redlegphi

I reply to this inadequate poll with a pair of apocryphal stories. 1) A man breaks into your house, rapes your wife, kills your dog, and steals your TV. While leaving your house, an illegal immigrant sees him and could desribe him to the police. Why would that immigrant go to the police to help them solve the crime if he's afraid that they'll deport his happy ass once they're done taking his statement? 2) An illegal immigrant has a contagious, but treatable disease. In the normal course of his day, he interacts with dozens of American citizens and their food. Would you prefer he go to the hospital to get treated or that he be afraid to go to the hospital because they might deport him if they find out his immigration status? In short, illegal immigration isn't a black and white issue. I think illegal immigrants found committing a crime should be deported. I think those found by the INS should be deported. I think it would behoove our society (through lower crime rates and better disease prevention) if illegal immigrants aren't afraid to talk to normal police or go to a hospital. I think you need to weigh each case individually, because the 26 year old immigrant who just crossed last week isn't the same as the 19 year old who has lived in America for 16 years and was brought here illegally by his parents. I also think Wendy's right: if we hammer the businesses that hire illegal immigrants, there'll be less incentive for them to come or stay here, which would allow a lot of the problem to fix itself.

Harder than Dutch? It's not that hard to learn Dutch spelling. They have some basic rules that you need to know, but once you know the rules they're followed much more uniformly than the rules in English. Pronunciation is somewhat harder.

I saw this in Stars and Stripes today and thought it was worth sharing: http://www.stripes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/an-iraqi-s-appreciation-1.104852 As the daughter of Iraq’s ambassador to the U.S., I want to send a message loud and clear to the good servicemen and women of the United States that I, as an Iraqi, am truly indebted to you and your families for the many burdens you have shouldered and tragedies you have experienced. In liberating Iraq, you have given me, and all Iraqis, an opportunity to have a say in our government, to vote, to speak freely, to experience rights and freedoms that are easy to take for granted until they are taken away. A friend of mine, a serviceman, is in Iraq right now. I told him I didn’t know when I’d be brave enough to go to back Iraq myself. He said to me, in these words: “You getting to go to Iraq whenever you want to is why I’m going.” He is a hero to me. His wife, who has gone to stay with her parents a few weeks to avoid sitting in an empty house, makes a sacrifice too. Today is the day that sacrifices you, and others like you, have made (and are making every day) are truly appreciated — not just by Americans, but by Iraqis like me. Today I join others in celebrating and honoring you. But not a day goes by that I don’t think of and remember you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Rend Shakir Washington

And what's up with those damn Irish-Americans waving Irish flags and dancing around dressed up like leprechauns on the 17th of March every year. And don't even get me started on the Italians! Amirite?!?

If is wasn't 'something of value', then why was it offered as an incentive? The fact that it was offered (instead of just asking nicely) leads me to believe that the people offering it certainly believed it had great value. So, to sum up, every time somebody offers you a job, your consider that an attempt at bribery. Good to know. Also, I find it amusing that we're still ignoring the fact that Saint Ronnie and W did the exact same fucking thing.

I usually don't like historical fiction, but I really enjoyed that book.

So, a sitting President directs his Chief-of-Staff to ask a former President, whose wife is the Secretary of State, to talk to a former Admiral who is a Congressman about an "advisory" board position if he stays in the House versus run for the Senate? No, no, no, no, no...you don't use a hot-knife-through-butter team like that for some meaningless non-paying board job. This is turning out to be bigger than I thought. Offering something of value as a political favor per se, is black-letter in violation of the statute. The problem is that AG Holder won't assign an independent prosecutor for this. He doesn't have the political moxy. No one on the democrat side of the aisle is saying anything...they're really going to sweep this under the rug? Really? Really?! This amounts to electoral manipulation at a minimum...denying (or attempting to deny) voters a "qualified" individual in a valid primary election. The advisory position was unpaid, so "something of value" just went right out the window. Also, they withdrew the offer when they realized that he couldn't serve in the advisory position and remain a member of Congress, due to conflict of interest. This is quite possibly one of the most meaningless "scandals" yet. You right wingers are getting desperate. Also, not that this really does anything to make it "right" (especially since it's not wrong in the first place), but Bush AND Reagan did it first, so the outrage looks more than a little hypocritical and phony.

