Those facts, combined the fact that he's the N-word, and enough hearsay and outright lies, are enough for most people to jump on this "Obama Is A Muslim Terrorist Trying To Dismantle The USA Or At Least It's Plausible Enough To Me That I'm Scared To Vote For Him" wagon.
To be fair, most of the people buying into this have a difficult time distinguishing 24 from reality. This is also why they support torture.
The very idea of "conservative", in the modern American context, refers specifically to the coalition between business interests, war hawks, and evangelical Christians. Huckabee and Romney aren't any more "conservative" than McCain--Huckabee is an evangelical preacher with no particular national security qualifications and a less-than-conservative record on business and taxes, Romney is a Mormon businessman with no national security qualifications, and McCain is a war hawk with moderate tendencies on taxes and business and no particular regard for the religious right. The very idea of conservatism is what's at stake in this Republican nomination.
Maybe that's his plan, but it sort of defeats the purpouse of having a gold standard if you arbitrarily raise the value of your bedrock commodity.
That's exactly how the gold standard works! As a result of the gold standard, gold is considered more valuable because it is legal tender. Gold is just another form of fiat currency, albeit one that requires more effort to mine and store. Instead of artificially raising the value of gold by using gold as legal tender, some very clever people figured out that you could artifically raise the value of sheets of cloth paper with paintings of dead presidents printed on them, and it serves the same purpose without the market distortion caused by using a real commodity as legal tender.
If Huckabee were to withdraw, Romney would have a better chance.
I've never understood this reasoning. Huckabee and Romney attract significantly different parts of the Republican base: Huckabee attracts evangelical Christians and Romney attracts pro-business types. (McCain attracts war hawks.) The interesting point here is that these are the three basic parts of the Republican coalition, but instead of a single candidate going after all three parts, each has its own champion.
I've met lots of girls who played rugby. Only one who ever played football. Anyway, our men play football because we leave rugby and soccer to our girls.
It's not just Fat Tuesday, it's Super Tuesday: as of Tuesday half of the delegates to each presidential primary will be selected, and it's not impossible that we will have the winning candidates all but certain.
Naismith was indeed Canadian, but the game of basketball was invented in a Massachusetts YMCA. And, nobody really thinks of basketball as a Canadian sport (unlike ice hockey, which probably was invented in Canada and maintains a large Canadian fanbase).
Baseball is quite popular in places like Japan and Latin America--Latin America by the regional absorption and Japan because MacArthur introduced it to them. (Likewise, I'm sure cricket is popular in India and Pakistan because they picked it up from the British colonial authority.) So one reason is probably that the United States didn't conquer enough countries to spread its sports around.
Basketball (the big US sport you left out) is slowly spreading around the world too, although our National Basketball Association still outclasses any other league in the world. (In basketball, I'd guess that the average NBA team could easily beat any other country's national champion. In soccer, pitting national champions against each other makes for the best and most-watched games.)
But football is an interesting one. American and Canadian football evolved from rugby football, which like association football at the time, was just called "football". It's a fallacy, incidentally, that association football is called "football" because it involves kicking--in reality, "football" was originally coined to refer to games played on foot, as opposed to the horseback sports that the upper class participated in.
Anyway, rugby football in America and Canada evolved differently than it did in England, and ultimately North America ended up with a game that had down-and-distance rules.
As for soccer, we Americans have a slightly different perspective. More of us are into the game than you'd think, but if you're an American getting into professional soccer you'd be more interested in the Premier League than in our Major League Soccer, so the support for professional soccer in America is a little weak. There's also the recent tradition that in America, soccer is played by women and children. Our women are generally among the best in the world. Our children aren't, mainly because in countries where soccer is taken seriously as a professional sport, boys are developed as players from a young age.
Look on the bright side--after bearing a child or two, she's probably fat and aging, so unless you're into that sort of thing you can just have affairs with younger women.
Actually most women, when you get past the psychological programming from their parent,society and church, are interested in women and alternative sex. ask any guy that has orchestrated a threesome. most of the time he does not start with a bi chick but two chicks that are straight and he works past the problems that society created.
All that proves is that some women are sluts who are willing to do things they don't enjoy in order to please men. (I don't see being a slut as a negative thing, I'm using it as a purely descriptive term.) It goes beyond "most women" though--look up situational homosexuality.
If it's about equal appreciation of both genders, why don't you call it "gender equality" instead of "feminism". If I went around calling myself a masculist, you'd be perfectly justified in thinking I was pro-male instead of pro-equality.
"Being gay" itself is an arbitrary distinction. That majority of people are, in fact, bisexual yet the overwhelming majority of them identify (arbitrarily) as straight.
