So you can only protest if you're polite and informative, and what's more, the people who get to judge whether you've been sufficiently polite and informative are the people who don't want to listen to you in the first place.
If it were up to people like you, Jim Crow would still be in force.
Why would I read a journal entry with such a hyperbolic title as "The End of the Republic"?
But okay, let's go read it...
[The bill] ends the Democratic Republic of USA and installs a dictatorial power of the 'elected' POTUS.
Well, that's a flagrant lie, right off the bat. Perhaps you should look up the term "dictatorial"? Also, I like the scare quotes to suggest that Obama wasn't elected.
The MSM propaganda machine has been deployed to ensure that the population of USA (and probably of the world) does not understand that it was the President himself, who required that the current NDAA, which has provisions for 'indefinite detention' of 'suspected terrorists' by the military would also apply these powers against US citizens, which means that at this point the POTUS (any POTUS, Obama or anybody who comes after him), can capture and detain anybody in the world, including US citizens and hold them in military containment without a trial, without even possibility to contact any lawyers for any length of time.
That is one sentence. Try as I might, I can't parse it. It's an absolute train wreck of missing and misplaced commas and incomplete thoughts.
At this point it is clear that the powers that govern USA are making their last preparations before the USD collapses and ensures the survival of the elite with this dictatorial nonsense and basically establishment of the martial law.
Uh-huh. Right. The big bad THEY all know that the country is about to collapse, and are thus laying the legal groundwork for the following chaos. Because if the country does collapse, a few words on paper are going to make a difference.
Say hello now to the Fourth Reich
And there's the Godwin, a great note to end on.
You are paranoid and delusional. Scream about ad hominems all you like, the fact is you come across as no more trustworthy than the homeless crazy guy a few blocks from my apartment. Come back with sources, or don't come back at all. Better still, seek help from a professional before you hurt yourself or others.
You might want to mention that Obama fought against those provisions, and managed to weaken several key ones, and stated "My administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens... doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.”
The Republicans forced this through by attaching these totalitarian provisions to the NDAA (which is passed every year to set the budget for the Department of Defense). The Democrats tried their best to weaken the new provisions - voting all but unanimously against them (the lone bad Democrat was Peterson of Minnesota). In the end, the people to blame are the idiot voters who thought that the Republicans had changed since the Bush years and gave the House back to them in 2010.
I don't see why you would fail to mention this, unless you were intentionally trying to mislead people about who exactly was behind these new laws.
Offtopic, but what is the point of the metric system if no one ever uses the prefixes? I have never once heard someone talk about teragrams or gigameters. It doesn't work that way in the other direction... people talk about nanometers or micrograms all the time. But in the large direction, people get to kilo and stop. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid the big prefixes, using phrases like "metric ton" instead of megagram.
Just think how much clearer your post would be if the convention was to say "Hundreds of megagrams wouldn't be worth it, but some objects out there may have teragrams."
How is it a surprising time? A few ongoing legal procedures means that they can't make aesthetic changes to their website? Also, it does not take "two clicks" to enter Google Images - just a mouseover and a click.
I'm pretty sure the last two sentences were just tacked on as flamebait, as they are either false or unrelated.
That was ten years ago. What makes you so sure that the Navy didn't update their tactics in the interim? Sure, they sort of cheated to win the war game, but that's just for PR. Afterwards, I have no doubt they put a lot of thought into how to do better next time, and you can scarcely expect them to make their new strategies public.
The cancer bit, fine. The dose doesn't seem like it would be enough to kill any passengers (TSA agents manning the things might be a different story) but stranger things have happened. I sincerely doubt it will compare to car crashes though. Few things can.
But "time-person kills"? Are you kidding me? Nobody plans their life to the second. Ten minutes earlier at the airport means ten minutes less sleep, or ten minutes less watching TV. To compare that to killing a person is so shockingly myopic I barely know how to respond. By that logic, oversleeping should be the leading cause of death in America. And the lines at the drivethru... that's a daily holocaust!
