Sounds like the man should have had the balls to stand up for his rights rather than meekly surrender them to a bunch of private citizens with zero actual power. If they attempted that with me I would tell them to fuck off and come back with an actual court order or law enforcement officer. If they persisted I'd take whatever steps I deemed appropriate to defend myself.
and since no conveyor means no warm gulf steam to warm the northeastern US and European continents, they will get colder.
Does the Gulf Stream actually have much of an impact on North America? Wouldn't the typical weather patterns (i.e: west to east) suggest that the heat moved by the Gulf Stream would wind up making most of it's impact on the Atlantic Ocean and Europe?
And I already replaced all my light bulbs with those dim, mercury-filled corkscrew kind!
I can't be the only one that hates those damn things. They are useful in areas where the lights are left on for extended periods but I find them to be highly annoying in areas that I walk into and out of quickly. They don't even manage to reach full brightness before I've accomplished what I came into the room to do.
They also seem to fail miserably if you have the misfortune of living somewhere that lacks stable voltage. My old apartment had voltage issues because the next door neighbor ran electric kiln's for a glass business. I'd watch the voltage dip from 118V down to 105V and back up to 118V for hours on end when she ran those damn things. The CFL's just couldn't take it. Most of them crapped out within six months. Regular incandescents worked just fine (albeit with annoying changes in brightness when the voltage dipped), as did regular fluorescents.
Imagine what your country would be like if the RIAA were in charge of running the roads.
The difference between RIAA and the Government is that RIAA can't send well armed goons to knock down your door if you choose not to do business with them......
but if you became (for example) a fat bloat practically paralysed, unable to do any work of any kind that could benefit the society and without money to sustain yourself does society leave you to die?
or someone (friend, relatives, church, neighbour, charity,... ) pay for you in time, sweat or money?
If friends or private charity want to take care of you then all the power to them. What I object to is the Government taking my money by force to use to support someone in that scenario.
so in 99% of the cases your self destruction is a cost for the society
Lot's of things are a "cost" to society. People who don't have children are imposing a "cost" on society because they'll be relying on society to take care of them instead of their children when they age. People who get divorced after having children impose a cost on society. People who live in cities and don't pay the actual cost of their mass transit systems impose a cost on society. None of that is an excuse for the nanny state to tell me what I can eat or what recreational substances I can put into my body. If my behavior is not directly harmful to my neighbor then you have no business trying to regulate it.
you could never be totally separated and independent from the society, unless you live like an Inuit of a long time ago, so you have some privileges and some responsibility, that you want it or not.
I have the privilege to live my life with a minimal amount of Governmental interference. I don't want Governmental oversight of the foods that I eat or Governmental "charity" that comes with strings attached as to how I can live my life. Government exists to protect me from crime and war. It does not exist to protect me from eating too many Big Macs.
Maybe in the meantime, the GOP can get back to ideas that unite all of us on the right, like actually producing a smaller government, instead of focusing on wedge issues that separate us. If not, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs that came before them.
If the GOP would get back to those roots I'd register as a Republican in a heartbeat. It's the social wedge issues that I have a problem with. Take gay marriage as an example. It seems to me that a Conservative solution to the gay marriage debate would be to get Government out of the "marriage" business altogether. Let the Churches "marry" people according to their own doctrine and let the Government provide for civil unions for all couples (gay and straight) that would provide the benefits (medical proxy, joint tax filing, etc) of what the Government currently calls marriage. Problem solved.
and yeah, he was pretty upset with the Spitzer thing
The best explanation I've heard is that was a cynical calculation to get the 50,000 votes they needed to keep their party line. It was apparent to anyone with a clue that Faso was going down in flames, so why endorse him and risk falling below the threshold to retain your ballot line? Spitzer burns me up. I knew he was going to be a downstate liberal but I still had hopes that he would use some of the political capital from his landslide to make some changes in Albany. Instead he burned it all up on drivers licenses for illegals. WTF? Even if you think that's a good idea why would you pick a fight over such an issue when there are far more important things to burn political capital on?
There's a whole new undercurrent of excitement and it's all from the grassroots level, despite what certain newscasters with an agenda want to tell people.
