Since you're totally wrong about Vietnam, and have been totally wrong about Iraq, "shut up" is all you get.
You're a bloodthirsty Anonymous Coward with only a perverted sense of history. Next you'll be telling me that Dixie really won the "War of Northern Aggression".
You're increasingly irrelevant as Americans no longer care about your lies, and your idiotic president's time controlling Iraq is finally drawing to a close.
So "shut up" is all you rate. You should feel lucky anyone bothers to notice your yapping at all.
So we should have stayed in Vietnam and lost even worse there too, right, Anonymous loser Coward?
The "good news" propagandized in that WP article is a lie that the White House has already written, regardless of who signs it. But that doesn't penetrate to your shit-scared brain, because all you want to hear is Republican lies, rather than the brutal reality of the butchery you re responsible for, you and the Republicans you worship.
You Republicans have already lost in Iraq. You've taken the greatest army ever assembled, and wasted it on an impossible task: forcing Iraq to work, after destroying it, and ignoring everything wrong with it. Everything that everyone outside the Republican Party told you would make it impossible. But you failed, and destroyed Iraq, and have destroyed much of America, too. And somehow that's the fault of the people who tried to stop you.
You have no standing to say anything worth hearing about war. You act like it's a videogame. How come you are not fighting in Iraq? Because it's "somebody else's problem", right?
I've been to the Mideast. I've spent time in Egypt, Israel and Turkey. I was headed to Iran before you assholes blew up the world. I was headed to India before you assholes let Osama attack us. I've been to dozens of foreign countries, even lived for years abroad. So shut up. Really. SHUT UP. Your endless running your coward mouth, repeating the nonsense your Republicans pump you on your talkradio and cable "news" shows are all just TV bullshit, not reality.
You want to impress me, go fight in Iraq. Of course you won't - you're a coward. So just shut up while we clean up after the mess you baby elephants have left wherever you've grabbed the power. And watch as we protect you from the hornets nest you insisted on kicking the last 6 years.
No, Anonymous Republican fascist Coward, Clyburn did not say what you are claiming he was quoted as saying. The WP reporter interpreted it in paraphrase to suit his own typically Washington Post Republican bias. And you are lying to say that Clyburn was quoted as saying that.
What Clyburn actually was quoted as saying:
"I think there would be enough support in that [rightwing Democrats] group to want to stay the course and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us [to easily change course in Iraq]" Clyburn said. "We, by and large, would be wise to wait on the report." [...] Clyburn said that [a generally positive report] would be "a real big problem for us."
Which the WP reporters paraphrased as:
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Mond, ay that a strongly positive report on progress on Iraq by Army Gen. David Petraeus likely would split Democrats in the House and impede his party's efforts to press for a timetable to end the war. [...] Without their [rightwing Democrats'] support, he said, Democratic leaders would find it virtually impossible to pass legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal.
Balz and Cillizza are two Republican boosters writing for the Republican corporate media Washington Post. The simple fact is that Democrats have a small (but larger than their majority margin) fifth column faction, the "Blue Dog Democrats", who vote with Republicans, and who wait for any pro-Bush propaganda Bush manufactures as excuse to vote with Republicans. Balz and Cillizza have turned that propaganda problem for the Whip, who marshals Democratic votes on bills, into a material problem for Democrats, implying that Democrats would find winning to be a problem. When the problem is that Bush, not Petraeus, is writing the report to lie about progress when it's still a worsening catastrophe.
And of course you pick up that propaganda victory and run with it, Anonymous Republican Coward. Because you are a coward. You let Bush scare you into invading, when we needed to capture Osama (where is he, anyway, tough guy?) and destroy the Taliban, who your DC boys are letting retake Afghanistan and threaten the (nuclear) Pakistan that harbors them.
I'd point out that Vietnam's fate, after we stopped propping up its fake government to massacre its people, was to next successfully defend itself from the China (now among our greatest "allies" with Pakistan) we pretended was going to engulf the world in Communism. Next Vietnam shut down the Cambodian genocide we created with our covert war there. And since then, Vietnam has finally lived in decades of peace after centuries of the colonialism your favorite US buddies (including specifically Cheney, Rumsfeld and their cronies) fought so hard (though not in person, of course, but in air-conditioned remote control offices) to keep for themselves. But lost, and lost horribly, at such terrible, irreparable cost to America. Instead of just accepting Ho Chih Minh's post-WWII plea for a Marshall Plan for SE Asia, which would have given the US the same leverage there against China that we had in Europe against Russia. But the Vietnam War was too profitable for US corporations and Cold War fearmongering to Republican cowards like you to pass up. Exactly like those same Republican mass murderers are doing with Iraq right now. I'd point it out, but what's the point? You Republican cowards can't hear the truth about the blood on your hands and the piss in your pants. You need to kill more people to distract yourselves from your record of failure.
You sick bitches have got everything about Iraq wrong, just like you alzheimers fucktards got Vietnam so horribly wrong last time around. You should never be let anywhere near decisionmaking power. O
No, I'm saying that devolving rights to "the people", when not enumerated to the United States or to the states themselves, is not exclusively "individual rights". It treats the people either collectively or distributively, as appropriate. But not exclusively distributively as the post to which I replied claimed.
Yes, you are insisting on moving the goalposts, and pretending that you're not.
You said the two parties aren't very different. I pointed out that among their differences are that Republicans tried to privatize and eliminate Social Security, while Democrats saved it. You are now trying to change the point to a completely different one, that Social Security has problems. That's a straw man. The kind of fallacious argument that Republicans are expert in, especially Bush, who very commonly fails to make some radical change, then reverses rhetoric to claim credit for the opponent's version that succeeded.
For bonus points, your actual plan is ignoring the unsupportable debt that has been propping up Bush's underperforming economy and mostly stagnant (with artifical stimulant) stock market. All of which is actually collapsing in a global wildfire right now, as global central banks flood markets with extra cheap credit in a panic to avert a total economic collapse. Even as China threatens to use its half $TRILLION in US debt holdings as a weapon against us. But none of that exists in your world, because it would make privatizing Social Security into private investments clearly suicide.
How perfectly Republican of you.
So I decline to debate any revision of Social Security with you. Because it's not an honest debate. You're not interested in working together to find ways to improve Social Security. You're waiting for me to stop defending Social Security from your attacks, so you can try to destroy it (and keep its money for your efforts).
That kind of ultra dishonest politics is why Republicans have blown the trust of America. Why Republican Party membership is plummeting into marginality: significantly less Republicans now than either Democrats or independents. Bush's approval comprised of about 75% of the Republican 31% and about 75% of the 1/3 of independents who are really Republicans but too ashamed or dishonest to admit it. Since you won't abandon that failed political rhetoric strategy, or the corporate anarchy agenda that it protects, you're not going to convince anyone to join you.