But, can you fit tacos into an MRE? 1) We already have fajita MREs. 2) I am all for allowing foreign citizens to earn their way into the US through military service. That said, I'd prefer if our homegrown citizens were filling the quotas (which they currently are) because I think an Army full of foreign Soldiers would be even more likely to be misused than our current one. 3) To go back to the original topic, I fully agree with you Amazon. We need the best Soldiers we can get, and DADT has been making it harder for that to happen. I really look forward to the day when it becomes history.

I love my dog. She's a member of my family. And, being a lab, she likes to run around outside. Which is why I invested several thousand dollars to have a fence put up around my backyard. Just letting your dog roam a residential neighborhood is rude.

THAT is no surprise whatsoever - there are A LOT of things he said he would do and hasn't. Yes. How dare President Obama not develop a time machine and use it to simultaneously travel to Arlington Cemetary on all present, past, and future Memorial Days and Veterans Days to lay wreaths there.

Terry Jones' Barbarians.

I'm definitely for the repeal of DADT. That said, I just felt I had to point out that people aren't running away from serving their country any more. None of the services have had any issue meeting recruitment or retention goals recently. Turns out that when the economy turns to shit, people suddenly get a whole lot more patriotic.

I hate to break this to you, but we invaded in 2003, not 2004. NO SHIT!? Maybe that's why I wrote words like "had to continue" and "couldn't leave" when talking about the second phase of the war. Must be past your bedtime in Chicago. It's the typical role played by the winner. It's what we did in 1991. And what do you think happens to Iraq when we leave? What if the Democrats had succeeded in 2007 in forcing the pullout then? No different, but leaving in 2004 would have saved them 6 years of fighting with our guys. I'm kinda confused about what exactly you think would happen in each of these scenarios and what the right thing to do would have been in each case. For the record, I thought it was a bad idea to invade in 2003. Once we did invade, I thought the plan for invasion was poor (specifically, the complete lack of planning for what to do once we had finished crushing the Iraqi military). However, once we invaded, I thought we had a moral obligation to get Iraq stood back up. Despite this moral obligation, I don't think it's clear yet that we'll achieve our goals in Iraq, regardless of how much longer we stay or how much more money we dump into this country.

I noticed that you didn't answer the questions I asked. I think Bush had the best intentions in mind. He acted on the information that he had, and the reccomendations of his advisors. He also might have drawn his deceisions from public statements of people like Gore and Clinton and Kerry. It seems that he had quite a few more players, and (heavyweights at that) giving him unreliable information than just the one history prof in hypothetical I presented for you. Wow. We've come pretty far from "The buck stops here." Sad, really.

I wonder why everybody doesn't agree with a statement that appears to be popular on a white supremacist/neo-Nazi website. Hmmm... Also, I'm curious why turtle thinks everyone SHOULD agree with this. The summary of it is basically "Democrats are fucking up our country by voting Democratic politicians in to office." There's no reason "everyone" should agree with that anymore than everyone should agree that GWB was the worst President ever. Neither even comes close to approaching the status of an absolute truth. It's just more opinionated drivel that somebody thought was clever.

Wait. You mean you're not all billionaires? Fucking riff-raff! Get off my internet!!!

Cognitive dissonance.

"We had a mining accident that was very tragic," Paul said. "Then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen." sounds inexperienced to me. not total idiocy. A more experienced politician would have followed that up with something about safety measures. Maybe he should have started out as a community planner first. Except the point of his statement is that he thinks the company shouldn't be held culpable and that the mining operation (and BP, and any other business/corporation you can think of) is regulated too much. He literally saw a case where a company failing to follow regulations led to the deaths of miners and thought "That company needs the government interfering in their business less." I agree with Kallend. That crosses well over into idiocy.

