Iraqi civilians alive. The fact that Saddam mis-directed aid, and generally used the suffering of his people to try to blackmail the international community into allowing him to have prohibited items is too-often overlooked by his supporters. The Hussein regime is entirely responsible for the existence of the sanctions, and therefore responsible for any deaths supposedly caused thereby.
4) The invasion of Iraq by the United States from 2003 until the present.
One does not get to blame post-war deaths on the war. The US and Germany fought each other in WWII, but WWII cannot be blamed each time some German civilian kills some American civilian, or each time some American kills some German. Some white American might hate some black American, or some black American may hate some white American, but neither may murder the other and then blame it on the civil war or president Lincoln or general Lee, etc. even though there is much cultural baggage from that war which found Americans fighting on both sides. Combat ended long ago and Iraq has a post-war government which the US is attempting to support, so the continuing violence between sunnis and shiites cannot be legitimately blamed on the war. The fact that sectarian violence in Iraq was suppressed before the war because Saddam was a tyrant whose control of the country was wrapped-up in th
No, a hundred thousand people killed by a country with no right to even be in their hemisphere...
Sorry, but the US has every right to be in that hemisphere; First, we have the universally-recognized right to operate in international waters anywhere on Earth, as do all other nations. Second, we have numerous treaties with many nations involving both trade and military matters. This second point includes the following: Defending certain nations if they are attacked, training and equipping the forces of certain nations, joint exercises, etc.
Not one single Iraqi ever physically harmed an American outside of their sovereign border.
One presumes you were either just born in the past few years or have severe memory issues. Iraq invaded Kuwait (a UN Member... look-up the UN rules on member nations attempting to conquer each other) so the US and many other UN member nations fought a war to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Even if there had been no UN related issues, the government of Kuwait asked the US to intervene on its behalf (as ANY nation may do), so the justification for US involvement was doubly-legitimate. This was completely within international law. That war ended with a cease-fire which included many terms the violation of which are, by definition, grounds for resuming the fighting. Iraq violated those terms many times over twelve years (including by routinely firing upon US and allied aircraft monitoring the no-fly zones ( those aircraft had the right to be there enforcing the terms that ended the war)) so the US and its allies had every right to re-start the fighting at any time even without any WMD arguments/claims leading to a "second" war. Had Iraq never invaded Kuwait, the US would not have been drawn into the 1st gulf war, and your argument might hold some weight.
The same goes for the Afghani people.
Sorry, but here again you are in error: The government of Afghanistan (the Taliban at that time) hosted and supported Bin Laden and his un-merry band as they prepared and launched the 9-11 attacks on the US. By every right of international law and precedent going back into the dusty dark recesses of history, the US was justified in going to war in Afghanistan. This is hardly the first time in history that Nation A went to war against Nation B because Nation B supported an attack on the civilians of Nation A.
Next time, try using rational discussion as a substitute for expletives; the former is much more persuasive than the latter
Wrong on both counts (and you display a shocking lack of historical knowledge)
First, the Crusades were a response to a Muslim invasion and land-grab. There are very long and detailed books on the subject, try reading some.
Second, the Holocaust was not a Christian thing (Hitler though said to have been born into a Catholic family was personally an atheist, and the NAZI party was engaged in a long-term process of moving the German population from its historical Catholic and Lutheran faiths to a quasi-pagan mystical political system as is well documented in party papers), and the Germans did not hate the Jews primarily for their religion but rather for their ethnicity. It is also well documented that a number of serious Christians were killed by the NAZIs for their attempts to interfere with the Holocaust. For starters, try reading a bit about Bahnoffer and if you have any intellectual curiosity you will find plenty more
If Rackspace is going to shut down all sites with "hate speech". they are going to have to kill all the muslim sites they host with burning American flags, All the conservative sites with biting criticism of liberals, all the liberal sites with nasty words about conservatives, etc. If a pastor planning to burn the Quran is hate speech, then I presume other actions offending other religions are also hate speech. There go any muslim sites that have the muslim dome atop the Jewish temple mount. Any atheist sites with the flying spaghetti monster, any Jewish sites (many people view even the existence of a Jew as bad), and sites critical of Jews or Jewish sites. etc. etc. etc. Wiill they have any customers left?
Once we get rolling on this whole subjective "hate speech" standard, there may be no sites left on the internet since nearly anybody can take anything as "hateful"
I guess it they still have a lot of customers tomorrow, we will see that their idea of hate speech is rather targeted.
perhaps if this pastor had followers who had a reputation for sawing people's heads off, stoning women, hanging gays, and crashing planes into buildings, rackspace might have been less inclined to pull the plug over some proposal to burn a few dead trees
I smell a lawsuit if Rackspace fails to also pull any sites with muslim "hate speech". This is a bad path our society is slipping down when standards are applied differently to different groups based upon an apparent fear of violence. It matters not whether fear is the actual motive at rackspace; the perception that facilitators of expression are selectively limiting expression based on fear is ultimately the chilling element
It could even be that before 1962 they had no ways of detecting and measuring icebergs.
Blasphemy!