So I part with you now. I'll see you after the 2009 inauguration, when a Democratic Congress and White House have gained all the tyrannical powers Bush and his Republican Congress created. Which their corporate media trained Americans to ignore. So probably Hillary Clinton can treat her political enemies the way that Bush treated his, including the gulags in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the secret CIA torture camps flying around the world from medieval Muslim dictatorships to "New Europe" ex-soviet allies. OK, probably the CIA will remain covertly opposed to Democrats, part of some Republican plot to retake power in 2012, just like Bush Sr led the Republican Party from the Nixon near-impeachment to pick up with Reagan in 1980. Keep your fingers crossed. And kiss your country goodbye.
Of course impeachment is "political": it's proposed in Articles in the House, and tried in the Senate. Only the presence of the Chief Justice "presiding" over the Senate trial offers anything not "political", though even that presiding is by Senate rules, not the Judicial Branch rules for trials.
But "political" doesn't just mean "partisan". It means "people system". Have you ever served on a jury? It's as social as it is logical or just. Because politics and justice are just the rules by which their substance, human interactions, are conducted. Impeachment conviction does not prove legal guilt of a crime. It proves only that the convicted officer cannot hold that office. Which is a purely political consideration: even a horrendously unpopular, though innocent, ham sandwich cannot hold an office that the majorities of both Congressional chambers, in a public process acceptable to them, holds unfit to stay.
Remember that the government is defined by the Congress. The Executive's role is to merely faithfully execute Congress' stated will, with the greater expediency of a single person rather than the majority of 535 people which stated that will. Congress is in fact not the "coequal" branch many people claim when defending it. Congress is in fact the superior branch, demonstrable in many ways, perhaps most undeniably in Congressional power to override vetoes and pass laws without Executive consent, as well as the required Congressional consent to install the highest Executive officials, and even Congress' power to impeach. The Executive has no powers to match or balance those.
Congress is facing an Executive literally out of control. Whose officers routinely execute anti-Constitutional conspiracies, repeatedly violate essential laws, and ignore even Congressional subpoenas when they're not directly (and obviously) lying to Congress about these essential matters. All of which crimes are destroying essential liberties like privacy and equal treatment under law, as well as robbing the Treasury and killing people in places like New Orleans and Iraq.
The problem is not that Congress doesn't have the power. The problem is indeed politics: the partisan politics that lets Democrats sacrifice America longer so American voters make more sure that the Senate, especially, has a greater Democratic majority. The risk of backfiring is pure partisan politics. This is the politics that you're talking about. The politics that constitutes impeachment is straightforward and appropriate. As appropriate as the politics that installs these representatives by elections. And of course that is the legit politics that is also in crisis in this country over the knife's edge of partisan politics.
If Democrats do not impeach Bush/Cheney, there is never going to be a time to do it, except perhaps if a Congressional opposition majority is large enough not to be tempted into delay just to wait for a reward in the next election instead. But that scenario also makes it that much more likely that a strong and popular enough Congressional opposition majority would impeach an Executive for purely partisan politics. Impeaching on proper grounds, as we have currently, is therefore essential to saving our balanced democracy from the partisan politics that has consumed it and poisoned impeachment as a remedy.
The other way out is for the partisan competition to fail to impeach, which further alienates the electorate from the Parties. Which is already the trend: there are now significantly more independents unaffiliated with either major Party than there are Republicans. At this rate, independents could outnumber even Democrats by this November. If that alienation accelerates as a result of Democrats' "pressure cooker" campaign, Democrats will start to drop faster than they have, though the pressure cooker will force down Republicans, too. Next November could see independ
Yes, Anonymous illiterate Coward, the government. If you were to read the 2nd Amendment where it says its rationalization is because "a well regulated militia [is] necessary to the security of a free state". Just because your buddies shoot trees every weekend when you're not playing MMORPGs doesn't make you a militia.
You're not familiar with the rest of the Bill of Rights, either. Which includes freedom of assembly and the devolution of unenumerated rights to "the states" and to "the people", to name a few, none of which are "individual" rights.
In other words, you're talking gibberish, especially the part where you preposterously claim the 2nd Amendment "quite clearly" protects handguns, which practically didn't exist in the 1780s, and which absolutely are not distinguished in any way in the Amendment.
You can't even read the Constitution, or lie about it effectively, and you want unrestricted weapons? You shouldn't be let out of your mother's basement.
First of all, who says that people who oppose abortion don't donate a weekend a year volunteering with adoption or motherhood support groups? And in fact many anti-abortion folks do advocate adoption as an alternative to abortion.
I do. The number of people who do anything material to help find better lives for unwanted children is vanishingly small compared to those just shooting off their mouths. And no, there is no "up in arms" over the discarded blastocysts at fertility clinics. It's only an issue at all because it's used as a counterargument by pro-choice people. To which their antiabortion opponents casually (though of course angrily) say "yeah, that's bad too", but never do anything about it. Faith doesn't have to be logically consistent for it to be valid. That's why it's irrelevant to the law.
I say that an embryo isn't a fetus until its nervous system is developed more than a puppy's. The current 6-month cutoff covers that, with substantial margin to cover individual variation. But that's totally irrelevant to the antiabortion movement. Who say that their faith tells them that life begins at conception. A strangely genetic argument, and one that ignores the many spontaneous abortions of embryos that even implant in the uterus, but fail. Well, my faith says that god creates a soul on the first date, and any couple who fail to conceive and give it a body are murderers. Why is their faith any more important to government than mine?
When the Democrats controlled Congress, they did indeed reinvest the Social Security fund in government spending. But they didn't try to privatize it and risk it all in the stock market that's been shedding $TRILLIONS in just the last few months alone. Republicans are trying to do that, while deregulating corporate accounting and opening the floodgates to unsupportable new consumer and government debt. The two Parties' policies on Social Security couldn't be more different: Republicans actively campaign to eliminate the most popular, biggest government program that is one of our few that compares to the rest of the industrialized world. And which lets our government resist the onslaughts of corporate attacks on consumers. Republicans want it gone so they can "starve the beast", weaken the government itself so they can "drown it in a bathtub". In favor of corporate anarchy. So you should just concede this major point: you're trying to shift the goalposts to a strawman about whether Democrats borrow from Social Security, when we're talking about how Republicans privatize and target it for elimination. Extremely different, in a huge and essential program that is probably the defining difference since its founding by Democrats.
When the people who profit from the conflict but aren't exposed to its risk cannot control the rest of the people in conflict, the conflict usually ends. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is no different. But the people who benefit are too protected to be stopped at all easily.