That was an excellent and informative post, and well deserving of a +5 moderation, but I think you should know that the person you are responding to was speaking sarcastically. As he pointed out, while this tablet may be weak by modern standards, it's still much stronger than what was used to put men on the Moon or to design and fly the world's first supersonic stealth jets.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're greatly overselling this device.
1) Assuming it does hold 20k books on topics from history to advanced biology, is that really preferable to funding better schools? Among the Indian poor, the target market for this device, the school dropout rate is more than 50%. For girls, it's more than 90%. Is giving them a bunch of books really going to improve that? 2) Assuming that the device does contain info on (for example) hygiene and medicine, are people really going to follow it over the common knowledge? I know a doctor in Moldova who, despite his medical training, still believes that moving air is the root cause of illness (a common belief in that country). Even in America, we are still trying to get past our old beliefs that "everyone knows" which are not only false but damaging (e.g. drinking alcohol keeps you warm). 3) Diagrams on well digging and such would be a great help, but is this device rugged enough to be taken into the field? The GP made a good analogy... if your choice is between a $1000 car that breaks down all the time, and no car at all, you're better off without a car. What happens to a man who makes 10 cents a day if his $35 tablet stops working because he dropped it in some muck?
While it might do some good, this thing is not going to uplift a village from stone age to space age. Nor could any realistic gadget. You can't rely on technology to solve a cultural problem.
It's really not. What percentage of passengers are killed by the TSA? What percentage are killed by accidents on road trips?
How many Americans does the US government kill each year? How many die from eating at McDonald's too often?
You'll find the results to be against your current conceptions by orders of magnitude. You can oppose erosion of civil liberties without resorting to the hyperbole of claiming the government is this big, evil, dangerous behemoth. Such exaggerations only drive away rational people who might otherwise join your cause.
If the point you are trying to disprove is "very few people don't fly because of the TSA", you can't refute it by pointing out a lack of commensurate increase in airline passengers as compared to the population, because, say it with me, correlation does not equal causation.
The fact that the number of airline passengers per capita has decreased in the time that the TSA has existed says absolutely nothing about whether or not the TSA caused that decrease. Maybe it was the rough economy and constantly shrinking middle class causing people to take smaller vacations and businesses to cut back on travel. Maybe 9/11 scared some people into using trains or buses or driving, and they never bothered to switch back. Maybe aliens are sneaking down to Earth and brainwashing us into staying home.
The key here is that you have absolutely not demonstrated his point to be false. At the very least, you'd need some polls. As notoriously bad as self-reported statistics are, they still beat conjecture. Of course, he never bothered to back his statement up with evidence of his own, so the best we can say is that we don't know if it's true or false, but it certainly doesn't sound very likely.
Because it can be inconvenient. Say I want to log in to a particular site on a friend's computer. I don't want to download KeePass on their PC, so I have to read the password off my phone. Reading and typing a 20+ character random string without errors is the opposite of convenience.
From the summary: "think of how many thousands of interconnections are in every piece of cotton clothing — you could make a fairly powerful computer!""
There aren't that many connections. Assume a 200 thread count fabric, since it's both typical and makes the math easy. That thread count means in each square inch of fabric, you have 100 vertical threads and 100 horizontal, for a total of 10k crossings. To replicate just the old 100 MHz Pentium 1 processor (hardly what anyone would call a powerful computer), you'd need over two square feet of this stuff. If you want something decent, like what you might get in a modern smartphone, you'll need anywhere from ten to a hundred times that much. And remember that it won't run anywhere near the speeds of the IC, and that we haven't even allowed space for all the other essential bits of a computer (e.g. memory). If you want a powerful computer in your shirt, you're much better off sewing something tiny into the hem. Even then, the weight of the battery will be obnoxious.
Still very cool technology, but I see it being used for simpler distributed systems (like the mentioned sensors) rather than a fabric computer.
It's real easy to say that they didn't fight hard enough. But in the end, they need 60 votes to break the Republican filibuster, and they didn't have those votes. What would you have them do?