{sarcasm}
How dare you claim that we do not have exact measurements of arctic ice for the past several million years?!?!? If that were true, then we would lack the information about what constitutes "normal" and what constitutes "extreme" over spans of time not measured by puny human lifespans. If we did not have such detailed satellite imagery from before the industrial revolution and, indeed, from the warming period between the last ice age and the ice age before that one, then we would not know whether this event was unusual for such a warming period or whether it had ever happened before in the absence of significant man-made emissions. You cannot possibly be saying that, can you? You are saying things that those evil deniers have said, and we know that they are all like the Nazis, so your morals are now in question; you are clearly a nasty person; nobody should listen to you, etc.
You could get excommunicated by Pope Gore for such filthy anti-dogma ideas.
You'd better say a few Hail Manns, crawl thrice around the IPCC headquarters building on your knees, and beg Gaia for forgiveness
{/sarcasm}
What's that you say? You claim you were just speaking honestly about a lack of data? You say you prefer an honest and calm discussion over the charge of Nazi-likeness and a demand for silence? Well so do those of us who have problems with AGW claims. I'll know that there might be some serious science involved when the proponents no longer need to accuse others of being Nazis and "deniers", and no longer try to make their case by lying, rigging peer-reviews, and withholding information.
If we lack the historic data to perform an apples-to-apples comparison with modern data, then it should not be a problem to point to that fact and use it as an argument. We should be able to question claims that something is the "hottest ever" or the "coldest ever" or the largest or smallest ever (or over some range of time) when the person using the claim lacks the proof of the claim, or tries to distract from important caveats or contrary evidence. Human beings have been around for a remarkably short period of geologic time, they have been keeping records for only a fraction of that time, and they have lacked the ability to make and record observations of most of the Earth for an even smaller fraction of that small fraction of time. We have no equivalent observations from any previous global cooling or warming period to give this event any context. Is it sad? Sure, if you like the beauty of glaciers (as I do) but it might not be if you like the green meadows of a glacier-free Greenland. Is it reason to panic? No. Not if we lack the data to know whether this particular event is not a repeat of what happened during previous warming periods.
OK, so there was one this size or bigger in 1962 before George W Bush, all the iPods, farting cows and SUVs caused all the global warming. Interesting. If there had not been a "worse" incident in 1962, it would have been said that this was the worst since 1920, or 1830 or whenever or perhaps "the worst ever". Sensational rhetoric like this works on the young precisely because they have such a short view of history. We are all supposed to be so shocked by the size that we do not pay attention to the date. This is by design; it's a common tool. Any young person will automatically translate "1962" to "way back in time before I was born" which will place it somewhere in the vicinity of WWII, the Roman Empire and the ice age (The time of black-and-white photos and cave paintings)
Earth's climate has always been changing. The time to really worry is when the climate stops changing
While your post was funny, it might interest you to know that there actually have been private aircraft built from a composite that used brown craft/shipping type paper as the fiber. I cannot recall the name of the stuff, but if you look hard enough for experimental composite aircraft construction techniques, you'll find it.
Looks like they just dusted-off one of the old ACRV (Assured Crew Return Vehicle) designs for ISS from the 1990s. IIRC, Boeing proposed a slightly larger Apollo capsule (they got the Apollo IP from their acquisition of North American) with new docking port and mini service module as an ISS lifeboat. What's cheaper than a little napkin engineering followed by some drawings and a powerpoint? why, re-using some napkin engineering, updating a powerpoint and doing a new CG version of a drawing, of course!
Slashdot Mirror
....unqualified minorites. While many minorities there are certainly qualified, these institutions do in fact pride themselves on the way they rig the rules to admit minorities who would not otherwise qualify. This is part of what makes the scheme so nasty.....it introduces doubt on all the fully-qualified minorities who attend on their own merits. Bush, like all other recent Presidents, authorized the university to release its records on him. What is Obama ashamed of? What's he hiding? What are we not allowed to know about him? Do we even know his real name? There is absolutely nothing in Obama's college years, absent a release of records, that tells us anything about him or his qualifications.
Why has Obama prevented a release of his college records?
What were his grades? What were the admissions criteria he used to get admitted? How did he pay for his Ivy League education?
Let's see, Obamabots claim his Harvard education is proof he is a genius (there's no other evidence) but his records are sealed and his supporters claim that Bush's Ivy League education proves nothing because Ivy League Schools make exceptions....they claim that Bush is obviously a chimp!
The only chimps in American politics are the Obama supporters who can keep those two contradictory ideas in their noodles at the same time without seeing how dumb they look while doing it
Um, Sorry but Bush was flying the F-102 which pre-dated the moon landing. This is important because the Apollo guidance computers were (under the direction of Neil Armstrong) adapted by NASA to become the early experiments in making USAF jets eventually the super-computerized fly-by-wire wonders they are today.
In case you are thus-far missing my point, the jets Bush flew were the old-school heavy-metal fly-it-right-or-die machines which were designed with a lot less aerodynamic knowledge, not the modern computerized craft computer game players fantasize about. Furthermore, the US Military does not put a pilot into a jet until he is fully trained and qualified (including an education in aerodynamics). Think it's easy? Sign-up and prove it! Or are you dumber than a chimp?
