I tend to agree with you in principle, but technically speaking, any outright statements the two have made about the Al Qaeda / Iraq "connection" have been accurate. The way they made those statements (and the fact that any question about Iraq was immediately answered by saying that 9/11 was bad) was clearly designed to tie the two entities together in the public mind, but if you look at the text of the statements, they can be justified. It clearly worked like a charm since a frighteningly large number of Americans still think that Iraq was behind 9/11, and no matter how carefully you look at the transcripts of the Bush / Cheney stump speeches, you'll never find a statement about the two that can't be defended in its most literal interpretation.
I'm continually awed by their ability to play the public and by the tremendous stupidity of the public in allowing itself to be played. I agree with just about every claim of incompetence and dereliction of duty that was alleged in this thread, and I also happen to think that everything they've done is technically legal enough that they shouldn't be impeached. Unfortunately, the President has broad powers to be a dubmass. Combine that with the fact that it takes quite a bit less effort than outright lying to manipulate a voting majority of the population and there really isn't much in the way of legal grounds for impeachment.
well, what I think gwb was doing was protecting the church's right not to recognise gay marriage. I believe that gay people should have the same protections and rights as hetero in civil union. I don't, however, think that the state should mandate that marriage is defined by the church. if the church wants to not recognise gay marriage, that's their opinion and the state should have nothing to do with it
I don't believe that anybody has ever proposed making a law to force churches to recognize any marriage that they didn't perform (or perform marriages that are counter to their articles of faith). That's a completely different issue. If you think that's why the Republicans are against gay marriage, you're sadly misinformed. There's more to that agenda than simply supporting the rights of religious organizations.
My guess is that the crowd would boo him off the stage and he could declare victory. I'm surprised he didn't see it as a golden opportunity to get some press and make gamers look uncivilized.
I generally agree with what you're saying, but it should be noted that the FCC has gotten more powerful lately. Our current president and congress have increased the fine the FCC is allowed to levy for indecency tenfold. Combined with the vagueness of the indecency rules, that has turned the FCC into a censorship force to be reckoned with.
It's certainly not isolated to President Bush, but to say that things are no different than they were, say, 10 years ago is simply not true.
You do realize that you're splitting hairs. Although his actual words were that he "took the initiative in creating the internet" presumably by voting for a bill which had funding of ARPA as one of its items, the essence of that statement was Gore claiming credit for the internet's existence.
I don't think that if a senator said "I took the initiative in creating the bridge from Metropolis to Anytown" that people would jump all over him for not designing the trusses or welding the frame. Doing that would be viewed as a stupid joke at best, and lame way to score cheap points at worst. Somehow in this situation it's hilariously insightful. Go figure.
Funny how we don't seem to be seeing much of that, considering oil prices; I think it's time to retire the oil argument.
The fact that our leaders are too incompetent to pull off the "create a stable military presence around our oil source" maneuver doesn't mean that oil wasn't at the core of the Iraq war. I don't blame them for it--if it weren't for oil Iraq would have been a really stupid place to start a war given the other options. In fact, I submit that any president who is not concerned with future energy availability is derelict in his duties. I just happen to think that the way this particular president went about it was ham-handed, short sighted, and generally moronic.
I don't understand how Slashdot, usually bastion of small government libertarianism, can have the cajones to be hypocritical enough to be pro net neutrality.
Let's do an exercise. I believe that/. has well over 1,000,000 accounts. Let's say it's exactly one million, just for simplicity. Let's also say that ACs never post. The typical volume for a very contentious topic is usually under 1000 posts. Let's round up to 1000. Let's say that the average poster posts 1 comment to a given topic (although in politics, I'm sure it's at least 2).
What does that mean? For any given discussion, you're seeing a cross section of less than 0.1% of Slashdot's posters. Given that people aren't randomly forced to post in topics (that is, they post on topics that are interesting and important to them), that means that the 0.1% you're seeing isn't necessarily a representative random sample of the Slashdot population as a whole. It also means that it's not totally crazy to think that the two sets of opinions you referenced may be held (largely) by two different sets of people.