It has to come from the grassroots level, because the GOP doesn't seem to have any idea what to do, other than run on yesterday's themes. They lost the middle of this country some time ago and don't seem to have any idea of how to get them back. I'm hopeful that we'll see some fresh blood emerge on the scene in 2010 and 2012. Here in New York it would be nice if the GOP could come up with somebody other than Mr. 9/11 but their bench in this state is pretty empty.
I had hopes for Gillibrand, but she seemed to join the rest of the anti-gun Democrats as soon as she got to Washington
Of course she did, she knows where Democratic primaries are decided in this state. Unless I've misread her I'm going to have a very hard time voting for her in the general election. She will get my vote in the primary if the downstater's try to knock her off though. What I can't figure out is why she felt the need to completely embrace the Brady platform. I understand throwing them a bone but she's gone way beyond that. It'll be interesting to see how the NRA rates her this time around. I'm guessing she won't be getting that A+ again.
and we can count our annual murders county-wide on one hand
We used to be able to do that until that nutjob went on his rampage through the ACA. Most of our crime problems here relate to drug traffic from the city. It stops here on it's way to the rest of the state. As of yet the violence from this hasn't really spilled over into the rest of the community -- it's primarily criminal on criminal violence. Other than that we usually have a few robberies per year and a murder every other year or so. Can't really argue with living here from a crime standpoint although I'm afraid it will become more of a problem as the economy tanks.
I know here in Livingston, the Sheriff will give anyone a permit unless there is an obvious reason not to
We have a Judge right now that is allowing people to get their unrestricted pe
contrary to the USA we have public healthcare, so if many stupid people gorge themselves at mcdonald and became really fat and with a ton of health problems that need medical cares I pay for them too!
And there's the problem with public health care. If "charity" is going to come with strings attached as to how I can live my life then I want no part of it.
And, if the only way for a child to learn moderation is by turning into a diabetic fatass, then I will gladly support any law that will rid our society of the scourge that is fast food industry.
You must be a liberal. I guess you missed the part where I said "when said behavior harms nobody whom doesn't engage in it" If you are so convinced that the fast food industry is "targeting" your children then don't let your children eat there. My children eat a happy meal every now and then and amazingly enough aren't fatasses.
It's not the role of Government to step in and use the tax code to make sure that we aren't getting overweight. Even if it was a proper role of Government it's utterly ineffective anyway. Do you really believe that even doubling the cost of fast food is going to teach moderation to those that don't understand it?
Look, if this fixes the behavior of millions of people but happens to minorly inconvenience one person with an abnormal routine, I think it's worth going for.
Do you honestly think that it's a proper role for Government to "fix" the behavior of it's citizenry, when said behavior harms nobody whom doesn't engage in it?
Ithaca would very much be part of the new state in that scenario, as would your current residence of Binghamton
The only reason I tossed Ithaca out there was because you said you'd give NYC the Hudson Valley because the people there "identify with the politics of NYC". Ithaca is arguably further to the left than the rest of Upstate (Tompkins was the only county Obama managed to steal from Hillary in the primary) hence my concern that if we were splitting up the state along party lines it would wind up lumped with downstate.
I think your map makes sense. The only bit I'd question is the inclusion of Sullivan County with NYC. Sullivan is fairly equally split between NYC commuters and locals. Liberty and Monticello are big commuter towns but the rest of the county is pretty rural. Tough call on where to put it.
Since we are fantasizing, where would you put the capital? I think that Syracuse is probably the logical choice. Centrally located and most people are familiar with it. Easy to get to from almost anywhere in the state. It's more of a hike from Buffalo but not nearly as far away as Albany is.
Let's not forget that it was Golisano that funded a number of Democrats for State Senate this last election in an effort to flip the Senate to cause "change." All he did was knife the state in the jugular in the process, by ensuring one party rule
I don't know if I'd give him that much credit for it. I place more of the blame with the national GOP. Some of the positions they have adopted have made it very hard to be a Republican in the Northeast. Upstate New York isn't NYC by any means but it's not South Carolina either. I think people just started pulling the lever (random thought: I'm gonna miss our lever machines!) for the Democrats because of disgust with the GOP in Washington.