And no, no chimpanzee has ever flown an airplane
A Third party in will never exist in America as a significant entity. We are a democratic republic. Third (and fourth, and fifth...) parties can work in a parliamentary system where power is shared in coalitions, but in the American system things are more winner-takes-all. Any third party here is either not significant, or it becomes a spoiler. Any third party that actually became big enough to win (only happened once), would quickly cause the smaller of the two original parties to vaporise. This is exactly what happened when a new upstart third party (the Republicans) arose to challenge the two big parties (the Democrats and the Whigs) 150 years ago. Those pesky oddball whacko right-wing extremist nuts who actually wanted to inject morality into politics (sound familiar?) by claiming that blacks were people and slavery was wrong (the morals issue of that day) actually managed to elect a poorly-educated stupid hick from the wilderness (sound familiar?) Abraham Lincoln as president and with the well-educated super-wise intellectual Democrats (ring any bells?) firmly supporting slavery (after-all, morals should not be in politics, right?), the Whigs did not just recede to be the smaller of three parties...... they evaporated. The Democrats back then of course went completely insane over the hick oddball gun-toting Republican (Palin-Derangement-Syndrome on steroids) and dragged the country through a bloody civil war. Not too many people look forward to such a massive political shift. To be fair, those times and people do not compare well with these times and these people, BUT too many who have grown-up in relative peace and prosperity and who slept through History classes have a remarkable ability to imagine that political upheaval could never happen here (even though we have proof it can) and/or would be smooth and happy (even though we have proof if might not be).
People in our system divide between the two most-viable parties based mainly on the big issues of the day. Whigs who could adapt to the concept that blacks were people, merged into the Republican party; those who could not, merged in with the Democrats. There are still people in the Republican party who insist that morals should not be in politics, but they stay Republican because the party is also to the right on economics (which they admit to caring about more than the pesky morals stuff). There are still people among the Democrats who are to the right on economics, but they stay with the Democrats because the Democrats have their preferred positions on morals and they value the morals issues over the economic ones. In picking a party, most people prioritize and go with the party more aligned with them on the thing or things most important to them, rather than trying to form a third party that would more-precisely align with their beliefs but which would never be more than a spoiler.
The simple fact is that if the Greens ever rose to be significant, they would replace the Democrats rather than becoming a permanent power-sharing source of left-leaning frustration.
The Libertarians, likewise, will never manage such a rise; they would naturally replace the Republicans, but the biggest base of the Republican party is deeply attached to certain moral principles which override personal economics for them and keep them from ever participating in such a replacement. The people the Libertarians would need to add to the mix for a replacement (the sex and drugs libertarians) find a more natural home with the Democrats and are not a large enough block to replace the morals voters in the GOP. Even if the Libertarians did find a fantasy way to replace the Republicans, you would simply have a re-run of the old Whigs-and-Democrats system and the Libertarians(playing the role of the Whigs in this thought experiment) would collapse to be replaced by some new morals-based Republican party.
The interesting thing actually is the Tea party, which is trying something else: Form a non-party party and attempt to use it to steer the more-closely-aligned exist
I am stunned that a posting like this can get tagged "insightful"
Obama is better than W only because he has a normal IQ.
What is Obama's IQ? What is Bush's IQ? Are you really so certain Bush's is below normal? I doubt you have qualified to fly jets in the Air Force as Bush did, so does that mean you have a lower IQ? This is closely-related to the anti-Bush crap the left issued as part of the Gore and Kerry campaigns, until people compared college grades and Bush came-out looking better. I dislike many things about Bush, but this comment is without merit and lacks any insight.
As to his politics, he's a corporatist who's broken enough campaign promises (close gitmo! Stop military tribunals of suspected terrists! Get out of Iraq! End welfare for the rich!) to lose 3 re-election bids.
No, he is not a "corporatist", he's just a super-big-government guy, and unfortunately that leads either to a marriage of big corporations with big government, or a replacement of corporations with government. You weren't really gullible enough to think he could usher-in communism in America within his first two years in office did you? If not, then you should have expected that he would end-up fully in-bed with the corporate big boys.....that was a no-brainer. Didn't you notice how completely in-bed he was with the big drug companies? He railed against them in public, while they actually funded pro-Obama-care ads on TV! Any adult who was paying attention knew this before he was elected. All you had to do was actually listen to his words AND look at who was giving him all that money. He took far more money from Hollywood and Wall Street than any Republican ever has. If you were young and dumb and gullible, then you fixated on "hope" and "change" and some posters and t-shirts and you tweeted your adoration and you breathlessly encouraged everyone you know to vote for your new messiah........ and now you are disappointed and confused.
Nonetheless, I'll probably have to vote for him because the other side will be running some jackass like Palin, Pawlenty or Bachmann, and letting them get within 3 miles of the White House would be disastrous.