Actually, I kind of like the idea of giving Al Qaeda a seat in government. After 3 months in Congress, Bin Laden would be waist deep in hookers and soft money, and within a year he'd just be another ineffectual, neutered, corrupt old politician. Look what having to wear the daddy pants did for Fatah.
Bush didn't take a long time to get on board with climate change. Why, I just heard one of his reps talking a few days ago about how they've always been pushing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions!
Among the Republican candidates, both John McCain and Ron Paul are the least dishonest candidates -- even if you disagree with their political positions.
:::boggle:::
What is this bullshit then? McCain has to take the cake for the single scummiest maneuver on Iraq that I've seen, and that's saying something.
The AWB limited a law-abiding, sane citizens ability to defend themselves by limiting the available tools. Therefore, it was ( and is ) unacceptable.
You know, I just haven't read any anecdotes that sounded like this, "I shot him over and over again with my pump action shotgun, but he just kept coming! Thank goodness I had my Uzi or I wouldn't be talking to you right now!" Even with the AWB, there is no shortage of practical self defense weapons. That doesn't make it good policy, but please spare us the alarmist statements.
Of course, not having RPGs could be regarded as limiting one's ability to defend oneself. The question is, where do you draw the line? It clearly has to be drawn somewhere.
Note that it also failed to impact national crime rates in any measurable way, and is therefore twice a failure.
No disagreement there. Like I said, it's generally bad policy and security theater. I just don't see it as legislation that leaves our society defenseless.
So, in your mind the only real reason someone should own a firearm is for hunting? Self defense is a tangeal benefit?
I don't remember saying that. As a non-hunting gun owner, that would be a rather silly thing for me to say.
I think we've found the difference between our view points. I see self defense and a last ditch resistance to tyrany as the primary reason the 2nd amendment was written.. not as an aid to hunting. Taken in context, the 2nd amendment would allow common citizens the right to keep a personally owned version of current Military weapons, so what we have today is too restrictive given that view.
I take a more nuanced view. Remember, there was supposed to be standing army, and it was the responsibility of the citizenry to provide a militia should it be necessary to raise an army. Of course, this has the nice side benefit that the citizens, being the army, don't have an army to oppress them. Of course, we have the world's largest military now, so we've sort of dropped that whole idea, and we've clearly dropped the idea of a "well regulated" militia with it. What we're left with is a bunch of people with firearms. Now, I don't see that as a big problem as 99.9xxx% of gun owners are never going to hurt anybody. That doesn't mean, however, that we shouldn't be thinking about sensible ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them.
Again, though, what constitutes weapons comparable to the military? You've already said that H-bombs and VX are right out. Are RPGs OK? Land mines? Are you restricting it to hand-carried firearms? If so, why? Isn't that just about as arbitrary as anything else?
For instance, if a police officer stops someone on a street and they can't produce their CCW permit, they're already subject to arrest. In your registration scheme, they might also have to produce a "firearms owners card". Redundant, no?
In that case, it would be. I would say that a CCW permit would suffice in that case. I'm more referring to any firearm possession at all. Locked up, unloaded and in the trunk of your car, but no license to own? Bad dog. The point of the legislation would be less a matter of regulating who could carry a gun around and more to make it a crime to sell guns privately to people who don't clearly have the credentials to own one.
We both know that right now, dealers have to jump through plenty of hoops to sell a gun to somebody at a storefront. A private sale between two individuals, though? Not so much. The people who are committing crimes with guns aren't buying them from legitimate firearms dealers. They're getting them through private party transactions that the government has no transparency into. I'm suggesting a way to slowly (admittedly very slowly) dry up that aftermarket.
The police can not be everywhere to prevent crime.
Therefore, there will be times that a law-abiding citizen must have the capability to defend themselves.
The most effective means of defense for the average citizen is a firearm.
If the Democratic party could get behind those ideas, they might gain more supporters from those who currently vote Republican.
That's not an unreasonable position. I'm not sure how the AWB fits into it, given that there are still plenty of guns to go around, but it's certainly one way of looking at things.
However, a question for you: Why do you care what "arms" a law-abiding sane citizen possesses?
I don't, particularly, as long as they're reasonably unlikely to be dangerous to me and other law abiding citizens. I just don't see the right to bear arms as something to be taken without limitation, and I don't think that somebody proposing restrictions on that right should immediately be decried as some sort of a fanatic who gets his jollies watching innocent people get killed by crack addicted home invaders.