Broome County was a Republican stronghold until 2004. Democrats swept into numerous local offices because of the large number of people who came out to vote for Kerry and whom pulled Row B all the way across. I work as an Elections Inspector and you can tell when people are casting party line votes -- you hear them yank the levers straight across without even pausing to read the names. The vast majority of the voters I saw in 2004 voted in such a manner.
To make matters worse, 2006 and 2008 drove the final nails into the coffin for the local GOP. The sad thing is that it really had nothing to do with local politics. It was all party line voting driven by people who were fed up with GWB and the Republicans in Washington. Today our only remaining Republican countywide official is the Sheriff.
A friend of mine sits on several high level committees in the Independence Party and he's thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing
I've never understood exactly what it is the Independence Party stands for. Their endorsements for Governor in particular seem cynically aimed at ensuring they net the 50,000 votes needed to retain their ballot line. How else to explain why they endorsed Spitzer? People register as Independent seemingly with no idea of what the party stands for or the fact that they are actually enrolling in a party. "What party are you in?", "None, I'm an Independent!"
I'm a registered Republican for town/county political reasons (whoever wins the Republian primaries wins the general election), but I'm much more of a conservative/libertarian type.
I wound up registered as a Democrat when I was young and naive and haven't gotten around to changing it. The problem is that I'm an Elections Inspector and the inspector assignments are technically party jobs. If I switch parties I'll have to get a new assignment and I won't be able to work in the district that I've come to know and love. I also wouldn't be able to register as a Republican in good conscience and would prefer to write in Libertarian -- but not being in one of the two big parties make
Act like it. Tell you child "NO", and then stick to your guns
Unfortunately, the last time I tried to use firearms to obtain compliance from the kids I had to spend a few hours at the police station filling out paperwork;)
I'd give NYC the entire Hudson corridor as well, since most of the people there identify with the politcs of NYC anyway
I don't know if I'd slice it up that way. If that's the way you want to slice it then Ithaca would probably go to NYC as well.
the disparities are just too great to overcome given that one city wants to dominate the rest of us
As usual if you want to blame somebody you can blame an activist SCOTUS. In this case, the Reynolds v. Sims ruling that held that State Legislative districts all need to be roughly equal in population. Apparently the principle of Republicanism which works just fine for the US Senate is unacceptable if applied to the State Senate. Figure out that logic.
If it wasn't for that ruling we could have a State Senate arranged in such a way (perhaps two Senators per county?) that Upstate and Downstate would have to come to terms and neither could dictate to each other. Instead of that we are currently stuck with the tyranny of the majority. I'd love to know how that ruling was Constitutional when the Constitution specifically states that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government".......
I love where I live, but our government is so bad, I've been fighting the temptation to leave since I graduated high school and my parents were fighting it long before that.
My fear is that if the Republicans don't take back the State Senate in 2010 that it will be the final nail in the coffin. The Democrats will be able to draw the district lines as they see fit and we can forget about any prospect of Upstate Representation for the foreseeable future. I don't even agree with a lot of what the GOP stands for but I'm forced to vote for them on the state level because the NYS Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sheldon Silver.
I too love my home state and have promised to stick it out until at least 2010. Might as well get to vote in one more big election (Governor, two US Senate seats and the state offices) before I give up all hope. After that, who knows? May I ask where you are from? I grew up in Chenango County and currently reside in the Binghamton area.
Quite right. Who needs firefighters, libraries, roads, fixed potholes, policemen, trains, courts, freeways and airports? Scrap it all and let's go back to living in a subsistence economy. Who wants all this civilisation crap anyway?
What does any of that have to do with his point that the special interests have Albany's balls in vice grips? Have you ever looked at public sector compensation vs. private sector? Buddy of mine who works for the state gets a 14% match into his 403(b). Can you name me a single private sector employer that remotely approaches that?
I seriously think Texas and other border states will start seceding the union (by force if necessary) by then.
Texas should exercise it's right to split into five states. The prospect of 10 US Senators from the area formally known as Texas ought to send shivers down the spine of any Democrat.