After a bit of digging I found the voting record for the 2009 extension of the Patriot Act, and guess what... it was a voice vote. They called for yeas and nays, and it was so obvious that the yeas won that it went unchallenged, which means:
1) Very few democrats opposed it. The only person I could find on the record as opposing it was Dianne Feinstein. 2) We'll never know who exactly voted for or against it, as it wasn't recorded, and people in the room at the time probably couldn't even be sure.
So yeah, Kennedy's death, while unfortunate, changed absolutely nothing with regards to this law.
If you read the PDF, they actually cite similar cases which had already been decided by the Florida supreme court. So it appears that the precedent has already been set, if only in that one state.
Ron Paul would be disastrous for the country's economy, not to mention scientific research. It's a shame, because if he was sane on economic issues, the man would be a godsend, but as it stands the amount of harm he'd do outweighs all the good.
On the Iraq war vote: Yes, the mixed numbers make it so that they'd need a large majority (~80% if my math is right) to stop the war. Honestly, given how bad Republicans have been for the country, the Dems ought to have that many. Or better still, have the Dems have half of Congress with a new party to their left controlling the other half, so that the American left is no longer to the right of most country's conservatives. But that's a pipe dream. The fact is, the statement that the parties are the same is false.
On torture: I've never said that the amount of prison time handed out in this country is okay. But the claim being discussed is: "The parties are the same." One party actively supports torturing people, the other doesn't. That strikes me as a difference.
On gays and women: Gays in many places can't visit loved ones in the hospital, or adopt children, and only thanks to the Democrats can they serve in the military. Women can have abortions, for now, but the Republicans are curtailing that right at every step of the way, and if a liberal Justice has a heart attack while a Republican is in the White House, that can change in a jiffy. Tell a 16 year old girl who just had her entire life screwed up over one mistake, all because the government is kowtowing to a religious group, that her rights aren't being denied by the government, then get back to me.
On unions: I'm aware of what Cuomo is doing... my dad is an affected union member (and, ironically, a Republican). I don't like it, but what he's doing isn't union busting. He is a tough negotiator with PEF, but there's a world of difference between taking a hardline stance in negotiations and taking away your opponent's right to negotiate at all.
On overall approach to politics: You have strong morals and are fighting for what you want. I get that. I don't like the war on drugs (along with its militarization of the police force) any more than you do. But if you want to see this country get better, you can't keep wasting votes on third parties. Vote for Democrats, primary for liberals, and drag the Overton window back to the left. The reason the conservatives have been able to do so much harm is because they understand that sometimes you need to hold your nose and vote in lockstep.
You're never going to hit that home run to fix the country all at once. You have to learn to play small ball. It took decades to create this mess, and it'll take decades to work our way out.
You don't seem to understand how the government works. Of course they passed every cloture vote. They wouldn't have brought the bill up for a vote if they weren't going to win. The Democrats tried for quite some time to get Snowe or Collins or Lieberman on board to break the Republican filibuster. They scaled the public option back repeatedly. First there was the Rockefeller option, in which the public option health care company couldn't use the force of the government to negotiate better rates (so as to ensure a level playing field with the private companies). Then there was the opt out option, followed quickly by the nicely named opt in option. The idea there was to let some states try the public option while other states abstained, but that too was rejected. They made a last ditch effort by proposing to let people as young as 55 buy into Medicare as a sort of makeshift option, but no go. They couldn't get the votes together for anything, because all 40 Republicans plus Lieberman simply refused. Then once Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, they had to just go with what they had at the time, with only minor changes, because the Republicans now had the magic 41 number and had made clear that they would not accept any compromise.
This wasn't that long ago. Either your memory is poor, or you weren't paying enough attention at the time.
That's not at random, you're purposefully picking good ones. The GP has an excellent point. From any particular year, most movies are crap. But we only remember the good ones, and then look back on that year and say to ourselves, "Boy, the movies sure were better back then!"