I would take the argument against the AWB and similar laws more seriously if the argument simply went as follows: "Law abiding citizens with guns aren't hurting anybody and are vanishingly unlikely to do so. There's no compelling reason to take away their right, so let's not do it." The idea that HR 1022 and the like will somehow dry up the supply of guns that are practical for self defense is nonsense. You just don't like the idea that you'll have your rights limited without a good reason, and I can get behind that. What I can't get behind is silly rhetoric like wailing about "gun bans" and the like.
Why do you ( apparently ) see such things as HR 1022 as acceptable?
I see it as "acceptable" simply because I don't see a compelling reason in the Constitution that a private citizen should be able to own whatever gun he wants. I also don't see a compelling argument that the particular guns in question are the only guns that can be used for the uses the gun lobby claims to be trying to protect. They're largly not hunting weapons, and I can think of a fairly long list of guns I'd rather have my neighbor using to defend his house (just a few layers of sheetrock away from my bed) than a lot of the weapons on the list.
That being said, I don't see it as particularly good policy. For the reasons you pointed out, it's clearly not going to make any substantive difference in the safety of the average private citizen, and it's clearly going to do little more than inconvenience legal gun owners, so it's basically nothing more than political theater. I probably wouldn't vote for it if I was a member of Congress, because it would be just another silly law on the books that we'd have to enforce that doesn't make a serious difference.
I call such laws gun bans because... well, they ban guns.
Like I said, by that measure, the FDA has banned FOOD and MEDICINE! What evil nutty bastards! Your sentence might be technically correct, but it's hardly what I'd call the most accurate way of making your point. It is, however, a great way of stirring up controversy where none needed to exist.
Since we're getting deeper into specifics (which I mentioned that I was avoiding simply because I think that the meta-argument about absolute gun rights was more relevant at the moment), I'll tell you what I'd like to see done. To get a gun, you should have to have a license, just like you have to go get a car. It should be relatively easy for an adult without a criminal record to get that license and damn near impossible for anybody else to. As soon as you commit a crime that indicates that your judgment isn't good enough to keep the license, it's gone. Period. Guns
Exactly how do you view "assault weapon bans" then?
How about HR 1022, which would ban almost all semi-automatic rifles.
To say the gun-control advocates aren't interested in banning guns is disingenuous. That seems, instead, to be the point of their organization.
Without getting into the specifics of the legislation in question (note that I generally think that most of the gun control laws people try to pass are deeply flawed and pointless), I would call them bans on certain guns because that's what they are. Your "ban guns" claim is far too broad and alarmist. They're no more trying to "ban guns" than people who try to get certain medications off the shelves are "banning medicine" or people who pass laws keeping certain dangerous vehicles off the road are trying to "ban cars." Saying otherwise is simply disingenuous wordplay.
There's already laws in place to prevent convicted felons ( and some convicted of misdemeanors ) from ever owning firearms again.
Yes, and that's a good thing. It's also an indication that the right to bear arms can be limited. There are those who would claim that the 2nd Amendment disallows that sort of regulation.
Excellent strawman you've got there. We're not talking about hydrogen bombs or VX gas.
Really? Are you sure? We are talking about "arms" are we not? Or are you agreeing that there is an upper limit as to what constitutes reasonable arms for a private citizen to bear?
When you say "get away from Second Amendment absolutism", what some of us hear is "give your guns up".
Perhaps that's because you're not listening to the rest of it? The simple fact is that just about every person agrees that somewhere along the line, the government has the right to restrict the amount of weaponry that you can own. You seem to think that somewhere between "no pointy sticks for anybody" and and "H-bombs for toddlers" there's a reasonable line. You might be surprised to note that just about everybody agrees with you on that. They just disagree on where the line is should be drawn.
When you use overblown rhetoric like "ban guns" when you're describing a place where somebody has suggested the line be drawn, you're contributing to the problem. I haven't seen anything like a gun ban come anywhere near being a serious platform on the federal level at all. I have seen limitations on certain types of weapons and certain classes of owners proposed, and I think that the people who want to paint those limitations as "banning guns" are doing the country a disservice, just like people who paint foreign policy discussions as "supporting terrorism" or people who call all taxation "theft." The fact is, absolutism on the topic doesn't result in good policy.