Belief systems adapt to the environment in which they're forced to live. So long as their environment is dominated by those profiting people, they will remain under its control, and at each others' throats. It's one reason why the biggest problem in Israel/Palestine is meddling by foreigners who don't actually have to live there amidst the violence. The same model holds true for practically every other place in conflict. Cooperation is more profitable than competition. But when those forcing cooperation set those who cooperate with them against others cooperating with their competitors, the conflict is the subject of the respective cooperation. It's locked in until one of the controllers changes.
I also think it's a little unfair to suggest that people don't care about the unborn if they haven't adopted children. One person or family can only do so much on their own.
That's a copout. If your morality tells you that abortion is murder, how come you don't donate even a weekend a year helping operate an adoption system, or babysitting for a foster family? How come you're not all up in arms about the hundreds of thousands of "unborn people" discarded as blastocyst medical waste every year all across the country by fertility clinics? And how come you agree with funding "abstinence" programs that result in more teen pregnancies than the sex/contraception education they replace?
It's all a quite convenient for you to demand that women who cannot afford, whether financially or socially, to bear and raise a child should destroy their life, and the life of that child. Based on your unproveable assertion that the new embryo is a person who can be murdered, and not a medically problematic appendage like a amputatable leg.
It's also convenient for you to find that Democrats have not protected Social Security or other Gore policies, when Republicans have not only held the power monopoly trifecta since Gore's election, but have abused it to extremes, like offering the "nuclear option" to destroy minority protections. Even as Democratic resistance in Congress is the only reason Social Security is still intact, right as the rest of the Republican economy collapses under the counterproductive debt that created the illusion of even minimal growth.
Politicians do what they do because we let them get away with it. Because it works to keep them in power, with the power we give them. If you really want to talk about principles and logical consistency, you should reexamine your own even in just the propaganda you've repeated here, rather than the reality that we both know is at work.
Gun control is indeed tangential to Bush's illegal domestic spying. But I don't mind talking about it.
Another interesting, and on-topic, archaic word from the Constitution is "misdemeanors". Demeanor used to mean "leadership" as well as "publicly presented appearance". While "looking bad in public" is still a serious crime in government ("appearance of improper conduct" laws govern most ethics rules), the original sense of "misleadership" was much more weighty when the founders signed the Constitution.
Not even close to the jumps by every Republican. While Johnson did increase (as roughly measured by debt) the budget size by 60%, Eisenhower doubled it, the smallest Republican increase. Though Truman did also double the debt, but from a very small base, and including postwar reconstruction costs like the Marshall Plan and military resupply/retooling (and the Manhattan Project), which didn't really increase the size of government. Democrats more often reduced the debt than increased it, which at least shows a slower rate of government growth than Republicans. While Republicans usually multiplied the size of the debt, showing how fast (and untenably) they increased the size of the government.
There is absolutely no evidence for Republicans' defining claim that Democrats favor bigger government, and that Republicans oppose it. In fact, the evidence is to the exact opposite. Unless you're talking about the "reality" in Republican rhetoric, which proves only that bigger rhetorical lies produce bigger, less supportable Republican government.
We don't currently rule the country by the 2nd Amendment. The government necessarily infringes the "right" to bear arms in many ways, to preserve order and safety. And the militia, as such, is not necessary to the security of our free state, though I believe we'd be better off with just the National Guard as the basis for raising an army in times of declared war.
We should revise the 2nd Amendment. But the interests in unlimited guns are so strong, as demonstrated by the many crazy gun permissions and vast numbers of guns used against the security of our free state, that a new Amendment at this time would upset the wobbly balance in favor of too many irresponsible gun owners. The NRA is a lot more powerful than people like me these days.
The Americans who founded our country were not entirely like us. Many of them were actually loyalists, many more on the fence, even more just wanted their own country and less "foreign" taxes and intervention, regardless of a democratic republic. But the ones who counted were more like me. Some, like Ben Franklin, were so much more like me that they created a new kind of person, distinctly American, which is why I can be the kind of person I am.
So I won't be leaving my country. Even when people threaten me with guns. And especially not when people pretend that the current state of the Constitution, the law and politics are some pure ideal that has existed since some original Garden of Eden in a brand new America. Because people like that are not living in the real America, and have less claim to it than I do.
But I would replace the 2nd Amendment with one that says "The Congress shall have the power to regulate manufacture, ownership, exchange, possession and use of weapons; and the states shall have the power to further regulate them, except as prohibited by the Congress". Then the people could use our legislation to ensure they're properly controlled with a minimum national standard, and more specific restraints appropriate to local factors like population density, immediate threats, infrastructure for safety/training, and crises where floods of guns worsen the threat:benefit balance. For example, New Jersey could prevent weapons that don't cause a problem in Montana's conditions from entering places like Newark, unless the weapons transmit the fingerprints and GPS/timecode to the police every time they're fired. NY could require weapons in Manhattan's financial districts to contain "lojacks" that police can disable with a radio signal. Nevada could make huge expanses of desert into gun ranges where anything goes, short of radioactive or geological-caliber energy.
And I would require all Americans who ever receive any government funding, including public education or healthcare as a child or any tax deductions, to fulfill a national service requriement. Something like 1-2 years spent in either the military or other organized volunteer organization (military default, exceptions granted to fill demand by other orgs like EMT/fire etc). Everyone, regardless of which service, would receive weapons training. Without passing weapons proficiency exams, they could not get a weapon license.
Weapons are not the problem. People, as always, are the problem. But they become a problem when they have weapons they can't handle responsibly. By default, people cannot handle weapons responsibly, no matter how much an inactive militia might benefit, however much an overwhelmed militia might benefit the security of our free state if it replaced our standing army. So our regulations of weapons, really of people's use of weapons, must reflect what we now know in our modern society. That the state must ensure that we are safe from people with weapons much more often that those people can offer security to our state.
I'm not a "Liberal" or a "Conservative", I'm a person who understands how people can live together.
I support limited firearms ownership, at least as limited as drivers licenses.
"Abortion on demand" is a propaganda term. I support abortions at a woman's discretion, under advice and care of doctors who counsel the risks, costs and benefits. I notice that people who say "abortion on demand" ignore the risks and costs of illegal abortions, and don't adopt many children they claim to care so much about.
Of course I support gay marriage. If your church rejects it, that's their business. But there's absolutely no reason that people shouldn't have the right to marry whichever consenting, unmarried adult they choose.
The difference between DC Republicans and Democrats is as stark as that between Bush and Gore, who others also said were no different. Iraq, Greenhouse pollution, Social Security lockbox - an endless list of critical differences. That are still different.
These issues are not political slogans. They're other real people's lives, which so many people treat like a videogame, blasting them away in the distance on their screens. That is truly sad, for all concerned.