If you plan to vote for Obama again, be honest about it and say "he can do anything he wants and I will still support him anyway because I [am gay]|[use drugs]|[support abortion][fill-in other left-wing cause]." Just be completely honest with yourself and with those around you. Palin, Pawlenty and Bachman are each probably twice as smart as Obama, and probably ten times as ethical..... I'd take any one of them in a heart-beat. You disagree? Well, your post contained no "insightful" information which might have persuaded me; it was just a very un-insightful drive-by slam on some people you probably hate because they have different political positions (since you provided no substance to your slams on those three, I feel no obligation to rebut with substance). The left has long been stuck on a theme: "we're smart, so anybody who disagrees is stupid." That's how we get a society in which political discourse collapses. Want to label somebody as dumb? Prove it. Not with some minor verbal gaff (as when Palin recently swapped north and south Korea during a radio interview, and which she herself corrected moments later, or when Obama said he'd been to 57 states and had one more to visit) but with serious substance that is approximately equivalent to a test you would accept others applying to yourself and your political hero. On the off-chance that you were not attacking the three Republicans as stupid but were instead implying they were evil, Bachmann alone has raised quite a few foster kids and in doing so has probably done more to help society and humanity generally than 90% of the people who post here and who would so casually assault her in a web posting. You should try raising a dozen kids who were abondoned/abused by their parents, and after you have done at least as good a job of it as Bachmann did, then take-in some more. When you have final
This incident does of course bring up gun control and whether mandatory psychological evaluation should be required prior to access to the most dangerous forms weapons designed specifically to kill people. Even the idea of compulsory psychological evaluation of all people at late high school age to pick up on warning signs and initiate treatment or support when required to try to avoid these random very destructive events, is starting to look more acceptable. Quite invasive, fairly expensive but, would likely save many lives.
Good idea. We could screen all teenagers and if we find any who might grow-up to be liberals we could send them off to be re-educated, or we could drug them, we could prevent them from getting weapons or cars, or jobs....
Do you see a problem with that? Does that scare you when aimed at liberals but excite you if aimed at conservatives? The American idea is liberty and freedom and minimal intrusion by government, not nanny state big-brotherism that pretends to be able to protect you from everything.
A government big enough to give you everything you want (including safety) is a government big enough to take from you everything you have (including freedom and liberty), Do not ask for the former unless you are willing to suffer the latter.
I have to disagree. I know that would be nice and fair in theory, but in practice the right wing really is much crazier. There is nothing to compare in rhetoric or in practice. Who is the left's Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter?
Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Bill Maher, Kathy Griffin, Al Franken, Joy Behar, Arianna Huffington, Randi Rhodes, Janeane Garofalo, etc. etc. etc.
You're right, there's no comparison. The lefties routinely label people they dislike as "worst person in the world", and express the wish (often in expletive-laden rants) that people they dislike would die, whereas people on the right (like the super-evil Glenn Beck are always telling people not to use violence). The left likes to physically-assault their opponents (how many times have lefties thrown pies at Coulter???) to try to prevent their speech rather than engage in an intellectual debate. Yup. There's no comparison.
Many more liberal people on slashdot also have libertarian leanings... so I guess that means his ties to slashdot are just as solid as his (non-existent) ties to the Tea Party, right?
My first clues that this guy is not tied to the Republicans, the Democrats, the Tea Party, the Greens, etc was probably his rants about government-mind-control-through-bad-grammar...
A pox upon any person who tries to turn this crazy drug-addled evil freakish murdering bastard into a cheap partisan political attack.
Like many politicians on both sides of the aisle (including team Obama), Palin "targeted" political opponents in a campaign. Politicians also frequently try to "beat" their opponents. Democrats have spent many months trying to twist campaign rhetoric like that to try to make it sound like threats of physical violence in order to rev-up their political base. Most Americans are smart enough to see through it, but I guess it works for energizing a largely young group of supporters who lack the common sense that comes gradually with age.
Palin used a map with cross-hairs on it (not cross-hairs over faces) to show her supporters where to target their strategic political acts. If this use of cross-hairs is a threat of physical violence then I presume we should all call-out the bomb squad whenever some liberals on the web call for a "money bomb" (high-explosives wrapped in quarters and dimes to have grenade-like effects?)
As for screwed-up statement that "The government is giving Trillions ("T", plural now 2.1) to the wealthy", I barely know where to start. There is a huge difference between giving somebody money and deciding not to steal money from him. If you think that leaving tax rates as they are constitutes "giving to the wealthy", then I have news for you... I have decided not to steal $1 million from you, wow, I guess that makes you $1 million richer right? Get ready to pay your new millionaires tax...
They're blaming nutbag teatards like you because of things like GIffords being threatened for voting for the so-called "Obamacare" bill
Typical slashdot idiotic group-think. Most Democrats eat chocolate. Most Americans die before they turn 100. Some Democrats buy their chocolate from stores run by Republicans... so obviously Republicans are using chocolate in an evil plot to kill Democrats! Run for your lives! Get a foil hat!
The shooter was a pot-head; hardly a stereo-typical Palin supporter/TeaPartier. And just because he was a pot-head, that does not even mean otherpot-heads are to blame.
Giffords had recently been blasted by liberals for not supporting Pelosi and failing to be sufficiently liberal. Her actions in opposing Obama's tear-down of NASA's manned spaceflight activities earned her an additional serving of scorn from Obama supporters. By your severely-flawed attempt at reasoning, I presume pot growers or HuffPo or Kos are responsible, or maybe it was the evil people at SpaceX who wanted to make money hauling astronauts on their rockets... Maybe global warming made his brains too hot, so it was really the evil George Bush who is to blame!