There's a simple way to take this, at least, out of Republican hands. Stop trying to ban guns.
Exaggerate much? What percentage of gun control supporters are actually interested in "banning" guns? Seriously, now.
Public statements the the 2nd amendment is at least as important as the 1st would help as well.
At least as important as the 1st Amendment? I'm not buying into it. I'm all for the individual right to gun ownership, but I'd put restrictions on it well before I'd put restrictions on freedom of speech. For example, if you rob a convenience store, I have zero problem with making it illegal for you to own a gun. Forever. No more guns for you. I can't think of a crime that you could commit that would cause me to support abridging your freedom of speech or religion.
It might help the situation if we could get away from Second Amendment absolutism a bit. Do you really think that the right to bear arms should be 100% without restriction? Would you be OK with your neighbor down the street owning a hydrogen bomb or a VX gas rocket (to prevent government oppression, you know)?
A private monopoly, where a few, select individuals are gifted with the privilege of creating money out of nothing (literally), is more stable than a government that can print its own money, and owe itself NOTHING in terms of interest?
The history of governments that have done just that is not a pretty one.
If I remember correctly, it goes to their election campaign fund, which isn't money they can spend as they please.
That's nice in theory, but not so great in practice. For example, a snippet from Wikipedia on my former congressman Richard Pombo:
Between 2000 and 2004, Pombo used his campaign and PAC funds to pay his brother Randall $272,000, and his wife (between 2003 and 2004) $85,000. In that 2003-04 campaign cycle, Pombo paid more to his family members -- $217,000 -- than his opponent, Jerry McNerney, spent on his entire campaign. The two have been paid for duties listed as bookkeeping, fundraising, consulting and other unspecified services.[19]
Campaign money becomes bribe money pretty quickly when the books are kept the right way. I'd love to pay my wife an extra $85K out of a bank account that I'm not allowed to spend on myself.
Besides the bubble, and the fact he had to deal with an opposition-party Congress, the other major factor that led to surpluses was Clinton's massive cuts to military spending. But among the many lessons Iraq has given us, is that the cuts went too deep. We simply don't have enough personnel anymore, and the strain on the Reserves and National Guard is the result.
Our defense budget is bigger than the next fourteen countries' budgets combined. If you can't pull it off with those kinds of resources, I don't know what to tell you.
The real problem wasn't Clinton's budget cuts. The real problem is that Bush has been trying to fight this war on the cheap since it started, slowly trickling in additional resources just fast enough to get them chewed up in the meat grinder but not fast enough to get anything done, hoping all the time that people wouldn't notice how long and expensive his slam-dunk quickie war was getting. Now that it's too late to get it done right and people are starting to realize that this war is going to cost a lot of blood and treasure, he wants a blank check to finish the job that he so brilliantly screwed up in the first place.
At least you didn't try to blame the liberal media for the failure in Iraq. I'll give you credit: blaming it on Clinton's budget cuts was creative.
Can we really 100% guarantee stopping every weapon getting onto a plane?
I think that Doug Stanhope made a good point when he said (paraphrasing): "You'll never keep weapons off of planes. We can't keep weapons out of prisons, and in prisons they're even allowed to search in your ass."
The question isn't why the nutball extremists hate us. Yes, we could do things to give them fewer legitimate reasons to hate us, but we'll never do away with all terrorists by simply being nice. The important question is why do those nutball extremists find it so easy to get support and financing? That's a question we can much more easily deal with, and it has a whole lot more to do with how we act and how we're perceived in the world than a lot of people want to admit.
The fact is, there will always be violent extremism. We have our own homegrown terrorists in the US. The difference is, they're so far out on the fringe in the US that it's hard for them to operate. They don't get millions in donations, and their neighbors don't look the other way when they start building bombs. The fact that the situation isn't so great elsewhere is largely a product of the fact that we've managed to lose the PR war so spectacularly that it's not uncommon for people to think that organizations like Al Qaeda are actually fighting for justice.