While Gun Control might seem like a good idea in Los Angeles
Gun Control only seems like a good idea in Los Angeles if you are delusional enough to think that criminals obey the law or foolish enough to be afraid of non-criminals having easy access to firearms.
NY's population remains powerless. We've got no citizen initiated referrendum or recall powers and due to the Assembly's power base in NYC, the opinion of the roughly 50% of the population in the rest of the state doesn't even matter. We're dictated to, not listened to. It's nothing short of a tyranny and is one of the driving causes in the hatred of NYC by the rest of the state.
I didn't used to feel this way but lately I've been contemplating the idea that Upstate should just secede from the rest of the state. Let the NYC'ers have their little socialist paradise and free us to focus on our own problems. Yeah, we'd lose some of the tax base but I suspect we could make that up through reduced spending and charging them fair market value for all that upstate water they rely on. Maybe we'll even let them keep dumping their criminals on us, provided they are willing to pay for their incarceration.
No. If certain fast food is that bad for the kids, make it illegal to market or sell it to minors.
Fast food isn't bad or good for the kids. Fast food consumed without moderation is the problem. A quarter pounder with cheese (500 calories), large fries (500 calories) and large soda (300 calories) adds up to 1,300 calories.
That's quite a lot for a single meal but not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, provided that you adjust your caloric intake accordingly. There's no reason to charge me more for fast food simply because the rest of the country doesn't know what moderation means or how to exercise it.
Clean air, hundreds of miles of bike trails, clean parks, trees actually IN the city (and not just in one park), clean lakes (13,000 in our state alone), clean rivers, hunting and fishing galore, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the man should have had the balls to stand up for his rights rather than meekly surrender them to a bunch of private citizens with zero actual power. If they attempted that with me I would tell them to fuck off and come back with an actual court order or law enforcement officer. If they persisted I'd take whatever steps I deemed appropriate to defend myself.
and since no conveyor means no warm gulf steam to warm the northeastern US and European continents, they will get colder.
Does the Gulf Stream actually have much of an impact on North America? Wouldn't the typical weather patterns (i.e: west to east) suggest that the heat moved by the Gulf Stream would wind up making most of it's impact on the Atlantic Ocean and Europe?
Yeah, but today is two days before the day after tomorrow!
Manbearpig
The core temperature is unaffected.
Just wait until some crazy Romulan with a scary looking CGI drilling device comes along ;)
And I already replaced all my light bulbs with those dim, mercury-filled corkscrew kind!
I can't be the only one that hates those damn things. They are useful in areas where the lights are left on for extended periods but I find them to be highly annoying in areas that I walk into and out of quickly. They don't even manage to reach full brightness before I've accomplished what I came into the room to do.
They also seem to fail miserably if you have the misfortune of living somewhere that lacks stable voltage. My old apartment had voltage issues because the next door neighbor ran electric kiln's for a glass business. I'd watch the voltage dip from 118V down to 105V and back up to 118V for hours on end when she ran those damn things. The CFL's just couldn't take it. Most of them crapped out within six months. Regular incandescents worked just fine (albeit with annoying changes in brightness when the voltage dipped), as did regular fluorescents.
Faith and blind devotion to a cause, not reason.
In other words, the Democratic and Republican parties?
Imagine what your country would be like if the RIAA were in charge of running the roads.
The difference between RIAA and the Government is that RIAA can't send well armed goons to knock down your door if you choose not to do business with them......
although I've read of many stealing power when the lines go right over their house or barns, which have huge transformers hidden in em
That's an urban legend. The Mythbusters tried it and were able to steal a whooping eight millivolts.
If you want full duplex 32 kbps for $24.95/month that is.
My v.34+ USR Courier gave me that sometime around 1996 as I recall......
but if you became (for example) a fat bloat practically paralysed, unable to do any work of any kind that could benefit the society and without money to sustain yourself does society leave you to die?
or someone (friend, relatives, church, neighbour, charity, ... ) pay for you in time, sweat or money?