The vast majority of people are slightly bisexual. There's no useful distinction between "straight" and "slightly bisexual" either. Some people are homosexual most of the time, and many people are homosexual some of the time, but most people are straight most of the time.
Homophobia stems from the fear by those who have made this "choice" that they might be missing out. Those insecure, closeted bisexuals need constant reassurance that their "choice" was, and is, the right one. It is an offense to them that others appear to make a "choice" opposite theirs regardless of the fact that homosexuals rarely have such choice at all.
Either that, or butt sex grosses them out. I prefer to go with the simpler explanation, rather than a psychobabble explanation that serves to give gays a smug sense of superiority rather than address the issue honestly.
Okay, you got me there. A double action revolver has a hell of a hard trigger pull if it isn't cocked though. Wouldn't count on that if I wanted to actually hit what I was trying to aim that.
Pure US-style-libertarian (as opposed to left-libertarian) capitalism has never been successfully employed by any nation, and always leads to disaster.
You're correct--of the zero times libertarian capitalism has been implemented, all zero of those implementations led to disaster. Let me guess, you failed logic?
Housing was vastly overpriced 11 months ago, and is slowly becoming affordable for ordinary folks who actually want to buy a house to live in (as opposed to real estate speculators and the rich). Combine that with an easy influx of US dollars coming into this country from foreign states trying to fix their own economic problems and this problem has long been in the works. It's bigger than even what Bush can or did do.
No, a revolver isn't semiautomatic. A revolver is a revolver. A semiautomatic pistol doesn't require you to cock it between each shot--if you cock it once, it automatically recocks when fired.
They should have been working in food production, distribution, or education all along. We shouldn't be building mega-yachts while people are starving. It's just pure evil.
So you want to go back to the 19th century? We produce more food now that less than 20% of Americans work in agriculture than we did when 90% worked in agriculture. And less people are starving today.
You have absolutely no idea how the economy works. None. Putting 100 more Americans to work on the farm wouldn't accomplish much in this country, except maybe put 1000 third world farmers out of work and increase the need for food aid. Putting 100 Americans to work building mega-yachts provides 100 people with a living wage. Those 100 people will purchase engines, electrical systems, raw materials including steel, wood, and fiberglass, navigational charts, and so forth. This means that engineers, navigators, loggers, miners, and other working people all around the world will be able to support themselves. The employees of the mega-yacht company, engine company, chart-printing company, logging company, mining company, and so forth can all support themselves, sustainably, with enough money left over to pay taxes in order to support the legal and physical infrastructure required of a society.
The market economy is a very complex and interconnected ecosystem where people trade materials and talents to mutual advantage. It evolves naturally, providing a system without external design or control, and yet functioning remarkably well. And all this time, creationists like you want to throw away the whole thing and replace it with a top-down command economy. That experiment was run several times in the past century, and inevitably led to political corruption, starvation, and waste.
This isn't to say that the market is perfect or that market failures never happen. Let's look at the environment. The market fails to protect the environment because environmental costs aren't factored into the system. Cap-and-trade systems attempt to compensate for these costs by defining a level of pollution that can be sustained in the medium term and allowing market forces to distribute that level about. Hunger is another problem. In the United States, a form of government assistance--food stamps--is available to those poor who are unable to afford food on their own. For a small overhead, starvation is averted and the market keeps working. When you look at starvation overseas, it's usually due to one of two things: either there's a non-market economy in the country in question and a (usually corrupt) dictator is to blame, or overproduction of food in the western world has left local farmers unable to compete. Food aid is a big part of the problem--if truckloads of free food are coming in from America, the local farmer is put out of business, and that region is totally unable to support itself. They're stuck in a cycle of poverty that they will never recover from, only further taxing the rest of the world.
You are a perfect example of why democracy is a bad idea. Lots of people have simplistic ideas like yours that are horrifically wrong and will in fact cause more starvation than they relieve, and unfortunately, they vote. All I can recommend is to educate yourself in economics.
Before you dismiss this as Bush hatred, consider the peculiar reaction Bush had to the Texas executions, his insistence on keeping open the option to use torture at huge political cost despite the evident fact that the US is no longer using torture. I cannot explain this situation in political terms, it makes no sense.
Bush was a callous jerk about Texas executions, true. Part of that was definitely an act to piss off liberals, because conservatives find those things funny (e.g. Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh) and would be sympathetic to his antics. Even if it wasn't, it doesn't prove that Bush gets turned on by killing people, just that he doesn't feel any mercy or remorse for it if he thinks it's justified.
As for the torture thing, there are two possible motivations. One is that there are, in fact, a limited number of corner cases where torture is actually useful, though in the vast majority of cases it's horrible and unjustifiable. Another is that the bill to ban torture was seen as an unnecessary overreaction by the left (I don't think it was but Bush and other conservatives undoubtedly did) and supporting that bill would have been seen as a political concession. This is similar to the conservative opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which some conservatives saw as a rallying cry for the feminist left more than it was a good-faith attempt to improve the law.