We're losing a PR war to the types of people who behead reporters and blow up vegetable markets, and we're losing that war because the people of the middle east have their own media now. We can't say one thing and do another because we're going to get called on it. They're not relying on CNN and the BBC for the scoop anymore. They didn't watch the siege of Fallujah from the outside on CNN like we did. They watched it from the inside on Al Jazeera. That makes all the difference in the world, and when you apply that fact to everything we're doing in that region, you have to wonder whether we could build a worse reputation there if we tried. We actually have to make an effort to promote justice there rather than simply paying lip service to it, and the strategy of saying "We'll be nice to you when you stop supporting terrorists" is the same thing as saying, "Well be nice to you when you start liking us enough to care about the terrorists operating in your neighborhood." Come on, "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is not a viable strategy.
No, we didn't "deserve" 9/11. It wasn't our "fault." It was the fault of violent extremists who should be brought to justice. What is our fault is that we and our leaders have managed to allow our reputation in the region to become so bad that those violent extremists aren't marginalized. Once that happens, there's no way we can fight them because every one we kill will be replaced by another volunteer. The fact that our leaders simply don't get this still blows my mind. Use force against the terrorists by all means, but unless you've managed to marginalize the terrorists, you're not going to get anywhere. That's where our leadership has failed, and that appears to be where they will continue to fail until enough people have the balls to stand up and point out that maybe the sun doesn't shine out our ass in all corners of the world, and maybe we should spend some time thinking about how our foreign policy reflects that.
The sig is definitely a joke, both on my part and the part of the author. I appreciate your concern, though. I need to change it soon because that page was a lot funnier a few weeks ago.
The interesting thing about conspiracy nuttery (like creationism and much of alternative medicine) is that they're effectively indistinguishable from parodies of themselves.
They might not to corporate serfdom, but they sure to environmental serfdom:) Not to mention frivolous lawsuits, positive 'rights'. I could go on. For both sides.
I like Bill Maher's take on it from a few years back. Something to the effect of, "I'm voting with the Democrats this time because I think that they're owned by a slightly less scary group of special interests."
If so, why was he surrounded by American soldiers?
Photo-op. Duh.
Seriously? Do you really believe that he wanted a photo op with more than 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk and two Apache helicopters? Let's see here: the day after he left 21 people were abducted from that market and murdered. The snipers have returned to the market after taking a quick break while McCain and the entire US Army paraded through. And you seriously believe that all these guys were there for a photo op? No, they were doing their jobs putting themselves in danger so another self-interested politician who couldn't care less about them tries to mislead his people into keeping them in harm's way.
McCain was there for a photo op, but not with the soldiers. He was there to show us how amazingly safe the market was--the market where locals say they lose about a person per day to sniper attacks. Of course, he says that he didn't want any protection, but General Petraeus wanted to send them. If only he'd gotten his wish, the American people may have a better idea of what a clusterfuck the whole operation has been. I didn't have a huge amount of respect for McCain going into the incident, but it's all gone now. The single worst thing for our leaders to do in a time of war is to lie to his people about the costs and make them unable to make informed decisions about policy.
Eh, I just saw that as depressing pandering to the religious nutjobs that make up a huge portion of the Republican base. I gave up on him after his little trip to Baghdad in which he endangered American soldiers by making them act as his personal armed guard so he could safely go to a market to show us how safe(!) it is. Anybody who has lost friends to war and can still bring himself to unnecessarily endanger soldiers for the sole purpose of tricking Americans into keeping them at war will never, ever have my respect as a human being, much less my vote.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to agree with you in principle, but technically speaking, any outright statements the two have made about the Al Qaeda / Iraq "connection" have been accurate. The way they made those statements (and the fact that any question about Iraq was immediately answered by saying that 9/11 was bad) was clearly designed to tie the two entities together in the public mind, but if you look at the text of the statements, they can be justified. It clearly worked like a charm since a frighteningly large number of Americans still think that Iraq was behind 9/11, and no matter how carefully you look at the transcripts of the Bush / Cheney stump speeches, you'll never find a statement about the two that can't be defended in its most literal interpretation.