We have the natural right to go places. So everyone must have the natural right to drive any vehicle anywhere without government restraint, right?
Except that vehicles are dangerous. So we limit their use to enable the maximum freedom to use them, while minimizing their threat to other people's rights to life, safety and property.
Guns are even more dangerous. Even more rarely needed to protect our rights to safety. But you don't want them requiring at least the same licensing restrictions that cars require?
Natural persons have rights that are fairly well balanced when we have mutual expectations and don't accumulate more power to exploit them in one person more than another. Technology, like cars, telephones, guns, even computers - anything that exaggerates some human capacities without scaling up all of them, including our capacity to limit ourselves, needs special consideration as a privilege, even when it is rightfully used. Cars are a good example, because failing to regulate them has undeniable consequences. Guns are the same, but centuries of people ignoring their problems has made it much harder to see them clearly.
And you don't understand what power Bush now has with his unrestricted domestic spying operations.
Moderation -1
100% Offtopic
Secret TrollMods don't even know the topic is Bush's unlimited power of unrestricted domestic spying operations, and what we have to do to stop him and his successors.
"Regulated" did indeed mean "supplied", as supplies of military materiel came from the king "regulus". The meaning of "regular" in "standard without exception" is also from the same: "as according to the king".
I think the 2nd Amendment is full of puns that tweak the king's discarded power. They used a word that said the power of the army to secure the free state would come not from the divine right of kings, but from people bringing their own guns.
Although the Constitution also states in Article II.8 that Congress has the power to create, fund and specify the rules of operation/behavior for armies and navies.
Though a strict constitutionalist would say that those rules should respect the construction of the rest of the Constitution, and write those rules to constitute those armed forces only during wartime. That only after Congress has declared war can the United States deploy those military forces. Just like in the Revolution, the US should support with state militias the "Continental Army", and disband it immediately at war's end, when Congress ratifies the peace. FWIW, the president's job as Commander in Chief is solely to execute the rules and policies written by Congress.
We are a long way away from that setup. And we suffer from the very problems that the founders discussed any country with our current setup - like England - would have.
You are a retard. You are measuring whether something has happened by whether it's reported in the corporate mass media.
Now you're telling me that the FISA Court is running "blatant administration bashing". Because it favors the ACLU, which protects your rights.
You don't deserve the liberty we're fighting for you to keep. But we have to drag you along with the rest of us, because liberty is universal. Even retards like you have inalienable rights, though you are aggressively giving them away.
Now shut up and let the Americans save your cowardly slave ass.
Switzerland also makes military membership and training mandatory. If every American were required to spend 1-2 years before age 25 in a military service (or other national service, but all including weapons training), we might find out whether we can handle guns. As it is, we should at least require people who hold gun licenses to demonstrate proficiency before letting them think they can just shoot wildly when they get excited enough to pull a trigger.
If you think an armed rebellion would stand up for more than a week against government forces, you don't know anything about what happened to all the various armed rebellion groups in the 1960s-80s that the government utterly destroyed. And you don't understand what power Bush now has with his unrestricted domestic spying operations.
The Constitution has all kinds of unprecedented guarantees in it. The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, is a reiteration of explicit protections from intrusion that are merely implicit in the rest of the Constitution. Which starts with people creating a government with no powers, then enumerating them.
But the Second Amendment is unique among the others in including an (awkwardly worded) justification for its guarantee. It was flawed from the start. But it does explicitly scope the basis for an uninfringed right to bear arms to supplying a militia, which was distinct from a national army. And since a well-supplied militia is not necessary to the free state in which we live, unless you also think we should disband the standing army and stop buying it weapons, the basis of the noninfringement is gone. While the basis for restricting the weapons is well established. And is the law all over the country.
The Constitution has been revised plenty of times since the Bill of Rights. Some revisions don't just spell out rights, but have removed some government restrictions and powers. The Second Amendment has survived intact, though experience has shown it to be fundamentally flawed, because its supporters have too much power. They have the guns, for starters, and base their rhetoric on fear. Far from everyone has the right to as many guns as they can afford. We need a better protection of our limited natural entitlement gun ownership that recognizes that it's more of a privilege, like a driver's license, than any kind of natural exercise of the human powers with which we are created.
Let's see your facts instead of your unsupported rant. Just like an Anonymous Bush worshipper Coward to do (poorly) exactly what you criticize most.
If liberals would do "anything", they'd just impeach him on the mountain of evidence of his many crimes. Like the many FISA violations a Federal court already decided Bush violated again and again, and now the FISA Court itself is trying to stop with the action we're discussing in this story. Are you ready now to say that the FISA Court is "liberal" and just out to get Bush?
And how easily you pisspants Republican cowards morph from talking about how Bush illegally spies on Americans into your demented "support the troops: keep killing them". No one is rooting for Americans to lose. Some of us are pointing out that they have already lost, as is perfectly clear, because they were run into the ground by the Bush regime you worship. This isn't a fucking Cubs game, you obnoxious Anonymous bloodthirsty Coward. Your stupid insanity is killing American troops for nothing, and making us less safe every day.
Like thinking that pointing out a problem that has to be solved by stopping its perpetuation is somehow rooting for the problem. How do you manage to even brush your teeth with insanity like that ruling your brain? I bet you don't.
Quoting a Washington Republican Post writer predicting problems for Democrats is just the kind of stupid Republican faceplant that is keeping this war going, well after it's hopeless.
And claiming that liberals believe the US is the greatest evil in the world is more of the same denial projection you broken "Conservatives" can't help but spew. Since you've attacked all the freedom and rights protection that makes this country the best, while scrambling to find someone standing up for them to blame it on.
Your factfree post is a sniveling example of why you Conservatives must never be allowed to wield any power in America ever again. Your "Conservative Revolution" has thrown this country low. I bet you've got a similar insane rant insisting that we must torture anyone who gets near our roundup crews.
You're a Coward. Not just an Anonymous Coward, but a scared baby who will do anything so the big men who say "boo" will tell you you're "strong". Just get out of the way already and let the adults run the country. We might have a chance to save it so you can live in it a free man. Not the abject slave you and your Bush regime have worked so hard to lower us all to.
Hundreds of millions of Americans owning guns hasn't made us more secure. It's made us less secure, more vulnerable to gun violence. And to police, who now have an excuse to shoot because so many people have guns. More guns means less liberty and less security.
Meanwhile, the 2nd Amendment just ensures that a necessary militia be well supplied so the government doesn't have to maintain a standing army or pay to arm it. We've replaced the militias (like the one in which Jefferson served in the Revolution) with a huge standing army that has let presidents pick so many fights and raided the Treasury so much for so long that it threatens the security of our free state exactly like the founders predicted and expected to avoid with that Amendment.