The simple truth is that a nutjob tried to kill a member of congress and succeeded in killing some innocent bystanders including a child. Only a sick, twisted, whackjob would try to turn this into a political act that may be blamed on a third party. Blame it on Palin, or Obama, or Beck, or Kos, or Fox, or CNN, or Hitler, or Marx, or Buddah, or anybody else and you are beneath contempt.
As for the rest of your obnoxious post, I guess I am gradually becoming aware of just how far our educational system has fallen in the past few decades. You seem to lack any historical understanding of either politics or economics in the US and substitute expletives and ranting for facts and reason. Very sad, really. I have no connection to the Tea Party, but they may have a point about what's been happening to the country...
Hatred of the 2nd amendment is much more closely-tied to hatred of the 1st, which it protects, than most like to admit. It's no surprise that the same leftist judges who approve of gun control laws also tend to approve of limits of free speech, warrant-less e-mail searches, warrant-less use of GPS devices to track the vehicles of citizens, etc. Our founders gave us all ten of the amendments in the Bill Of Rights together as a group, and it should arouse a very healthy dose of suspicion when any American wants a full-scale repeal of any one of the ten.
Consider that land-of-enlightenment Canada, where gun rights are reduced and, oh yeah, you can go to jail for saying or writing something if it makes some protected group of people unhappy.
Bad logic throughout your entire post
Note that one of the other "targets" on Sarah Palin's map had his home's propane line cut. Fortunately, no other damage occurred.
The rhetoric of "targeting" in politics has been used for decades (it particularly arose post-WWII when so many Americans became familiar with terminology related to strategic military activity resulting in large successes) and the vast majority of the population, having more than a couple of brain cells to rub together, never used to confuse this form of strategic planning rhetoric with personal acts of physical violence. Democrats used to talk about "targeting" Republicans and then some nutjob shot Reagan; but that did not make any of those Democrats responsible for the shooting. Yes, Palin (and others) "targeted" Democrats recently and now a nutjob has attacked one of her "targets" with a gun, but she's no more responsible than Obama will be if anybody he "targeted" becomes the victim of some random nutjob violence.
The problem isn't guns - it is a political movement that pursues eliminationist goals.
Here, you are actually almost right; it is not the instrument (the gun), but then you go doubly-wrong (it's not any "movement" nor is any significant American political movement including Palin's "eliminationist"). The problem is entirely with the individual who carries out the act. If no German is willing to kill a Jew, Nazism is incapable of the holocaust. If no Russian will abuse his fellow citizen, the Gulags do not exist. If no American had been willing to "own" a black person or defend the supposed right of others to do so, the American civil war would have not only never happened, but it would have been un-necessary. If there were no Muslims who were willing to blow themselves up in an effort to wipe-out innocent men women and children, Bin Laden would just be another creepy dude in a cave. The most foul and obnoxious rabble-rousing criminal or political leader cannot achieve a significant bad result without the actions of individuals who are willing to take individual acts. Each individual is completely responsible for his or her own acts.
Jesus died for sombody's sins but not mine
Funny, but also wrong. It is a matter of historical record (even secular records) that a Jew named Jesus did exist and did die. His followers made many claims about why and there's no more reason to question their statements about his motives (though it might be rational to believe those motives were invalid) than, say, to question the contemporary accounts of why any Roman (for example) of the same era did whatever he is said to have done. Your opinion on the matter approx 2K years later has no impact upon either the event or the motivations a person at that time may have had. It may be an open question as to whether what he did would, or would not, have any effect on your particular sins, or you may claim to be sin-free, but your contemporary opinion cannot change the motivation of somebody when he took certain steps centuries ago. Your rejection of a gift also has no effect on whether or why the gift was offered. Your parents could leave you a house in their will and you could reject the house, but it would not mean they had not left you a house, nor would it mean they had not left it for your use. If you want to use an anti-Christian tag-line, try to at least come up with something that's rational ;-)
She never said she could see Russia from her house...
but now we know you get your news from Saturday Night Live and/or other comedy shows
"gun violence" statistics are junk. Guns are inanimate objects that function as enablers/force multipliers. As a result, "gun violence" lines-up more with illegal activities and other violence than with concentrations of guns. In rural areas where many people own ten or more guns you generally see lower "gun violence" rates than in big cities where most people own no guns. Look at where drugs crimes, robberies, prostitution, etc are more frequent (not making a moral point here just listing activities banned by law) and you will see higher rates of "gun crimes". People who are already breaking the law are simply more willing to add a gun to the mix either for intimidation or to directly aid in their law breaking.
If you find a magic wand that will eliminate all guns, you will quickly find criminals resorting to knives, clubs, or worse like bombs. The problem is not the tool, but rather the person who holds the tool.
The "Fox News crowd and other right wing paranoid freak tea baggers" as you put it are simply being more rational than you apparently are.
Most gun violence in the US is tied to alcohol, or drugs or other criminal activity (such as robbery which in turn is also often tied to drugs) and is not related to politics, a desire for smaller government, or any other activity of decent law-abiding hard-working tax-paying citizens. We lose tens of thousands of people each year to drunk driving, so presumably we should ban alcohol and cars too as we ban the guns? The tea party people you slimed with your gay sex rhetoric have little in common with this gunman who was a pot-head loser who liked leftist rags The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf (Tea partiers reject the philosophies of both the old union of soviet socialist republics, and the old national socialist workers party).