The thing is, they can halve the prices! The Regal cinemas near me charge $13 a head, plus outrageous amounts for any refreshments. The nearby indie theatre just charges $7, and has refreshments that cost no more than they would at a corner store. And then there's the local drive-in (yes, I'm lucky enough to live in a place where there is one), which charges $7 for adults and $3 for kids under twelve and that's for a double feature! At those prices, it's a great way to spend an evening, and given the economies of scale, the major theatres should be able to charge even less.
But why would they? As long as people come and pack the house to see the latest Alvin & the Chipmunks abortion, they have no reason to reduce their profit margins.
On the Iraq war: Democrats were opposed 126-82, Republicans in favor 215-6. If Democrats had controlled congress, it would never have happened.
On public option healthcare: It was filibustered to death. It had support of 100% of Senate Democrats, but was opposed by 40 Senate Republicans plus Lieberman, who is an independent. One more Democrat in the Senate, and it would have passed.
On torture and the prison-industrial complex: They fought against torture. The fact that they didn't do some other good thing does not erase the good thing that they did do.
On gays and women (and immigrants and Muslims, for that matter): When a large segment of the population is used as a political punching bag and denied basic rights and control over their lives, that IS a big deal. It's not like the government can only do one thing at a time, and we must solve one problem before moving on to another. We can help millions of people right now, but it seems you'd rather let them suffer because you can't get some other things you want first.
On unions: You accuse them of union busting. That's just shocking. They fought for EFCA, but it was filibustered to death by the Republicans. Also I seem to recall some Democrats fighting like hell in Wisconsin to protect the unions, only for the Republican governor to circumvent the law and pass his union busting bill illegally, and then have a Republican state supreme court judge give it the okay.
The Republicans are out to break your spirits. They want you to give up on the Democrats so that they can take power. That's been their goal for years, and it's perfectly clear to anyone paying attention. Stop falling for it.
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So you can only protest if you're polite and informative, and what's more, the people who get to judge whether you've been sufficiently polite and informative are the people who don't want to listen to you in the first place.
If it were up to people like you, Jim Crow would still be in force.
Why would I read a journal entry with such a hyperbolic title as "The End of the Republic"?
But okay, let's go read it...
[The bill] ends the Democratic Republic of USA and installs a dictatorial power of the 'elected' POTUS.
Well, that's a flagrant lie, right off the bat. Perhaps you should look up the term "dictatorial"? Also, I like the scare quotes to suggest that Obama wasn't elected.
The MSM propaganda machine has been deployed to ensure that the population of USA (and probably of the world) does not understand that it was the President himself, who required that the current NDAA, which has provisions for 'indefinite detention' of 'suspected terrorists' by the military would also apply these powers against US citizens, which means that at this point the POTUS (any POTUS, Obama or anybody who comes after him), can capture and detain anybody in the world, including US citizens and hold them in military containment without a trial, without even possibility to contact any lawyers for any length of time.
That is one sentence. Try as I might, I can't parse it. It's an absolute train wreck of missing and misplaced commas and incomplete thoughts.
At this point it is clear that the powers that govern USA are making their last preparations before the USD collapses and ensures the survival of the elite with this dictatorial nonsense and basically establishment of the martial law.
Uh-huh. Right. The big bad THEY all know that the country is about to collapse, and are thus laying the legal groundwork for the following chaos. Because if the country does collapse, a few words on paper are going to make a difference.
Say hello now to the Fourth Reich
And there's the Godwin, a great note to end on.
You are paranoid and delusional. Scream about ad hominems all you like, the fact is you come across as no more trustworthy than the homeless crazy guy a few blocks from my apartment. Come back with sources, or don't come back at all. Better still, seek help from a professional before you hurt yourself or others.
You might want to mention that Obama fought against those provisions, and managed to weaken several key ones, and stated "My administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens ... doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.”