When gun fetishists start insisting we drop the standing army the founders tried to avoid, they'll get more respect from me than now, when they demand no limits on ownership of one of the most unsafe products ever invented.
So whenever it comes down to it, I want (and often have) solutions to real problems. Unless the problem is "how can we have even more guns, even less liberty, and even less security". Which seems to be your problem.
When someone figures out how to package these apps in an installer that can be just "clicked" (or tapped, or slid... what exactly is the operative gesture on an iPhone?), the iPhone will finally arrive as a platform, not just a product.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you're totally wrong about Vietnam, and have been totally wrong about Iraq, "shut up" is all you get.
You're a bloodthirsty Anonymous Coward with only a perverted sense of history. Next you'll be telling me that Dixie really won the "War of Northern Aggression".
You're increasingly irrelevant as Americans no longer care about your lies, and your idiotic president's time controlling Iraq is finally drawing to a close.
So "shut up" is all you rate. You should feel lucky anyone bothers to notice your yapping at all.
So we should have stayed in Vietnam and lost even worse there too, right, Anonymous loser Coward?
The "good news" propagandized in that WP article is a lie that the White House has already written, regardless of who signs it. But that doesn't penetrate to your shit-scared brain, because all you want to hear is Republican lies, rather than the brutal reality of the butchery you re responsible for, you and the Republicans you worship.
You Republicans have already lost in Iraq. You've taken the greatest army ever assembled, and wasted it on an impossible task: forcing Iraq to work, after destroying it, and ignoring everything wrong with it. Everything that everyone outside the Republican Party told you would make it impossible. But you failed, and destroyed Iraq, and have destroyed much of America, too. And somehow that's the fault of the people who tried to stop you.
You have no standing to say anything worth hearing about war. You act like it's a videogame. How come you are not fighting in Iraq? Because it's "somebody else's problem", right?
I've been to the Mideast. I've spent time in Egypt, Israel and Turkey. I was headed to Iran before you assholes blew up the world. I was headed to India before you assholes let Osama attack us. I've been to dozens of foreign countries, even lived for years abroad. So shut up. Really. SHUT UP. Your endless running your coward mouth, repeating the nonsense your Republicans pump you on your talkradio and cable "news" shows are all just TV bullshit, not reality.
You want to impress me, go fight in Iraq. Of course you won't - you're a coward. So just shut up while we clean up after the mess you baby elephants have left wherever you've grabbed the power. And watch as we protect you from the hornets nest you insisted on kicking the last 6 years.
Coward.
What Clyburn actually was quoted as saying:
Which the WP reporters paraphrased as:
Balz and Cillizza are two Republican boosters writing for the Republican corporate media Washington Post. The simple fact is that Democrats have a small (but larger than their majority margin) fifth column faction, the "Blue Dog Democrats", who vote with Republicans, and who wait for any pro-Bush propaganda Bush manufactures as excuse to vote with Republicans. Balz and Cillizza have turned that propaganda problem for the Whip, who marshals Democratic votes on bills, into a material problem for Democrats, implying that Democrats would find winning to be a problem. When the problem is that Bush, not Petraeus, is writing the report to lie about progress when it's still a worsening catastrophe.
And of course you pick up that propaganda victory and run with it, Anonymous Republican Coward. Because you are a coward. You let Bush scare you into invading, when we needed to capture Osama (where is he, anyway, tough guy?) and destroy the Taliban, who your DC boys are letting retake Afghanistan and threaten the (nuclear) Pakistan that harbors them.
I'd point out that Vietnam's fate, after we stopped propping up its fake government to massacre its people, was to next successfully defend itself from the China (now among our greatest "allies" with Pakistan) we pretended was going to engulf the world in Communism. Next Vietnam shut down the Cambodian genocide we created with our covert war there. And since then, Vietnam has finally lived in decades of peace after centuries of the colonialism your favorite US buddies (including specifically Cheney, Rumsfeld and their cronies) fought so hard (though not in person, of course, but in air-conditioned remote control offices) to keep for themselves. But lost, and lost horribly, at such terrible, irreparable cost to America. Instead of just accepting Ho Chih Minh's post-WWII plea for a Marshall Plan for SE Asia, which would have given the US the same leverage there against China that we had in Europe against Russia. But the Vietnam War was too profitable for US corporations and Cold War fearmongering to Republican cowards like you to pass up. Exactly like those same Republican mass murderers are doing with Iraq right now. I'd point it out, but what's the point? You Republican cowards can't hear the truth about the blood on your hands and the piss in your pants. You need to kill more people to distract yourselves from your record of failure.
You sick bitches have got everything about Iraq wrong, just like you alzheimers fucktards got Vietnam so horribly wrong last time around. You should never be let anywhere near decisionmaking power. O
No, I'm saying that devolving rights to "the people", when not enumerated to the United States or to the states themselves, is not exclusively "individual rights". It treats the people either collectively or distributively, as appropriate. But not exclusively distributively as the post to which I replied claimed.
Yes, you are insisting on moving the goalposts, and pretending that you're not.
You said the two parties aren't very different. I pointed out that among their differences are that Republicans tried to privatize and eliminate Social Security, while Democrats saved it. You are now trying to change the point to a completely different one, that Social Security has problems. That's a straw man. The kind of fallacious argument that Republicans are expert in, especially Bush, who very commonly fails to make some radical change, then reverses rhetoric to claim credit for the opponent's version that succeeded.
For bonus points, your actual plan is ignoring the unsupportable debt that has been propping up Bush's underperforming economy and mostly stagnant (with artifical stimulant) stock market. All of which is actually collapsing in a global wildfire right now, as global central banks flood markets with extra cheap credit in a panic to avert a total economic collapse. Even as China threatens to use its half $TRILLION in US debt holdings as a weapon against us. But none of that exists in your world, because it would make privatizing Social Security into private investments clearly suicide.
How perfectly Republican of you.
So I decline to debate any revision of Social Security with you. Because it's not an honest debate. You're not interested in working together to find ways to improve Social Security. You're waiting for me to stop defending Social Security from your attacks, so you can try to destroy it (and keep its money for your efforts).
That kind of ultra dishonest politics is why Republicans have blown the trust of America. Why Republican Party membership is plummeting into marginality: significantly less Republicans now than either Democrats or independents. Bush's approval comprised of about 75% of the Republican 31% and about 75% of the 1/3 of independents who are really Republicans but too ashamed or dishonest to admit it. Since you won't abandon that failed political rhetoric strategy, or the corporate anarchy agenda that it protects, you're not going to convince anyone to join you.