There's something particularly nasty about the way that some on the left will use any crime they can to try to justify taking away the 2nd amendment rights of all Americans. If we are to use individual acts of murder to eliminate one constitutional right for all, then we may also use individual acts to justify removing other rights like the 1st amendment rights from all, or 4th amendment rights from all. Our society has already done too much of this (as with the underwear bomber becoming justification for TSA grope-fests)
If you want to protect your country from the government join the army...
I already served in uniform, have you? That service has nothing whatsoever to do with the 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms. The military role is the protection of these United States from external threats as directed by the congress and the President. The 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting and little to do with external threats; it's about the citizens having a check on government. The founders wanted to do two things: first, prevent the federal government from needing a huge standing army that could be used to oppress the citizens (by having the citizens themselves be available as local voluntary militias for repulsion of invaders) and second, guarantee not just the right but the ability of the people (as a whole, rather than as individuals) to rebel should a tyrant ever arise. They also believed individuals had the absolute right to defend themselves, their families, and their property from criminals though this was obvious common-sense to them. Read a little history (not the pre-chewed, pre-digested grade-school pablum most get in school, but rather the actual writings of our founders). I would not choose to live in a country whose government did not trust me to keep and bear arms. Such a government would not view me as a responsible adult and, in turn, would not deserve my trust. If you want to live in such a country with a government that trusts and respects you so little, you have many choices. Do not be so eager to mess up this last, best hope of man on Earth
Anybody who joins this effort will be playing directly into her hands.
She is a lot smarter than her critics claim. She needs attacks and schemes like this in order to win. She is counting on them, and the angry left has such a long track record that she can reliably depend upon them to leap into the trap. Every attack like this provides a conservative with more validation with middle-class Americans. It's counter-intuitive to the left, but these attacks actually provide a certain type of gravitas; many in the middle-class see these things as proof that the left fears a candidate and that this, in-turn, means the candidate being attacked has enough substance to be worthy of the attack. The standard line of attack by big-city liberals against conservatives is that they are dumb and they use hick language. This was the line used against Reagan, Bush41, Bush43, some on the left even used it against Eisenhower (the same line was used by the left in France against Sarkozy). While her critics blast Palin as an obvious moron, she is busy cleverly immunizing herself against this attack with large portions of the population. Indeed, every time she speaks and is well understood by vast swaths of the middle class (who are quite familiar with the parenthetical style of speech she uses) and then is ridiculed by left-leaning pundits who claim she is unintelligible, much of middle-America has a reaction her critics cannot fathom; her critics are the ones who are seen as too dumb to understand even such common speech patterns. Palin's supporters remember well that the left was so panicked about her that people resorted to criminal activity to try to take her down and even then could find no dirt, ending up attacking her teenage daughter as a fall-back position. You might disagree with her about every single thing, and you might hate her style, but you make a big mistake if you become lazy and cling to the standard childish liberal line that anybody you disagree with is a hate-filled idiot. It's intellectually lazy and could backfire. I had to laugh recently when a left-leaning pontificator blasted Palin for reading children's books when she said she was reading C.S. Lewis, the attack said a great deal about the illiteracy and general ignorance of the attacker.
Remember, in 1980 the supporters of Jimmy Carter (who told us he was a super-genius Naval Academy grad and Nuclear engineer) were begging for the Republicans to nominate Ronald Reagan (the obviously stupid B-actor, former Hollywood cowboy and co-star to Bonzo the monkey) so that the incumbent super-genius do-gooder Democrat would be re-elected in a land slide. That folksy-cowboy actor, we were told, was probably illiterate and had become famous by reciting other people's words from scripts. The American people, however, where quite comfortable and familiar with Reagan and were sick of the Carter train-wreck.
Simply saying Obama is a genius does not make him so (he never released his records so we do not know how he got into college, how he paid for it, what grades he got, how he got onto the Law Review, etc.), claiming he was a Constitutional Law Professor (when he actually was only and adjunct prof teaching one course on community organizing) does not make him a font of wisdom. The man is clueless about how jobs are created and maintained in the private sector (having never even run a lemonade stand). Obama's young gullible supporters might have convinced themselves that this empty suit was a messiah by passing around a bunch of dopey hope-and-change slogans and posters, but the man's actual record has firmly established him as a moron. If unemployment is still high in 2012 (as is projected) and if Obama is still "staying the course" on his disasterous policies, still appointing extremists to government positions, still completely clueless on the differences between common criminals and terrorists, still caving-in to dictators and tyrants, continuing to spend us into deeper debt than all the presidents before him combined, then much of the country wil
The low estimates of Iraqi casualties in both cases are about 100,000...
Junk accounting by a political activist writing in the Lancet. These numbers were part of a political act to bash Bush and/or the US by opponents of the Iraq war and used methods not generally viewed as legitimate. First, not everybody who dies during a war is a war casualty (some number of people will die from age, disease, malnutrition, crimes, etc in a given country even in peacetime). Second, civilians who have other disagreements and kill each other may have done it under the cover of the war, but the war id not to blame (for example, if a man decides to murder his wife and does it while thieves are in his house robbing him, he is still responsible for the murder (burglary is not responsible)). Third, a war technically ends when the opposing governments agree to end it. If unlawful combatants (persons not in uniform in the lawful service of their nation) kill people after the war has officially ended, they (not the war) are guilty for the killings.