The Republicans forced this through by attaching these totalitarian provisions to the NDAA (which is passed every year to set the budget for the Department of Defense). The Democrats tried their best to weaken the new provisions - voting all but unanimously against them (the lone bad Democrat was Peterson of Minnesota). In the end, the people to blame are the idiot voters who thought that the Republicans had changed since the Bush years and gave the House back to them in 2010.
I don't see why you would fail to mention this, unless you were intentionally trying to mislead people about who exactly was behind these new laws.
Way to speak for billions of people. Clearly all non-Americans are one big hivemind. As an American, I was unaware of that. Thanks for your insight!
Offtopic, but what is the point of the metric system if no one ever uses the prefixes? I have never once heard someone talk about teragrams or gigameters. It doesn't work that way in the other direction... people talk about nanometers or micrograms all the time. But in the large direction, people get to kilo and stop. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid the big prefixes, using phrases like "metric ton" instead of megagram.
Just think how much clearer your post would be if the convention was to say "Hundreds of megagrams wouldn't be worth it, but some objects out there may have teragrams."
How is it a surprising time? A few ongoing legal procedures means that they can't make aesthetic changes to their website? Also, it does not take "two clicks" to enter Google Images - just a mouseover and a click.
I'm pretty sure the last two sentences were just tacked on as flamebait, as they are either false or unrelated.
That was ten years ago. What makes you so sure that the Navy didn't update their tactics in the interim? Sure, they sort of cheated to win the war game, but that's just for PR. Afterwards, I have no doubt they put a lot of thought into how to do better next time, and you can scarcely expect them to make their new strategies public.
Thou shalt not make copies of things (e.g. movies, music, fish, bread) without first paying.
The cancer bit, fine. The dose doesn't seem like it would be enough to kill any passengers (TSA agents manning the things might be a different story) but stranger things have happened. I sincerely doubt it will compare to car crashes though. Few things can.
But "time-person kills"? Are you kidding me? Nobody plans their life to the second. Ten minutes earlier at the airport means ten minutes less sleep, or ten minutes less watching TV. To compare that to killing a person is so shockingly myopic I barely know how to respond. By that logic, oversleeping should be the leading cause of death in America. And the lines at the drivethru... that's a daily holocaust!
That was an excellent and informative post, and well deserving of a +5 moderation, but I think you should know that the person you are responding to was speaking sarcastically. As he pointed out, while this tablet may be weak by modern standards, it's still much stronger than what was used to put men on the Moon or to design and fly the world's first supersonic stealth jets.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're greatly overselling this device.
1) Assuming it does hold 20k books on topics from history to advanced biology, is that really preferable to funding better schools? Among the Indian poor, the target market for this device, the school dropout rate is more than 50%. For girls, it's more than 90%. Is giving them a bunch of books really going to improve that?
2) Assuming that the device does contain info on (for example) hygiene and medicine, are people really going to follow it over the common knowledge? I know a doctor in Moldova who, despite his medical training, still believes that moving air is the root cause of illness (a common belief in that country). Even in America, we are still trying to get past our old beliefs that "everyone knows" which are not only false but damaging (e.g. drinking alcohol keeps you warm).
3) Diagrams on well digging and such would be a great help, but is this device rugged enough to be taken into the field? The GP made a good analogy... if your choice is between a $1000 car that breaks down all the time, and no car at all, you're better off without a car. What happens to a man who makes 10 cents a day if his $35 tablet stops working because he dropped it in some muck?
While it might do some good, this thing is not going to uplift a village from stone age to space age. Nor could any realistic gadget. You can't rely on technology to solve a cultural problem.
It's really not. What percentage of passengers are killed by the TSA? What percentage are killed by accidents on road trips?
How many Americans does the US government kill each year? How many die from eating at McDonald's too often?
You'll find the results to be against your current conceptions by orders of magnitude. You can oppose erosion of civil liberties without resorting to the hyperbole of claiming the government is this big, evil, dangerous behemoth. Such exaggerations only drive away rational people who might otherwise join your cause.
If the point you are trying to disprove is "very few people don't fly because of the TSA", you can't refute it by pointing out a lack of commensurate increase in airline passengers as compared to the population, because, say it with me, correlation does not equal causation.