If friends or private charity want to take care of you then all the power to them. What I object to is the Government taking my money by force to use to support someone in that scenario.
so in 99% of the cases your self destruction is a cost for the society
Lot's of things are a "cost" to society. People who don't have children are imposing a "cost" on society because they'll be relying on society to take care of them instead of their children when they age. People who get divorced after having children impose a cost on society. People who live in cities and don't pay the actual cost of their mass transit systems impose a cost on society. None of that is an excuse for the nanny state to tell me what I can eat or what recreational substances I can put into my body. If my behavior is not directly harmful to my neighbor then you have no business trying to regulate it.
you could never be totally separated and independent from the society, unless you live like an Inuit of a long time ago, so you have some privileges and some responsibility, that you want it or not.
I have the privilege to live my life with a minimal amount of Governmental interference. I don't want Governmental oversight of the foods that I eat or Governmental "charity" that comes with strings attached as to how I can live my life. Government exists to protect me from crime and war. It does not exist to protect me from eating too many Big Macs.
Maybe in the meantime, the GOP can get back to ideas that unite all of us on the right, like actually producing a smaller government, instead of focusing on wedge issues that separate us. If not, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs that came before them.
If the GOP would get back to those roots I'd register as a Republican in a heartbeat. It's the social wedge issues that I have a problem with. Take gay marriage as an example. It seems to me that a Conservative solution to the gay marriage debate would be to get Government out of the "marriage" business altogether. Let the Churches "marry" people according to their own doctrine and let the Government provide for civil unions for all couples (gay and straight) that would provide the benefits (medical proxy, joint tax filing, etc) of what the Government currently calls marriage. Problem solved.
and yeah, he was pretty upset with the Spitzer thing
The best explanation I've heard is that was a cynical calculation to get the 50,000 votes they needed to keep their party line. It was apparent to anyone with a clue that Faso was going down in flames, so why endorse him and risk falling below the threshold to retain your ballot line? Spitzer burns me up. I knew he was going to be a downstate liberal but I still had hopes that he would use some of the political capital from his landslide to make some changes in Albany. Instead he burned it all up on drivers licenses for illegals. WTF? Even if you think that's a good idea why would you pick a fight over such an issue when there are far more important things to burn political capital on?
There's a whole new undercurrent of excitement and it's all from the grassroots level, despite what certain newscasters with an agenda want to tell people.
It has to come from the grassroots level, because the GOP doesn't seem to have any idea what to do, other than run on yesterday's themes. They lost the middle of this country some time ago and don't seem to have any idea of how to get them back. I'm hopeful that we'll see some fresh blood emerge on the scene in 2010 and 2012. Here in New York it would be nice if the GOP could come up with somebody other than Mr. 9/11 but their bench in this state is pretty empty.
I had hopes for Gillibrand, but she seemed to join the rest of the anti-gun Democrats as soon as she got to Washington
Of course she did, she knows where Democratic primaries are decided in this state. Unless I've misread her I'm going to have a very hard time voting for her in the general election. She will get my vote in the primary if the downstater's try to knock her off though. What I can't figure out is why she felt the need to completely embrace the Brady platform. I understand throwing them a bone but she's gone way beyond that. It'll be interesting to see how the NRA rates her this time around. I'm guessing she won't be getting that A+ again.
and we can count our annual murders county-wide on one hand
We used to be able to do that until that nutjob went on his rampage through the ACA. Most of our crime problems here relate to drug traffic from the city. It stops here on it's way to the rest of the state. As of yet the violence from this hasn't really spilled over into the rest of the community -- it's primarily criminal on criminal violence. Other than that we usually have a few robberies per year and a murder every other year or so. Can't really argue with living here from a crime standpoint although I'm afraid it will become more of a problem as the economy tanks.
I know here in Livingston, the Sheriff will give anyone a permit unless there is an obvious reason not to
We have a Judge right now that is allowing people to get their unrestricted pe
contrary to the USA we have public healthcare, so if many stupid people gorge themselves at mcdonald and became really fat and with a ton of health problems that need medical cares I pay for them too!
And there's the problem with public health care. If "charity" is going to come with strings attached as to how I can live my life then I want no part of it.