1) Saddam Hussein from 1980 to 1991 while he was an official ally and client of the United States.
Not so much. The US did not put him in power. His Iraqi supporters and not the US kept him in power. His alliance was actually with the Russians, and not the US, during the cold war... which is why his weapons were almost entirely Russian and so easily destroyed both times that the US fought him (and why there was concern about Russian "advisors" in Iraq becoming casualties and possibly triggering US-Russian difficulties when the US invaded Iraq.
2) The Iran-Iraq War, which was supported by the United States after we removed Iraq from the State Sponsors of Terror list in 1982.
The US did not start that war. The primary role of the US in that war was that the US gave some intel to a nasty little tyrant (who we generally ignored) while he was fighting against Iran which was both an enemy of the US and one of the world's leading terrorist sponsors. A bit like tossing a small treat to a junkyard dog while he is fighting another bad dog. This talking point always looks great on a protester's poster but there's not much significance to the so-called support.
3) Embargoes from the UN from 1991 until 2003 which were pushed and supported by the United States.
Sorry, but the embargoes were entirely the fault of Iraq; they were put into place by the international community to enforce the terms of the cease fire that ended to war which Saddam started by invading Kuwait. In fact, the international community went to great lengths to make sure they allowed in everything needed to keep the Iraqi civilians alive. The fact that Saddam mis-directed aid, and generally used the suffering of his people to try to blackmail the international community into allowing him to have prohibited items is too-often overlooked by his supporters. The Hussein regime is entirely responsible for the existence of the sanctions, and therefore responsible for any deaths supposedly caused thereby.
4) The invasion of Iraq by the United States from 2003 until the present.
One does not get to blame post-war deaths on the war. The US and Germany fought each other in WWII, but WWII cannot be blamed each time some German civilian kills some American civilian, or each time some American kills some German. Some white American might hate some black American, or some black American may hate some white American, but neither may murder the other and then blame it on the civil war or president Lincoln or general Lee, etc. even though there is much cultural baggage from that war which found Americans fighting on both sides. Combat ended long ago and Iraq has a post-war government which the US is attempting to support, so the continuing violence between sunnis and shiites cannot be legitimately blamed on the war. The fact that sectarian violence in Iraq was suppressed before the war because Saddam was a tyrant whose control of the country was wrapped-up in th
No, a hundred thousand people killed by a country with no right to even be in their hemisphere...
Sorry, but the US has every right to be in that hemisphere; First, we have the universally-recognized right to operate in international waters anywhere on Earth, as do all other nations. Second, we have numerous treaties with many nations involving both trade and military matters. This second point includes the following: Defending certain nations if they are attacked, training and equipping the forces of certain nations, joint exercises, etc.
Not one single Iraqi ever physically harmed an American outside of their sovereign border.
One presumes you were either just born in the past few years or have severe memory issues. Iraq invaded Kuwait (a UN Member... look-up the UN rules on member nations attempting to conquer each other) so the US and many other UN member nations fought a war to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Even if there had been no UN related issues, the government of Kuwait asked the US to intervene on its behalf (as ANY nation may do), so the justification for US involvement was doubly-legitimate. This was completely within international law. That war ended with a cease-fire which included many terms the violation of which are, by definition, grounds for resuming the fighting. Iraq violated those terms many times over twelve years (including by routinely firing upon US and allied aircraft monitoring the no-fly zones ( those aircraft had the right to be there enforcing the terms that ended the war)) so the US and its allies had every right to re-start the fighting at any time even without any WMD arguments/claims leading to a "second" war. Had Iraq never invaded Kuwait, the US would not have been drawn into the 1st gulf war, and your argument might hold some weight.
The same goes for the Afghani people.
Sorry, but here again you are in error: The government of Afghanistan (the Taliban at that time) hosted and supported Bin Laden and his un-merry band as they prepared and launched the 9-11 attacks on the US. By every right of international law and precedent going back into the dusty dark recesses of history, the US was justified in going to war in Afghanistan. This is hardly the first time in history that Nation A went to war against Nation B because Nation B supported an attack on the civilians of Nation A.
Next time, try using rational discussion as a substitute for expletives; the former is much more persuasive than the latter
Wrong on both counts (and you display a shocking lack of historical knowledge)
First, the Crusades were a response to a Muslim invasion and land-grab. There are very long and detailed books on the subject, try reading some.
Second, the Holocaust was not a Christian thing (Hitler though said to have been born into a Catholic family was personally an atheist, and the NAZI party was engaged in a long-term process of moving the German population from its historical Catholic and Lutheran faiths to a quasi-pagan mystical political system as is well documented in party papers), and the Germans did not hate the Jews primarily for their religion but rather for their ethnicity. It is also well documented that a number of serious Christians were killed by the NAZIs for their attempts to interfere with the Holocaust. For starters, try reading a bit about Bahnoffer and if you have any intellectual curiosity you will find plenty more
So.......I'm guessing you are against Rackspace on this because of the chilling effect their subjective actions will have? ;-)
I find the first line of your post hateful
Golly! I hope Slashdot is not hosted on Rackspace!!!!