Immigration, particularly the illegal kind, acts as a safety valve for Mexican society. Those most likely to leave are the poor and those disenchanted with how thing are going in Mexico. That leaves the people who are happy with how things are going behind to vote for the President. Since we can't really do anything directly about Mexico encouraging (or, at the very least, looking the other way for) illegal immigration, I'd say the more important question is "Why has the US, through Republican and Democratic administrations, done nothing to attempt to stop the flow of illegal immigrants?" As I've said in another thread, I'd venture the answer is that the cheap labor is too hard for a lot of American corporations to give up.

Pretty much the only way to get out of a depression or a recession is spending. Either the private or public sector have to spend money to buy shit, increasing demand, leading to industry creating more jobs to increase supply to fill that demand. President Hoover figured the government should stay out of things and that the private sector would work things out themselves. I think we all know how well that turned out. In general, in times of economic downturn, the natural inclination of people is to hoard what they have. While this is smart of them on the micro scale, it hurts the economy on the macro scale. So, since we can't count on the private sector to spend the money to pull us out of this downturn, that pretty much only leaves us with the government. No, it's not ideal that the government has to borrow a shitload of money in order to "prime the pump" of our economy, but the infusion of cash does lead to people having more money to spend, which is gradually increasing demand for products, which will eventually lead to better unemployment numbers. The alternative is to sit back and hope that the American people will start buying shit with money they don't have in order to prime the pump themselves. Historically, that isn't what happens.

Sorry Bill but were I am the school is very liberal ( very supportive of Obama and his agenda )and is very much for drug testing. The few on the right have stood against school drug testing. Just because someone one the right thinks drug testing for kids is ok doesn't mean those thoughts are not liberal thoughts. Authoritarians from both sides of the aisle would probably support drug testing. Nationally, Democrats don't tend to be authoritarian on this issue, as evidenced by the ACLU's statement. More locally, it's not surprising that some Democratic school board members would decide they'd be for this. As was pointed out earlier, it's a really easy way to make it appear you're "doing something" and can justify it by the typical whining about "thinking about the children". I would wager that whichever party is in power in an individual school board is more likely to be for drug testing, be they Republican or Democrat, because it allows them to claim they're "doing something".

Correct me if I"m wrong, but isn't part of the argument against illegal immigrants that they take jobs that Americans could do? So, to punish these illegal immigrants, you want to incarcerate them and...force them to do jobs that Americans could do. Bravo.

That's assuming their army wouldn't starve to death in 72 hours and that the ROK army didn't blast every pass across the DMZ. I still believe the biggest threat to Seoul is all the artillery that's pointed at them. DPRK doesn't need to use a nuke to take out the city...several hundred salvos of conventional might do the trick. I tend to agree with this. The ROK won't go with military retaliation because even though they'd "win' in the long run, Seoul (and their economy) would almost assuredly be fucked. If, on the other hand, the DPRK decided to come across the border, I think they'd make some quick advances for about 72 hours but would then stall out. They'd be pushed back over the DMZ within a couple months and the DPRK would probably completely collapse shortly thereafter.

68.02 points away from being under 10k again. Bad news.... A little over a year ago, we were under 7k. The fact that we've even near 10k right now, let alone were 1,000 points above it, is kinda shocking to me.

Good point ! Would an atheist ever risk his/her life for the greater good of mankind? Or when it comes to the ultimate sacrifice it is simply a sacrifice they would not make for anyone? Just curios. I wouldn't call myself an atheist at this point, though I'm probably pretty close to agnostic, so I think the question still applies. As somebody who admits that I have no idea what happens when I die, I value my life here highly. This doesn't mean that I'm going to go into a protective bubble and try to prolong my life as long as possible. Rather it means that I will try to make my life as valuable as possible. I do this by trying to live life to the fullest (skydiving) and by trying to use my life to make a difference. I have no desire to die, but there are certainly situations where self-sacrifice could help maximize the value of the life I've lived. Just my two cents, since we're waxing philosophical and such.