I'm continually awed by their ability to play the public and by the tremendous stupidity of the public in allowing itself to be played. I agree with just about every claim of incompetence and dereliction of duty that was alleged in this thread, and I also happen to think that everything they've done is technically legal enough that they shouldn't be impeached. Unfortunately, the President has broad powers to be a dubmass. Combine that with the fact that it takes quite a bit less effort than outright lying to manipulate a voting majority of the population and there really isn't much in the way of legal grounds for impeachment.
My guess is that the crowd would boo him off the stage and he could declare victory. I'm surprised he didn't see it as a golden opportunity to get some press and make gamers look uncivilized.
I generally agree with what you're saying, but it should be noted that the FCC has gotten more powerful lately. Our current president and congress have increased the fine the FCC is allowed to levy for indecency tenfold. Combined with the vagueness of the indecency rules, that has turned the FCC into a censorship force to be reckoned with.
It's certainly not isolated to President Bush, but to say that things are no different than they were, say, 10 years ago is simply not true.
What does that mean? For any given discussion, you're seeing a cross section of less than 0.1% of Slashdot's posters. Given that people aren't randomly forced to post in topics (that is, they post on topics that are interesting and important to them), that means that the 0.1% you're seeing isn't necessarily a representative random sample of the Slashdot population as a whole. It also means that it's not totally crazy to think that the two sets of opinions you referenced may be held (largely) by two different sets of people.
HTH.
Actually, I kind of like the idea of giving Al Qaeda a seat in government. After 3 months in Congress, Bin Laden would be waist deep in hookers and soft money, and within a year he'd just be another ineffectual, neutered, corrupt old politician. Look what having to wear the daddy pants did for Fatah.
Bush didn't take a long time to get on board with climate change. Why, I just heard one of his reps talking a few days ago about how they've always been pushing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions!
What is this bullshit then? McCain has to take the cake for the single scummiest maneuver on Iraq that I've seen, and that's saying something.
You know, I just haven't read any anecdotes that sounded like this, "I shot him over and over again with my pump action shotgun, but he just kept coming! Thank goodness I had my Uzi or I wouldn't be talking to you right now!" Even with the AWB, there is no shortage of practical self defense weapons. That doesn't make it good policy, but please spare us the alarmist statements.
Of course, not having RPGs could be regarded as limiting one's ability to defend oneself. The question is, where do you draw the line? It clearly has to be drawn somewhere.
No disagreement there. Like I said, it's generally bad policy and security theater. I just don't see it as legislation that leaves our society defenseless.
I don't remember saying that. As a non-hunting gun owner, that would be a rather silly thing for me to say.
I take a more nuanced view. Remember, there was supposed to be standing army, and it was the responsibility of the citizenry to provide a militia should it be necessary to raise an army. Of course, this has the nice side benefit that the citizens, being the army, don't have an army to oppress them. Of course, we have the world's largest military now, so we've sort of dropped that whole idea, and we've clearly dropped the idea of a "well regulated" militia with it. What we're left with is a bunch of people with firearms. Now, I don't see that as a big problem as 99.9xxx% of gun owners are never going to hurt anybody. That doesn't mean, however, that we shouldn't be thinking about sensible ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them.
Again, though, what constitutes weapons comparable to the military? You've already said that H-bombs and VX are right out. Are RPGs OK? Land mines? Are you restricting it to hand-carried firearms? If so, why? Isn't that just about as arbitrary as anything else?
In that case, it would be. I would say that a CCW permit would suffice in that case. I'm more referring to any firearm possession at all. Locked up, unloaded and in the trunk of your car, but no license to own? Bad dog. The point of the legislation would be less a matter of regulating who could carry a gun around and more to make it a crime to sell guns privately to people who don't clearly have the credentials to own one.
We both know that right now, dealers have to jump through plenty of hoops to sell a gun to somebody at a storefront. A private sale between two individuals, though? Not so much. The people who are committing crimes with guns aren't buying them from legitimate firearms dealers. They're getting them through private party transactions that the government has no transparency into. I'm suggesting a way to slowly (admittedly very slowly) dry up that aftermarket.
That's not an unreasonable position. I'm not sure how the AWB fits into it, given that there are still plenty of guns to go around, but it's certainly one way of looking at things.