I hope your web site is not on Rackspace!!!
If Rackspace is going to shut down all sites with "hate speech". they are going to have to kill all the muslim sites they host with burning American flags, All the conservative sites with biting criticism of liberals, all the liberal sites with nasty words about conservatives, etc. If a pastor planning to burn the Quran is hate speech, then I presume other actions offending other religions are also hate speech. There go any muslim sites that have the muslim dome atop the Jewish temple mount. Any atheist sites with the flying spaghetti monster, any Jewish sites (many people view even the existence of a Jew as bad), and sites critical of Jews or Jewish sites. etc. etc. etc. Wiill they have any customers left?
Once we get rolling on this whole subjective "hate speech" standard, there may be no sites left on the internet since nearly anybody can take anything as "hateful"
I guess it they still have a lot of customers tomorrow, we will see that their idea of hate speech is rather targeted.
perhaps if this pastor had followers who had a reputation for sawing people's heads off, stoning women, hanging gays, and crashing planes into buildings, rackspace might have been less inclined to pull the plug over some proposal to burn a few dead trees
I smell a lawsuit if Rackspace fails to also pull any sites with muslim "hate speech". This is a bad path our society is slipping down when standards are applied differently to different groups based upon an apparent fear of violence. It matters not whether fear is the actual motive at rackspace; the perception that facilitators of expression are selectively limiting expression based on fear is ultimately the chilling element
It could even be that before 1962 they had no ways of detecting and measuring icebergs.
Blasphemy!
{sarcasm}
How dare you claim that we do not have exact measurements of arctic ice for the past several million years?!?!? If that were true, then we would lack the information about what constitutes "normal" and what constitutes "extreme" over spans of time not measured by puny human lifespans. If we did not have such detailed satellite imagery from before the industrial revolution and, indeed, from the warming period between the last ice age and the ice age before that one, then we would not know whether this event was unusual for such a warming period or whether it had ever happened before in the absence of significant man-made emissions. You cannot possibly be saying that, can you? You are saying things that those evil deniers have said, and we know that they are all like the Nazis, so your morals are now in question; you are clearly a nasty person; nobody should listen to you, etc.
You could get excommunicated by Pope Gore for such filthy anti-dogma ideas.
You'd better say a few Hail Manns, crawl thrice around the IPCC headquarters building on your knees, and beg Gaia for forgiveness
{/sarcasm}
What's that you say? You claim you were just speaking honestly about a lack of data? You say you prefer an honest and calm discussion over the charge of Nazi-likeness and a demand for silence? Well so do those of us who have problems with AGW claims. I'll know that there might be some serious science involved when the proponents no longer need to accuse others of being Nazis and "deniers", and no longer try to make their case by lying, rigging peer-reviews, and withholding information.
If we lack the historic data to perform an apples-to-apples comparison with modern data, then it should not be a problem to point to that fact and use it as an argument. We should be able to question claims that something is the "hottest ever" or the "coldest ever" or the largest or smallest ever (or over some range of time) when the person using the claim lacks the proof of the claim, or tries to distract from important caveats or contrary evidence. Human beings have been around for a remarkably short period of geologic time, they have been keeping records for only a fraction of that time, and they have lacked the ability to make and record observations of most of the Earth for an even smaller fraction of that small fraction of time. We have no equivalent observations from any previous global cooling or warming period to give this event any context. Is it sad? Sure, if you like the beauty of glaciers (as I do) but it might not be if you like the green meadows of a glacier-free Greenland. Is it reason to panic? No. Not if we lack the data to know whether this particular event is not a repeat of what happened during previous warming periods.
the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962
OK, so there was one this size or bigger in 1962 before George W Bush, all the iPods, farting cows and SUVs caused all the global warming. Interesting. If there had not been a "worse" incident in 1962, it would have been said that this was the worst since 1920, or 1830 or whenever or perhaps "the worst ever". Sensational rhetoric like this works on the young precisely because they have such a short view of history. We are all supposed to be so shocked by the size that we do not pay attention to the date. This is by design; it's a common tool. Any young person will automatically translate "1962" to "way back in time before I was born" which will place it somewhere in the vicinity of WWII, the Roman Empire and the ice age (The time of black-and-white photos and cave paintings)
Earth's climate has always been changing. The time to really worry is when the climate stops changing
While your post was funny, it might interest you to know that there actually have been private aircraft built from a composite that used brown craft/shipping type paper as the fiber. I cannot recall the name of the stuff, but if you look hard enough for experimental composite aircraft construction techniques, you'll find it.
Looks like they just dusted-off one of the old ACRV (Assured Crew Return Vehicle) designs for ISS from the 1990s. IIRC, Boeing proposed a slightly larger Apollo capsule (they got the Apollo IP from their acquisition of North American) with new docking port and mini service module as an ISS lifeboat. What's cheaper than a little napkin engineering followed by some drawings and a powerpoint? why, re-using some napkin engineering, updating a powerpoint and doing a new CG version of a drawing, of course!
move along
nothing new to see here