I have no interest in or desire to apologize for Bush. I always thought he was a well-meaning dullard with too much loyalty to the wrong people, people who ultimately used him. Less Palpatine, more Jar-Jar Binks.
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To be fair, most of the people buying into this have a difficult time distinguishing 24 from reality. This is also why they support torture.
The very idea of "conservative", in the modern American context, refers specifically to the coalition between business interests, war hawks, and evangelical Christians. Huckabee and Romney aren't any more "conservative" than McCain--Huckabee is an evangelical preacher with no particular national security qualifications and a less-than-conservative record on business and taxes, Romney is a Mormon businessman with no national security qualifications, and McCain is a war hawk with moderate tendencies on taxes and business and no particular regard for the religious right. The very idea of conservatism is what's at stake in this Republican nomination.
That's exactly how the gold standard works! As a result of the gold standard, gold is considered more valuable because it is legal tender. Gold is just another form of fiat currency, albeit one that requires more effort to mine and store. Instead of artificially raising the value of gold by using gold as legal tender, some very clever people figured out that you could artifically raise the value of sheets of cloth paper with paintings of dead presidents printed on them, and it serves the same purpose without the market distortion caused by using a real commodity as legal tender.
Actually, Chrysler is American-owned, and it's an LLC instead of a corporation. Daimler sold it to an American private equity firm a couple years ago.
I've never understood this reasoning. Huckabee and Romney attract significantly different parts of the Republican base: Huckabee attracts evangelical Christians and Romney attracts pro-business types. (McCain attracts war hawks.) The interesting point here is that these are the three basic parts of the Republican coalition, but instead of a single candidate going after all three parts, each has its own champion.
I've met lots of girls who played rugby. Only one who ever played football. Anyway, our men play football because we leave rugby and soccer to our girls.
It's not just Fat Tuesday, it's Super Tuesday: as of Tuesday half of the delegates to each presidential primary will be selected, and it's not impossible that we will have the winning candidates all but certain.
When has it been implemented?
Naismith was indeed Canadian, but the game of basketball was invented in a Massachusetts YMCA. And, nobody really thinks of basketball as a Canadian sport (unlike ice hockey, which probably was invented in Canada and maintains a large Canadian fanbase).
Indeed, but most straight men associate male homosexuality with buttsex.
Baseball is quite popular in places like Japan and Latin America--Latin America by the regional absorption and Japan because MacArthur introduced it to them. (Likewise, I'm sure cricket is popular in India and Pakistan because they picked it up from the British colonial authority.) So one reason is probably that the United States didn't conquer enough countries to spread its sports around.
Basketball (the big US sport you left out) is slowly spreading around the world too, although our National Basketball Association still outclasses any other league in the world. (In basketball, I'd guess that the average NBA team could easily beat any other country's national champion. In soccer, pitting national champions against each other makes for the best and most-watched games.)
But football is an interesting one. American and Canadian football evolved from rugby football, which like association football at the time, was just called "football". It's a fallacy, incidentally, that association football is called "football" because it involves kicking--in reality, "football" was originally coined to refer to games played on foot, as opposed to the horseback sports that the upper class participated in.
Anyway, rugby football in America and Canada evolved differently than it did in England, and ultimately North America ended up with a game that had down-and-distance rules.
As for soccer, we Americans have a slightly different perspective. More of us are into the game than you'd think, but if you're an American getting into professional soccer you'd be more interested in the Premier League than in our Major League Soccer, so the support for professional soccer in America is a little weak. There's also the recent tradition that in America, soccer is played by women and children. Our women are generally among the best in the world. Our children aren't, mainly because in countries where soccer is taken seriously as a professional sport, boys are developed as players from a young age.
Canada uses the metric system, but still play Canadian football with yard lines (instead of meter lines).
Catholics also refer to "the sacrament" as "Eucharist" or "Communion", to distinguish from the other sacraments that the Protestants abolished.
I don't think Iran's in any position to bribe India at the moment.
Look on the bright side--after bearing a child or two, she's probably fat and aging, so unless you're into that sort of thing you can just have affairs with younger women.
All that proves is that some women are sluts who are willing to do things they don't enjoy in order to please men. (I don't see being a slut as a negative thing, I'm using it as a purely descriptive term.) It goes beyond "most women" though--look up situational homosexuality.
If it's about equal appreciation of both genders, why don't you call it "gender equality" instead of "feminism". If I went around calling myself a masculist, you'd be perfectly justified in thinking I was pro-male instead of pro-equality.