And, if the only way for a child to learn moderation is by turning into a diabetic fatass, then I will gladly support any law that will rid our society of the scourge that is fast food industry.
You must be a liberal. I guess you missed the part where I said "when said behavior harms nobody whom doesn't engage in it" If you are so convinced that the fast food industry is "targeting" your children then don't let your children eat there. My children eat a happy meal every now and then and amazingly enough aren't fatasses.
It's not the role of Government to step in and use the tax code to make sure that we aren't getting overweight. Even if it was a proper role of Government it's utterly ineffective anyway. Do you really believe that even doubling the cost of fast food is going to teach moderation to those that don't understand it?
Look, if this fixes the behavior of millions of people but happens to minorly inconvenience one person with an abnormal routine, I think it's worth going for.
Do you honestly think that it's a proper role for Government to "fix" the behavior of it's citizenry, when said behavior harms nobody whom doesn't engage in it?
Ithaca would very much be part of the new state in that scenario, as would your current residence of Binghamton
The only reason I tossed Ithaca out there was because you said you'd give NYC the Hudson Valley because the people there "identify with the politics of NYC". Ithaca is arguably further to the left than the rest of Upstate (Tompkins was the only county Obama managed to steal from Hillary in the primary) hence my concern that if we were splitting up the state along party lines it would wind up lumped with downstate.
I think your map makes sense. The only bit I'd question is the inclusion of Sullivan County with NYC. Sullivan is fairly equally split between NYC commuters and locals. Liberty and Monticello are big commuter towns but the rest of the county is pretty rural. Tough call on where to put it.
Since we are fantasizing, where would you put the capital? I think that Syracuse is probably the logical choice. Centrally located and most people are familiar with it. Easy to get to from almost anywhere in the state. It's more of a hike from Buffalo but not nearly as far away as Albany is.
Let's not forget that it was Golisano that funded a number of Democrats for State Senate this last election in an effort to flip the Senate to cause "change." All he did was knife the state in the jugular in the process, by ensuring one party rule
I don't know if I'd give him that much credit for it. I place more of the blame with the national GOP. Some of the positions they have adopted have made it very hard to be a Republican in the Northeast. Upstate New York isn't NYC by any means but it's not South Carolina either. I think people just started pulling the lever (random thought: I'm gonna miss our lever machines!) for the Democrats because of disgust with the GOP in Washington.
Broome County was a Republican stronghold until 2004. Democrats swept into numerous local offices because of the large number of people who came out to vote for Kerry and whom pulled Row B all the way across. I work as an Elections Inspector and you can tell when people are casting party line votes -- you hear them yank the levers straight across without even pausing to read the names. The vast majority of the voters I saw in 2004 voted in such a manner.
To make matters worse, 2006 and 2008 drove the final nails into the coffin for the local GOP. The sad thing is that it really had nothing to do with local politics. It was all party line voting driven by people who were fed up with GWB and the Republicans in Washington. Today our only remaining Republican countywide official is the Sheriff.
A friend of mine sits on several high level committees in the Independence Party and he's thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing
I've never understood exactly what it is the Independence Party stands for. Their endorsements for Governor in particular seem cynically aimed at ensuring they net the 50,000 votes needed to retain their ballot line. How else to explain why they endorsed Spitzer? People register as Independent seemingly with no idea of what the party stands for or the fact that they are actually enrolling in a party. "What party are you in?", "None, I'm an Independent!"
I'm a registered Republican for town/county political reasons (whoever wins the Republian primaries wins the general election), but I'm much more of a conservative/libertarian type.