The fact that the number of airline passengers per capita has decreased in the time that the TSA has existed says absolutely nothing about whether or not the TSA caused that decrease. Maybe it was the rough economy and constantly shrinking middle class causing people to take smaller vacations and businesses to cut back on travel. Maybe 9/11 scared some people into using trains or buses or driving, and they never bothered to switch back. Maybe aliens are sneaking down to Earth and brainwashing us into staying home.
The key here is that you have absolutely not demonstrated his point to be false. At the very least, you'd need some polls. As notoriously bad as self-reported statistics are, they still beat conjecture. Of course, he never bothered to back his statement up with evidence of his own, so the best we can say is that we don't know if it's true or false, but it certainly doesn't sound very likely.
Because it can be inconvenient. Say I want to log in to a particular site on a friend's computer. I don't want to download KeePass on their PC, so I have to read the password off my phone. Reading and typing a 20+ character random string without errors is the opposite of convenience.
From the summary: "think of how many thousands of interconnections are in every piece of cotton clothing — you could make a fairly powerful computer!""
There aren't that many connections. Assume a 200 thread count fabric, since it's both typical and makes the math easy. That thread count means in each square inch of fabric, you have 100 vertical threads and 100 horizontal, for a total of 10k crossings. To replicate just the old 100 MHz Pentium 1 processor (hardly what anyone would call a powerful computer), you'd need over two square feet of this stuff. If you want something decent, like what you might get in a modern smartphone, you'll need anywhere from ten to a hundred times that much. And remember that it won't run anywhere near the speeds of the IC, and that we haven't even allowed space for all the other essential bits of a computer (e.g. memory). If you want a powerful computer in your shirt, you're much better off sewing something tiny into the hem. Even then, the weight of the battery will be obnoxious.
Still very cool technology, but I see it being used for simpler distributed systems (like the mentioned sensors) rather than a fabric computer.
It's real easy to say that they didn't fight hard enough. But in the end, they need 60 votes to break the Republican filibuster, and they didn't have those votes. What would you have them do?
After a bit of digging I found the voting record for the 2009 extension of the Patriot Act, and guess what... it was a voice vote. They called for yeas and nays, and it was so obvious that the yeas won that it went unchallenged, which means:
1) Very few democrats opposed it. The only person I could find on the record as opposing it was Dianne Feinstein.
2) We'll never know who exactly voted for or against it, as it wasn't recorded, and people in the room at the time probably couldn't even be sure.
So yeah, Kennedy's death, while unfortunate, changed absolutely nothing with regards to this law.
If you read the PDF, they actually cite similar cases which had already been decided by the Florida supreme court. So it appears that the precedent has already been set, if only in that one state.
Ron Paul would be disastrous for the country's economy, not to mention scientific research. It's a shame, because if he was sane on economic issues, the man would be a godsend, but as it stands the amount of harm he'd do outweighs all the good.
They were buying Lieberman, who is an independent. They had 59 votes for the public option. He was the lone holdout.
On the Iraq war vote: Yes, the mixed numbers make it so that they'd need a large majority (~80% if my math is right) to stop the war. Honestly, given how bad Republicans have been for the country, the Dems ought to have that many. Or better still, have the Dems have half of Congress with a new party to their left controlling the other half, so that the American left is no longer to the right of most country's conservatives. But that's a pipe dream. The fact is, the statement that the parties are the same is false.
On torture: I've never said that the amount of prison time handed out in this country is okay. But the claim being discussed is: "The parties are the same." One party actively supports torturing people, the other doesn't. That strikes me as a difference.
On gays and women: Gays in many places can't visit loved ones in the hospital, or adopt children, and only thanks to the Democrats can they serve in the military. Women can have abortions, for now, but the Republicans are curtailing that right at every step of the way, and if a liberal Justice has a heart attack while a Republican is in the White House, that can change in a jiffy. Tell a 16 year old girl who just had her entire life screwed up over one mistake, all because the government is kowtowing to a religious group, that her rights aren't being denied by the government, then get back to me.