So I part with you now. I'll see you after the 2009 inauguration, when a Democratic Congress and White House have gained all the tyrannical powers Bush and his Republican Congress created. Which their corporate media trained Americans to ignore. So probably Hillary Clinton can treat her political enemies the way that Bush treated his, including the gulags in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the secret CIA torture camps flying around the world from medieval Muslim dictatorships to "New Europe" ex-soviet allies. OK, probably the CIA will remain covertly opposed to Democrats, part of some Republican plot to retake power in 2012, just like Bush Sr led the Republican Party from the Nixon near-impeachment to pick up with Reagan in 1980. Keep your fingers crossed. And kiss your country goodbye.
Of course impeachment is "political": it's proposed in Articles in the House, and tried in the Senate. Only the presence of the Chief Justice "presiding" over the Senate trial offers anything not "political", though even that presiding is by Senate rules, not the Judicial Branch rules for trials.
But "political" doesn't just mean "partisan". It means "people system". Have you ever served on a jury? It's as social as it is logical or just. Because politics and justice are just the rules by which their substance, human interactions, are conducted. Impeachment conviction does not prove legal guilt of a crime. It proves only that the convicted officer cannot hold that office. Which is a purely political consideration: even a horrendously unpopular, though innocent, ham sandwich cannot hold an office that the majorities of both Congressional chambers, in a public process acceptable to them, holds unfit to stay.
Remember that the government is defined by the Congress. The Executive's role is to merely faithfully execute Congress' stated will, with the greater expediency of a single person rather than the majority of 535 people which stated that will. Congress is in fact not the "coequal" branch many people claim when defending it. Congress is in fact the superior branch, demonstrable in many ways, perhaps most undeniably in Congressional power to override vetoes and pass laws without Executive consent, as well as the required Congressional consent to install the highest Executive officials, and even Congress' power to impeach. The Executive has no powers to match or balance those.
Congress is facing an Executive literally out of control. Whose officers routinely execute anti-Constitutional conspiracies, repeatedly violate essential laws, and ignore even Congressional subpoenas when they're not directly (and obviously) lying to Congress about these essential matters. All of which crimes are destroying essential liberties like privacy and equal treatment under law, as well as robbing the Treasury and killing people in places like New Orleans and Iraq.
The problem is not that Congress doesn't have the power. The problem is indeed politics: the partisan politics that lets Democrats sacrifice America longer so American voters make more sure that the Senate, especially, has a greater Democratic majority. The risk of backfiring is pure partisan politics. This is the politics that you're talking about. The politics that constitutes impeachment is straightforward and appropriate. As appropriate as the politics that installs these representatives by elections. And of course that is the legit politics that is also in crisis in this country over the knife's edge of partisan politics.
If Democrats do not impeach Bush/Cheney, there is never going to be a time to do it, except perhaps if a Congressional opposition majority is large enough not to be tempted into delay just to wait for a reward in the next election instead. But that scenario also makes it that much more likely that a strong and popular enough Congressional opposition majority would impeach an Executive for purely partisan politics. Impeaching on proper grounds, as we have currently, is therefore essential to saving our balanced democracy from the partisan politics that has consumed it and poisoned impeachment as a remedy.
The other way out is for the partisan competition to fail to impeach, which further alienates the electorate from the Parties. Which is already the trend: there are now significantly more independents unaffiliated with either major Party than there are Republicans. At this rate, independents could outnumber even Democrats by this November. If that alienation accelerates as a result of Democrats' "pressure cooker" campaign, Democrats will start to drop faster than they have, though the pressure cooker will force down Republicans, too. Next November could see independ
Yes, Anonymous illiterate Coward, the government. If you were to read the 2nd Amendment where it says its rationalization is because "a well regulated militia [is] necessary to the security of a free state". Just because your buddies shoot trees every weekend when you're not playing MMORPGs doesn't make you a militia.
You're not familiar with the rest of the Bill of Rights, either. Which includes freedom of assembly and the devolution of unenumerated rights to "the states" and to "the people", to name a few, none of which are "individual" rights.
In other words, you're talking gibberish, especially the part where you preposterously claim the 2nd Amendment "quite clearly" protects handguns, which practically didn't exist in the 1780s, and which absolutely are not distinguished in any way in the Amendment.
You can't even read the Constitution, or lie about it effectively, and you want unrestricted weapons? You shouldn't be let out of your mother's basement.
I do. The number of people who do anything material to help find better lives for unwanted children is vanishingly small compared to those just shooting off their mouths. And no, there is no "up in arms" over the discarded blastocysts at fertility clinics. It's only an issue at all because it's used as a counterargument by pro-choice people. To which their antiabortion opponents casually (though of course angrily) say "yeah, that's bad too", but never do anything about it. Faith doesn't have to be logically consistent for it to be valid. That's why it's irrelevant to the law.
I say that an embryo isn't a fetus until its nervous system is developed more than a puppy's. The current 6-month cutoff covers that, with substantial margin to cover individual variation. But that's totally irrelevant to the antiabortion movement. Who say that their faith tells them that life begins at conception. A strangely genetic argument, and one that ignores the many spontaneous abortions of embryos that even implant in the uterus, but fail. Well, my faith says that god creates a soul on the first date, and any couple who fail to conceive and give it a body are murderers. Why is their faith any more important to government than mine?
When the Democrats controlled Congress, they did indeed reinvest the Social Security fund in government spending. But they didn't try to privatize it and risk it all in the stock market that's been shedding $TRILLIONS in just the last few months alone. Republicans are trying to do that, while deregulating corporate accounting and opening the floodgates to unsupportable new consumer and government debt. The two Parties' policies on Social Security couldn't be more different: Republicans actively campaign to eliminate the most popular, biggest government program that is one of our few that compares to the rest of the industrialized world. And which lets our government resist the onslaughts of corporate attacks on consumers. Republicans want it gone so they can "starve the beast", weaken the government itself so they can "drown it in a bathtub". In favor of corporate anarchy. So you should just concede this major point: you're trying to shift the goalposts to a strawman about whether Democrats borrow from Social Security, when we're talking about how Republicans privatize and target it for elimination. Extremely different, in a huge and essential program that is probably the defining difference since its founding by Democrats.
When the people who profit from the conflict but aren't exposed to its risk cannot control the rest of the people in conflict, the conflict usually ends. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is no different. But the people who benefit are too protected to be stopped at all easily.
Belief systems adapt to the environment in which they're forced to live. So long as their environment is dominated by those profiting people, they will remain under its control, and at each others' throats. It's one reason why the biggest problem in Israel/Palestine is meddling by foreigners who don't actually have to live there amidst the violence. The same model holds true for practically every other place in conflict. Cooperation is more profitable than competition. But when those forcing cooperation set those who cooperate with them against others cooperating with their competitors, the conflict is the subject of the respective cooperation. It's locked in until one of the controllers changes.