I don't, particularly, as long as they're reasonably unlikely to be dangerous to me and other law abiding citizens. I just don't see the right to bear arms as something to be taken without limitation, and I don't think that somebody proposing restrictions on that right should immediately be decried as some sort of a fanatic who gets his jollies watching innocent people get killed by crack addicted home invaders.
I would take the argument against the AWB and similar laws more seriously if the argument simply went as follows: "Law abiding citizens with guns aren't hurting anybody and are vanishingly unlikely to do so. There's no compelling reason to take away their right, so let's not do it." The idea that HR 1022 and the like will somehow dry up the supply of guns that are practical for self defense is nonsense. You just don't like the idea that you'll have your rights limited without a good reason, and I can get behind that. What I can't get behind is silly rhetoric like wailing about "gun bans" and the like.
I see it as "acceptable" simply because I don't see a compelling reason in the Constitution that a private citizen should be able to own whatever gun he wants. I also don't see a compelling argument that the particular guns in question are the only guns that can be used for the uses the gun lobby claims to be trying to protect. They're largly not hunting weapons, and I can think of a fairly long list of guns I'd rather have my neighbor using to defend his house (just a few layers of sheetrock away from my bed) than a lot of the weapons on the list.
That being said, I don't see it as particularly good policy. For the reasons you pointed out, it's clearly not going to make any substantive difference in the safety of the average private citizen, and it's clearly going to do little more than inconvenience legal gun owners, so it's basically nothing more than political theater. I probably wouldn't vote for it if I was a member of Congress, because it would be just another silly law on the books that we'd have to enforce that doesn't make a serious difference.
Like I said, by that measure, the FDA has banned FOOD and MEDICINE! What evil nutty bastards! Your sentence might be technically correct, but it's hardly what I'd call the most accurate way of making your point. It is, however, a great way of stirring up controversy where none needed to exist.
Since we're getting deeper into specifics (which I mentioned that I was avoiding simply because I think that the meta-argument about absolute gun rights was more relevant at the moment), I'll tell you what I'd like to see done. To get a gun, you should have to have a license, just like you have to go get a car. It should be relatively easy for an adult without a criminal record to get that license and damn near impossible for anybody else to. As soon as you commit a crime that indicates that your judgment isn't good enough to keep the license, it's gone. Period. Guns
Yes, and that's a good thing. It's also an indication that the right to bear arms can be limited. There are those who would claim that the 2nd Amendment disallows that sort of regulation.
Really? Are you sure? We are talking about "arms" are we not? Or are you agreeing that there is an upper limit as to what constitutes reasonable arms for a private citizen to bear?
Perhaps that's because you're not listening to the rest of it? The simple fact is that just about every person agrees that somewhere along the line, the government has the right to restrict the amount of weaponry that you can own. You seem to think that somewhere between "no pointy sticks for anybody" and and "H-bombs for toddlers" there's a reasonable line. You might be surprised to note that just about everybody agrees with you on that. They just disagree on where the line is should be drawn.
When you use overblown rhetoric like "ban guns" when you're describing a place where somebody has suggested the line be drawn, you're contributing to the problem. I haven't seen anything like a gun ban come anywhere near being a serious platform on the federal level at all. I have seen limitations on certain types of weapons and certain classes of owners proposed, and I think that the people who want to paint those limitations as "banning guns" are doing the country a disservice, just like people who paint foreign policy discussions as "supporting terrorism" or people who call all taxation "theft." The fact is, absolutism on the topic doesn't result in good policy.
At least as important as the 1st Amendment? I'm not buying into it. I'm all for the individual right to gun ownership, but I'd put restrictions on it well before I'd put restrictions on freedom of speech. For example, if you rob a convenience store, I have zero problem with making it illegal for you to own a gun. Forever. No more guns for you. I can't think of a crime that you could commit that would cause me to support abridging your freedom of speech or religion.
It might help the situation if we could get away from Second Amendment absolutism a bit. Do you really think that the right to bear arms should be 100% without restriction? Would you be OK with your neighbor down the street owning a hydrogen bomb or a VX gas rocket (to prevent government oppression, you know)?
Campaign money becomes bribe money pretty quickly when the books are kept the right way. I'd love to pay my wife an extra $85K out of a bank account that I'm not allowed to spend on myself.