I wound up registered as a Democrat when I was young and naive and haven't gotten around to changing it. The problem is that I'm an Elections Inspector and the inspector assignments are technically party jobs. If I switch parties I'll have to get a new assignment and I won't be able to work in the district that I've come to know and love. I also wouldn't be able to register as a Republican in good conscience and would prefer to write in Libertarian -- but not being in one of the two big parties make
Act like it. Tell you child "NO", and then stick to your guns
Unfortunately, the last time I tried to use firearms to obtain compliance from the kids I had to spend a few hours at the police station filling out paperwork ;)
I assumed that you did. I just couldn't resist the temptation to point out how stupid gun control is even from a big city perspective ;)
I'd give NYC the entire Hudson corridor as well, since most of the people there identify with the politcs of NYC anyway
I don't know if I'd slice it up that way. If that's the way you want to slice it then Ithaca would probably go to NYC as well.
the disparities are just too great to overcome given that one city wants to dominate the rest of us
As usual if you want to blame somebody you can blame an activist SCOTUS. In this case, the Reynolds v. Sims ruling that held that State Legislative districts all need to be roughly equal in population. Apparently the principle of Republicanism which works just fine for the US Senate is unacceptable if applied to the State Senate. Figure out that logic.
If it wasn't for that ruling we could have a State Senate arranged in such a way (perhaps two Senators per county?) that Upstate and Downstate would have to come to terms and neither could dictate to each other. Instead of that we are currently stuck with the tyranny of the majority. I'd love to know how that ruling was Constitutional when the Constitution specifically states that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government".......
I love where I live, but our government is so bad, I've been fighting the temptation to leave since I graduated high school and my parents were fighting it long before that.
My fear is that if the Republicans don't take back the State Senate in 2010 that it will be the final nail in the coffin. The Democrats will be able to draw the district lines as they see fit and we can forget about any prospect of Upstate Representation for the foreseeable future. I don't even agree with a lot of what the GOP stands for but I'm forced to vote for them on the state level because the NYS Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sheldon Silver.
I too love my home state and have promised to stick it out until at least 2010. Might as well get to vote in one more big election (Governor, two US Senate seats and the state offices) before I give up all hope. After that, who knows? May I ask where you are from? I grew up in Chenango County and currently reside in the Binghamton area.
Quite right. Who needs firefighters, libraries, roads, fixed potholes, policemen, trains, courts, freeways and airports? Scrap it all and let's go back to living in a subsistence economy. Who wants all this civilisation crap anyway?
What does any of that have to do with his point that the special interests have Albany's balls in vice grips? Have you ever looked at public sector compensation vs. private sector? Buddy of mine who works for the state gets a 14% match into his 403(b). Can you name me a single private sector employer that remotely approaches that?
I seriously think Texas and other border states will start seceding the union (by force if necessary) by then.
Texas should exercise it's right to split into five states. The prospect of 10 US Senators from the area formally known as Texas ought to send shivers down the spine of any Democrat.
While Gun Control might seem like a good idea in Los Angeles
Gun Control only seems like a good idea in Los Angeles if you are delusional enough to think that criminals obey the law or foolish enough to be afraid of non-criminals having easy access to firearms.
NY's population remains powerless. We've got no citizen initiated referrendum or recall powers and due to the Assembly's power base in NYC, the opinion of the roughly 50% of the population in the rest of the state doesn't even matter. We're dictated to, not listened to. It's nothing short of a tyranny and is one of the driving causes in the hatred of NYC by the rest of the state.
I didn't used to feel this way but lately I've been contemplating the idea that Upstate should just secede from the rest of the state. Let the NYC'ers have their little socialist paradise and free us to focus on our own problems. Yeah, we'd lose some of the tax base but I suspect we could make that up through reduced spending and charging them fair market value for all that upstate water they rely on. Maybe we'll even let them keep dumping their criminals on us, provided they are willing to pay for their incarceration.
No. If certain fast food is that bad for the kids, make it illegal to market or sell it to minors.
Fast food isn't bad or good for the kids. Fast food consumed without moderation is the problem. A quarter pounder with cheese (500 calories), large fries (500 calories) and large soda (300 calories) adds up to 1,300 calories.
That's quite a lot for a single meal but not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, provided that you adjust your caloric intake accordingly. There's no reason to charge me more for fast food simply because the rest of the country doesn't know what moderation means or how to exercise it.
Clean air, hundreds of miles of bike trails, clean parks, trees actually IN the city (and not just in one park), clean lakes (13,000 in our state alone), clean rivers, hunting and fishing galore, etc.
I guess you've never heard of the Adirondack's or Catskill's, have you?