That's a copout. If your morality tells you that abortion is murder, how come you don't donate even a weekend a year helping operate an adoption system, or babysitting for a foster family? How come you're not all up in arms about the hundreds of thousands of "unborn people" discarded as blastocyst medical waste every year all across the country by fertility clinics? And how come you agree with funding "abstinence" programs that result in more teen pregnancies than the sex/contraception education they replace?
It's all a quite convenient for you to demand that women who cannot afford, whether financially or socially, to bear and raise a child should destroy their life, and the life of that child. Based on your unproveable assertion that the new embryo is a person who can be murdered, and not a medically problematic appendage like a amputatable leg.
It's also convenient for you to find that Democrats have not protected Social Security or other Gore policies, when Republicans have not only held the power monopoly trifecta since Gore's election, but have abused it to extremes, like offering the "nuclear option" to destroy minority protections. Even as Democratic resistance in Congress is the only reason Social Security is still intact, right as the rest of the Republican economy collapses under the counterproductive debt that created the illusion of even minimal growth.
Politicians do what they do because we let them get away with it. Because it works to keep them in power, with the power we give them. If you really want to talk about principles and logical consistency, you should reexamine your own even in just the propaganda you've repeated here, rather than the reality that we both know is at work.
Gun control is indeed tangential to Bush's illegal domestic spying. But I don't mind talking about it.
Another interesting, and on-topic, archaic word from the Constitution is "misdemeanors". Demeanor used to mean "leadership" as well as "publicly presented appearance". While "looking bad in public" is still a serious crime in government ("appearance of improper conduct" laws govern most ethics rules), the original sense of "misleadership" was much more weighty when the founders signed the Constitution.
Bush can be impeached for his well-documented crimes of misleadership, if not for his mountain of evidence of "appearance of improper conduct".
Not even close to the jumps by every Republican. While Johnson did increase (as roughly measured by debt) the budget size by 60%, Eisenhower doubled it, the smallest Republican increase. Though Truman did also double the debt, but from a very small base, and including postwar reconstruction costs like the Marshall Plan and military resupply/retooling (and the Manhattan Project), which didn't really increase the size of government. Democrats more often reduced the debt than increased it, which at least shows a slower rate of government growth than Republicans. While Republicans usually multiplied the size of the debt, showing how fast (and untenably) they increased the size of the government.
There is absolutely no evidence for Republicans' defining claim that Democrats favor bigger government, and that Republicans oppose it. In fact, the evidence is to the exact opposite. Unless you're talking about the "reality" in Republican rhetoric, which proves only that bigger rhetorical lies produce bigger, less supportable Republican government.
We don't currently rule the country by the 2nd Amendment. The government necessarily infringes the "right" to bear arms in many ways, to preserve order and safety. And the militia, as such, is not necessary to the security of our free state, though I believe we'd be better off with just the National Guard as the basis for raising an army in times of declared war.
We should revise the 2nd Amendment. But the interests in unlimited guns are so strong, as demonstrated by the many crazy gun permissions and vast numbers of guns used against the security of our free state, that a new Amendment at this time would upset the wobbly balance in favor of too many irresponsible gun owners. The NRA is a lot more powerful than people like me these days.
The Americans who founded our country were not entirely like us. Many of them were actually loyalists, many more on the fence, even more just wanted their own country and less "foreign" taxes and intervention, regardless of a democratic republic. But the ones who counted were more like me. Some, like Ben Franklin, were so much more like me that they created a new kind of person, distinctly American, which is why I can be the kind of person I am.
So I won't be leaving my country. Even when people threaten me with guns. And especially not when people pretend that the current state of the Constitution, the law and politics are some pure ideal that has existed since some original Garden of Eden in a brand new America. Because people like that are not living in the real America, and have less claim to it than I do.
But I would replace the 2nd Amendment with one that says "The Congress shall have the power to regulate manufacture, ownership, exchange, possession and use of weapons; and the states shall have the power to further regulate them, except as prohibited by the Congress". Then the people could use our legislation to ensure they're properly controlled with a minimum national standard, and more specific restraints appropriate to local factors like population density, immediate threats, infrastructure for safety/training, and crises where floods of guns worsen the threat:benefit balance. For example, New Jersey could prevent weapons that don't cause a problem in Montana's conditions from entering places like Newark, unless the weapons transmit the fingerprints and GPS/timecode to the police every time they're fired. NY could require weapons in Manhattan's financial districts to contain "lojacks" that police can disable with a radio signal. Nevada could make huge expanses of desert into gun ranges where anything goes, short of radioactive or geological-caliber energy.
And I would require all Americans who ever receive any government funding, including public education or healthcare as a child or any tax deductions, to fulfill a national service requriement. Something like 1-2 years spent in either the military or other organized volunteer organization (military default, exceptions granted to fill demand by other orgs like EMT/fire etc). Everyone, regardless of which service, would receive weapons training. Without passing weapons proficiency exams, they could not get a weapon license.
Weapons are not the problem. People, as always, are the problem. But they become a problem when they have weapons they can't handle responsibly. By default, people cannot handle weapons responsibly, no matter how much an inactive militia might benefit, however much an overwhelmed militia might benefit the security of our free state if it replaced our standing army. So our regulations of weapons, really of people's use of weapons, must reflect what we now know in our modern society. That the state must ensure that we are safe from people with weapons much more often that those people can offer security to our state.
I'm not a "Liberal" or a "Conservative", I'm a person who understands how people can live together.
I support limited firearms ownership, at least as limited as drivers licenses.
"Abortion on demand" is a propaganda term. I support abortions at a woman's discretion, under advice and care of doctors who counsel the risks, costs and benefits. I notice that people who say "abortion on demand" ignore the risks and costs of illegal abortions, and don't adopt many children they claim to care so much about.
Of course I support gay marriage. If your church rejects it, that's their business. But there's absolutely no reason that people shouldn't have the right to marry whichever consenting, unmarried adult they choose.
The difference between DC Republicans and Democrats is as stark as that between Bush and Gore, who others also said were no different. Iraq, Greenhouse pollution, Social Security lockbox - an endless list of critical differences. That are still different.
These issues are not political slogans. They're other real people's lives, which so many people treat like a videogame, blasting them away in the distance on their screens. That is truly sad, for all concerned.
We have the natural right to go places. So everyone must have the natural right to drive any vehicle anywhere without government restraint, right?
Except that vehicles are dangerous. So we limit their use to enable the maximum freedom to use them, while minimizing their threat to other people's rights to life, safety and property.
Guns are even more dangerous. Even more rarely needed to protect our rights to safety. But you don't want them requiring at least the same licensing restrictions that cars require?