The real problem wasn't Clinton's budget cuts. The real problem is that Bush has been trying to fight this war on the cheap since it started, slowly trickling in additional resources just fast enough to get them chewed up in the meat grinder but not fast enough to get anything done, hoping all the time that people wouldn't notice how long and expensive his slam-dunk quickie war was getting. Now that it's too late to get it done right and people are starting to realize that this war is going to cost a lot of blood and treasure, he wants a blank check to finish the job that he so brilliantly screwed up in the first place.
At least you didn't try to blame the liberal media for the failure in Iraq. I'll give you credit: blaming it on Clinton's budget cuts was creative.
The question isn't why the nutball extremists hate us. Yes, we could do things to give them fewer legitimate reasons to hate us, but we'll never do away with all terrorists by simply being nice. The important question is why do those nutball extremists find it so easy to get support and financing? That's a question we can much more easily deal with, and it has a whole lot more to do with how we act and how we're perceived in the world than a lot of people want to admit.
The fact is, there will always be violent extremism. We have our own homegrown terrorists in the US. The difference is, they're so far out on the fringe in the US that it's hard for them to operate. They don't get millions in donations, and their neighbors don't look the other way when they start building bombs. The fact that the situation isn't so great elsewhere is largely a product of the fact that we've managed to lose the PR war so spectacularly that it's not uncommon for people to think that organizations like Al Qaeda are actually fighting for justice.
We're losing a PR war to the types of people who behead reporters and blow up vegetable markets, and we're losing that war because the people of the middle east have their own media now. We can't say one thing and do another because we're going to get called on it. They're not relying on CNN and the BBC for the scoop anymore. They didn't watch the siege of Fallujah from the outside on CNN like we did. They watched it from the inside on Al Jazeera. That makes all the difference in the world, and when you apply that fact to everything we're doing in that region, you have to wonder whether we could build a worse reputation there if we tried. We actually have to make an effort to promote justice there rather than simply paying lip service to it, and the strategy of saying "We'll be nice to you when you stop supporting terrorists" is the same thing as saying, "Well be nice to you when you start liking us enough to care about the terrorists operating in your neighborhood." Come on, "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is not a viable strategy.
No, we didn't "deserve" 9/11. It wasn't our "fault." It was the fault of violent extremists who should be brought to justice. What is our fault is that we and our leaders have managed to allow our reputation in the region to become so bad that those violent extremists aren't marginalized. Once that happens, there's no way we can fight them because every one we kill will be replaced by another volunteer. The fact that our leaders simply don't get this still blows my mind. Use force against the terrorists by all means, but unless you've managed to marginalize the terrorists, you're not going to get anywhere. That's where our leadership has failed, and that appears to be where they will continue to fail until enough people have the balls to stand up and point out that maybe the sun doesn't shine out our ass in all corners of the world, and maybe we should spend some time thinking about how our foreign policy reflects that.
The sig is definitely a joke, both on my part and the part of the author. I appreciate your concern, though. I need to change it soon because that page was a lot funnier a few weeks ago.
The interesting thing about conspiracy nuttery (like creationism and much of alternative medicine) is that they're effectively indistinguishable from parodies of themselves.
McCain was there for a photo op, but not with the soldiers. He was there to show us how amazingly safe the market was--the market where locals say they lose about a person per day to sniper attacks. Of course, he says that he didn't want any protection, but General Petraeus wanted to send them. If only he'd gotten his wish, the American people may have a better idea of what a clusterfuck the whole operation has been. I didn't have a huge amount of respect for McCain going into the incident, but it's all gone now. The single worst thing for our leaders to do in a time of war is to lie to his people about the costs and make them unable to make informed decisions about policy.
Eh, I just saw that as depressing pandering to the religious nutjobs that make up a huge portion of the Republican base.
I gave up on him after his little trip to Baghdad in which he endangered American soldiers by making them act as his personal armed guard so he could safely go to a market to show us how safe(!) it is. Anybody who has lost friends to war and can still bring himself to unnecessarily endanger soldiers for the sole purpose of tricking Americans into keeping them at war will never, ever have my respect as a human being, much less my vote.