The vast majority of people are slightly bisexual. There's no useful distinction between "straight" and "slightly bisexual" either. Some people are homosexual most of the time, and many people are homosexual some of the time, but most people are straight most of the time.
Homophobia stems from the fear by those who have made this "choice" that they might be missing out. Those insecure, closeted bisexuals need constant reassurance that their "choice" was, and is, the right one. It is an offense to them that others appear to make a "choice" opposite theirs regardless of the fact that homosexuals rarely have such choice at all.Either that, or butt sex grosses them out. I prefer to go with the simpler explanation, rather than a psychobabble explanation that serves to give gays a smug sense of superiority rather than address the issue honestly.
Okay, you got me there. A double action revolver has a hell of a hard trigger pull if it isn't cocked though. Wouldn't count on that if I wanted to actually hit what I was trying to aim that.
You're correct--of the zero times libertarian capitalism has been implemented, all zero of those implementations led to disaster. Let me guess, you failed logic?
Housing was vastly overpriced 11 months ago, and is slowly becoming affordable for ordinary folks who actually want to buy a house to live in (as opposed to real estate speculators and the rich). Combine that with an easy influx of US dollars coming into this country from foreign states trying to fix their own economic problems and this problem has long been in the works. It's bigger than even what Bush can or did do.
No, a revolver isn't semiautomatic. A revolver is a revolver. A semiautomatic pistol doesn't require you to cock it between each shot--if you cock it once, it automatically recocks when fired.
So by your argument, I should be allowed to install a nuclear bomb in my apartment.
So you want to go back to the 19th century? We produce more food now that less than 20% of Americans work in agriculture than we did when 90% worked in agriculture. And less people are starving today.
You have absolutely no idea how the economy works. None. Putting 100 more Americans to work on the farm wouldn't accomplish much in this country, except maybe put 1000 third world farmers out of work and increase the need for food aid. Putting 100 Americans to work building mega-yachts provides 100 people with a living wage. Those 100 people will purchase engines, electrical systems, raw materials including steel, wood, and fiberglass, navigational charts, and so forth. This means that engineers, navigators, loggers, miners, and other working people all around the world will be able to support themselves. The employees of the mega-yacht company, engine company, chart-printing company, logging company, mining company, and so forth can all support themselves, sustainably, with enough money left over to pay taxes in order to support the legal and physical infrastructure required of a society.
The market economy is a very complex and interconnected ecosystem where people trade materials and talents to mutual advantage. It evolves naturally, providing a system without external design or control, and yet functioning remarkably well. And all this time, creationists like you want to throw away the whole thing and replace it with a top-down command economy. That experiment was run several times in the past century, and inevitably led to political corruption, starvation, and waste.
This isn't to say that the market is perfect or that market failures never happen. Let's look at the environment. The market fails to protect the environment because environmental costs aren't factored into the system. Cap-and-trade systems attempt to compensate for these costs by defining a level of pollution that can be sustained in the medium term and allowing market forces to distribute that level about. Hunger is another problem. In the United States, a form of government assistance--food stamps--is available to those poor who are unable to afford food on their own. For a small overhead, starvation is averted and the market keeps working. When you look at starvation overseas, it's usually due to one of two things: either there's a non-market economy in the country in question and a (usually corrupt) dictator is to blame, or overproduction of food in the western world has left local farmers unable to compete. Food aid is a big part of the problem--if truckloads of free food are coming in from America, the local farmer is put out of business, and that region is totally unable to support itself. They're stuck in a cycle of poverty that they will never recover from, only further taxing the rest of the world.
You are a perfect example of why democracy is a bad idea. Lots of people have simplistic ideas like yours that are horrifically wrong and will in fact cause more starvation than they relieve, and unfortunately, they vote. All I can recommend is to educate yourself in economics.
Bush was a callous jerk about Texas executions, true. Part of that was definitely an act to piss off liberals, because conservatives find those things funny (e.g. Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh) and would be sympathetic to his antics. Even if it wasn't, it doesn't prove that Bush gets turned on by killing people, just that he doesn't feel any mercy or remorse for it if he thinks it's justified.
As for the torture thing, there are two possible motivations. One is that there are, in fact, a limited number of corner cases where torture is actually useful, though in the vast majority of cases it's horrible and unjustifiable. Another is that the bill to ban torture was seen as an unnecessary overreaction by the left (I don't think it was but Bush and other conservatives undoubtedly did) and supporting that bill would have been seen as a political concession. This is similar to the conservative opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which some conservatives saw as a rallying cry for the feminist left more than it was a good-faith attempt to improve the law.
I have no interest in or desire to apologize for Bush. I always thought he was a well-meaning dullard with too much loyalty to the wrong people, people who ultimately used him. Less Palpatine, more Jar-Jar Binks.