Natural persons have rights that are fairly well balanced when we have mutual expectations and don't accumulate more power to exploit them in one person more than another. Technology, like cars, telephones, guns, even computers - anything that exaggerates some human capacities without scaling up all of them, including our capacity to limit ourselves, needs special consideration as a privilege, even when it is rightfully used. Cars are a good example, because failing to regulate them has undeniable consequences. Guns are the same, but centuries of people ignoring their problems has made it much harder to see them clearly.
Moderation -1
100% Offtopic
Secret TrollMods don't even know the topic is Bush's unlimited power of unrestricted domestic spying operations, and what we have to do to stop him and his successors.
"Regulated" did indeed mean "supplied", as supplies of military materiel came from the king "regulus". The meaning of "regular" in "standard without exception" is also from the same: "as according to the king".
I think the 2nd Amendment is full of puns that tweak the king's discarded power. They used a word that said the power of the army to secure the free state would come not from the divine right of kings, but from people bringing their own guns.
That is entirely the point.
Although the Constitution also states in Article II.8 that Congress has the power to create, fund and specify the rules of operation/behavior for armies and navies.
Though a strict constitutionalist would say that those rules should respect the construction of the rest of the Constitution, and write those rules to constitute those armed forces only during wartime. That only after Congress has declared war can the United States deploy those military forces. Just like in the Revolution, the US should support with state militias the "Continental Army", and disband it immediately at war's end, when Congress ratifies the peace. FWIW, the president's job as Commander in Chief is solely to execute the rules and policies written by Congress.
We are a long way away from that setup. And we suffer from the very problems that the founders discussed any country with our current setup - like England - would have.
You are a retard. You are measuring whether something has happened by whether it's reported in the corporate mass media.
Now you're telling me that the FISA Court is running "blatant administration bashing". Because it favors the ACLU, which protects your rights.
You don't deserve the liberty we're fighting for you to keep. But we have to drag you along with the rest of us, because liberty is universal. Even retards like you have inalienable rights, though you are aggressively giving them away.
Now shut up and let the Americans save your cowardly slave ass.
May your mind someday be chained to the reality your body and typing fingers inhabit.
Switzerland also makes military membership and training mandatory. If every American were required to spend 1-2 years before age 25 in a military service (or other national service, but all including weapons training), we might find out whether we can handle guns. As it is, we should at least require people who hold gun licenses to demonstrate proficiency before letting them think they can just shoot wildly when they get excited enough to pull a trigger.
If you think an armed rebellion would stand up for more than a week against government forces, you don't know anything about what happened to all the various armed rebellion groups in the 1960s-80s that the government utterly destroyed. And you don't understand what power Bush now has with his unrestricted domestic spying operations.
The Constitution has all kinds of unprecedented guarantees in it. The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, is a reiteration of explicit protections from intrusion that are merely implicit in the rest of the Constitution. Which starts with people creating a government with no powers, then enumerating them.
But the Second Amendment is unique among the others in including an (awkwardly worded) justification for its guarantee. It was flawed from the start. But it does explicitly scope the basis for an uninfringed right to bear arms to supplying a militia, which was distinct from a national army. And since a well-supplied militia is not necessary to the free state in which we live, unless you also think we should disband the standing army and stop buying it weapons, the basis of the noninfringement is gone. While the basis for restricting the weapons is well established. And is the law all over the country.
The Constitution has been revised plenty of times since the Bill of Rights. Some revisions don't just spell out rights, but have removed some government restrictions and powers. The Second Amendment has survived intact, though experience has shown it to be fundamentally flawed, because its supporters have too much power. They have the guns, for starters, and base their rhetoric on fear. Far from everyone has the right to as many guns as they can afford. We need a better protection of our limited natural entitlement gun ownership that recognizes that it's more of a privilege, like a driver's license, than any kind of natural exercise of the human powers with which we are created.
Let's see your facts instead of your unsupported rant. Just like an Anonymous Bush worshipper Coward to do (poorly) exactly what you criticize most.
If liberals would do "anything", they'd just impeach him on the mountain of evidence of his many crimes. Like the many FISA violations a Federal court already decided Bush violated again and again, and now the FISA Court itself is trying to stop with the action we're discussing in this story. Are you ready now to say that the FISA Court is "liberal" and just out to get Bush?
And how easily you pisspants Republican cowards morph from talking about how Bush illegally spies on Americans into your demented "support the troops: keep killing them". No one is rooting for Americans to lose. Some of us are pointing out that they have already lost, as is perfectly clear, because they were run into the ground by the Bush regime you worship. This isn't a fucking Cubs game, you obnoxious Anonymous bloodthirsty Coward. Your stupid insanity is killing American troops for nothing, and making us less safe every day.
Like thinking that pointing out a problem that has to be solved by stopping its perpetuation is somehow rooting for the problem. How do you manage to even brush your teeth with insanity like that ruling your brain? I bet you don't.
Quoting a Washington Republican Post writer predicting problems for Democrats is just the kind of stupid Republican faceplant that is keeping this war going, well after it's hopeless.
And claiming that liberals believe the US is the greatest evil in the world is more of the same denial projection you broken "Conservatives" can't help but spew. Since you've attacked all the freedom and rights protection that makes this country the best, while scrambling to find someone standing up for them to blame it on.
Your factfree post is a sniveling example of why you Conservatives must never be allowed to wield any power in America ever again. Your "Conservative Revolution" has thrown this country low. I bet you've got a similar insane rant insisting that we must torture anyone who gets near our roundup crews.
You're a Coward. Not just an Anonymous Coward, but a scared baby who will do anything so the big men who say "boo" will tell you you're "strong". Just get out of the way already and let the adults run the country. We might have a chance to save it so you can live in it a free man. Not the abject slave you and your Bush regime have worked so hard to lower us all to.
Hundreds of millions of Americans owning guns hasn't made us more secure. It's made us less secure, more vulnerable to gun violence. And to police, who now have an excuse to shoot because so many people have guns. More guns means less liberty and less security.
Meanwhile, the 2nd Amendment just ensures that a necessary militia be well supplied so the government doesn't have to maintain a standing army or pay to arm it. We've replaced the militias (like the one in which Jefferson served in the Revolution) with a huge standing army that has let presidents pick so many fights and raided the Treasury so much for so long that it threatens the security of our free state exactly like the founders predicted and expected to avoid with that Amendment.
When gun fetishists start insisting we drop the standing army the founders tried to avoid, they'll get more respect from me than now, when they demand no limits on ownership of one of the most unsafe products ever invented.
So whenever it comes down to it, I want (and often have) solutions to real problems. Unless the problem is "how can we have even more guns, even less liberty, and even less security". Which seems to be your problem.
When someone figures out how to package these apps in an installer that can be just "clicked" (or tapped, or slid... what exactly is the operative gesture on an iPhone?), the iPhone will finally arrive as a platform, not just a product.