On unions: I'm aware of what Cuomo is doing... my dad is an affected union member (and, ironically, a Republican). I don't like it, but what he's doing isn't union busting. He is a tough negotiator with PEF, but there's a world of difference between taking a hardline stance in negotiations and taking away your opponent's right to negotiate at all.
On overall approach to politics: You have strong morals and are fighting for what you want. I get that. I don't like the war on drugs (along with its militarization of the police force) any more than you do. But if you want to see this country get better, you can't keep wasting votes on third parties. Vote for Democrats, primary for liberals, and drag the Overton window back to the left. The reason the conservatives have been able to do so much harm is because they understand that sometimes you need to hold your nose and vote in lockstep.
You're never going to hit that home run to fix the country all at once. You have to learn to play small ball. It took decades to create this mess, and it'll take decades to work our way out.
You don't seem to understand how the government works. Of course they passed every cloture vote. They wouldn't have brought the bill up for a vote if they weren't going to win. The Democrats tried for quite some time to get Snowe or Collins or Lieberman on board to break the Republican filibuster. They scaled the public option back repeatedly. First there was the Rockefeller option, in which the public option health care company couldn't use the force of the government to negotiate better rates (so as to ensure a level playing field with the private companies). Then there was the opt out option, followed quickly by the nicely named opt in option. The idea there was to let some states try the public option while other states abstained, but that too was rejected. They made a last ditch effort by proposing to let people as young as 55 buy into Medicare as a sort of makeshift option, but no go. They couldn't get the votes together for anything, because all 40 Republicans plus Lieberman simply refused. Then once Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, they had to just go with what they had at the time, with only minor changes, because the Republicans now had the magic 41 number and had made clear that they would not accept any compromise.
This wasn't that long ago. Either your memory is poor, or you weren't paying enough attention at the time.
That's not at random, you're purposefully picking good ones. The GP has an excellent point. From any particular year, most movies are crap. But we only remember the good ones, and then look back on that year and say to ourselves, "Boy, the movies sure were better back then!"
The thing is, they can halve the prices! The Regal cinemas near me charge $13 a head, plus outrageous amounts for any refreshments. The nearby indie theatre just charges $7, and has refreshments that cost no more than they would at a corner store. And then there's the local drive-in (yes, I'm lucky enough to live in a place where there is one), which charges $7 for adults and $3 for kids under twelve and that's for a double feature! At those prices, it's a great way to spend an evening, and given the economies of scale, the major theatres should be able to charge even less.
But why would they? As long as people come and pack the house to see the latest Alvin & the Chipmunks abortion, they have no reason to reduce their profit margins.
On the Iraq war: Democrats were opposed 126-82, Republicans in favor 215-6. If Democrats had controlled congress, it would never have happened.
On public option healthcare: It was filibustered to death. It had support of 100% of Senate Democrats, but was opposed by 40 Senate Republicans plus Lieberman, who is an independent. One more Democrat in the Senate, and it would have passed.
On torture and the prison-industrial complex: They fought against torture. The fact that they didn't do some other good thing does not erase the good thing that they did do.
On gays and women (and immigrants and Muslims, for that matter): When a large segment of the population is used as a political punching bag and denied basic rights and control over their lives, that IS a big deal. It's not like the government can only do one thing at a time, and we must solve one problem before moving on to another. We can help millions of people right now, but it seems you'd rather let them suffer because you can't get some other things you want first.
On unions: You accuse them of union busting. That's just shocking. They fought for EFCA, but it was filibustered to death by the Republicans. Also I seem to recall some Democrats fighting like hell in Wisconsin to protect the unions, only for the Republican governor to circumvent the law and pass his union busting bill illegally, and then have a Republican state supreme court judge give it the okay.
The Republicans are out to break your spirits. They want you to give up on the Democrats so that they can take power. That's been their goal for years, and it's perfectly clear to anyone paying attention. Stop falling for it.