JayB

Brand new, $236, shipped as of today: http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/742806#Post742806

Well in this particular case I can't say that I'm terribly upset that the someone in question wasn't smitten enough to include herself in the set of women that she was pondering setting you up with....

I've had mine for about a year and a half - even the same colour as the one shown. I love it - fun, economical, and surprisingly good on the highway. Drove from Lake Louise to Penticton this summer for just under $18.00 Chicks seem to dig it, too. They just don't think much of me but I don't think that's the car's fault. Yeah, yea, yea - whatever. I can distinctly recall someone meeting you and hearing some variation on the "Wow - that' Murray's such a cool guy, I wonder if he's dating anyone? Hmmm - I wonder which of my friends I should try to set him up with?" about a thousand times before I explained that: said characteristics + owner of a successful business generally = has the chick thing covered. So the statements about the car are accurate but the rest is just more self-serving distortions of the facts by a Canadian with an agenda.

I license patrimonial sanctimony out on a subscription-fee basis to anyone on the site who wants it, so it's not technically recycling.

Someone should reserve a spot at the "Grief Center" for this kid 20 years down the road so that he can vent about how Earth Momma got all caught up in the protesto-frisson of the moment and dropped him on his face...

Good name for it. I thought you'd like the personal-responsibility aspect of it. Are you turning nanny-state on me? If you were to call the police to remove the socially conscious neighbor blocking your driveway, and or the Fire Department to cut the chain tethering his infant to your bumper, I certainly wouldn't think any less of you.

No worries. Evergreen's answer to Mr. Garrison is on point and has this one covered, mmmkay.. " From: Johnson, Leslie Sent: Wed 11/14/07 13:03 To: All Staff & Faculty DL Subject: FW: Port demonstration Debrief with Counseling Center staff —–Original Message—– From: Johnson, Leslie Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 12:15 PM To: Gaetz, Gloria Subject: Port demonstration Debrief with Counseling Center staff The Counseling Center will be holding a debriefing specifically for TESC students who have been involved The Olympia Port war protest. The purpose of the debriefing is to provide emotional support and help students process traumatic experiences. This will be a therapeutic setting and as such no media will be present or allowed. If you are aware of a student who was involved in the protest and is having difficulty coping with or processing this experience please encourage them to attend this therapeutic debriefing. When: Thursday Nov. 15 Time: 6- 8 p.m. Where: CAB room 108 Leslie Johnson, MSW Mental Health Therapist TESC Counseling Center Ext. 6802"

Seems like this would impose a pinch on the tax revenues and thus would force rates on the sub-25's to increase. I'm surprised that you aren't arguing for a personal responsibility/free-market alternate solution here. One could take the money that is saved by not having to subsidize those post-25'ers taxes, and invest it however one sees fit into an equity fund sufficient to pay off all personal property taxes for the rest of one's life. That's quite an idea you've got there. I'm going to call it...."saving for retirement." Whether or not you "had" to increase property taxes would be entirely dependent upon whatever else was done to the tax code in the meantime, but a capital gains tax on this asset class - which I've argued for before for other reasons, could contribute to covering whatever "revenue offset" was attributable to this plan. I don't have terribly strong feelings either way, but tend to favor income (active or passive) and capital gains taxes over property taxes for the philosophical reasons that KK has outlined - and thought that the time limited compromise might satisfy both property tax advocates and those who dislike the idea of the state having a permanent tax-lien on property that they've already paid for in-full.

Market rents and the costs associated with maintaining property are separable and determined by how much renters can afford to and/or are willing to pay (since you can't take out a 30 year debt-security to finance your rent) - not how much it costs the owner to hold onto them. There are quite a few "landlords" in the US in the past few years who can't possibly even come close to covering their mortgage with the rent that they can get for their property, much less mortgage/insurance/taxes/maintenance. If a property has been owned for less than ~4 years and it's up for rent, I'd ask to see enough information from the owner to have some reassurance that he/she can afford to hold onto the property, and you won't have to move and or lose the 1st/last/deposit due to them being foreclosed upon.

What would the problem be with raising all of the state's revenue on income, dividends, and capital gains from the sale of property - no matter what form the property takes? Not saying they don't exist, just wondering what people who favor property taxes claim that they are? Seems like, as CP said, this would eliminate one of the prime sources of the inequality in school funding. I would love to see all public schools funded equally, one because it strikes me as the most fair, and two because it would show that the difference in school performance have little to the dollars spent there, and quite a bit to do with the students sent there. Another idea might be to limit the total number of years that one is subject to property tax on one's primary residence, so that after say - 25 years of paying property taxes on your principal residence, you are no longer subject to such taxes (no such exclusions would apply to other properties that anyone might happen to own). Best of both worlds - people pay property taxes for the 25 years that are most likely to correspond to their prime-earning years, yet can retire without a permanent tax-indenture on the property that has the potential to force them out of their homes if they can't pay the taxes. Compensate for any decline in revenue that results from imposing such a threshold with an increase in the income tax.

He's using non-violent actions to enforce a private morality that's at odds with the laws established by the legislature. Same as the protestors - except that in this case he's obstructing your driveway, rather than a the road used to transport goods from the port. The key element here is who gets to make these decisions. If you grant the mob in Olympia the right to determine which uses of the road are acceptable according to their lights, then you have zero basis upon which to condemn the actions of your activist-neighbor in this case.

The law provides for pretty much all forms of assembly that don't compromise the rights of fellow citizens or attempt to supercede the laws established by their legislature. Assemble and protest on the side of the road, railroad, airport runway, shipping lane, etc.

Substitute the white mobs who attempted to obstruct integration for Wallace and Bull Connor to remove the state/private dichotomy - and the comparison stands. The overarching principle is the status of the law in a society where all citizens have the right to vote, address their grievances in court, etc. Whether a mob assembles and attempts to impose their particular conception of morality on private citizens, or agents of the state who are acting in accordance with the laws enacted by their legislature makes no difference. Your attempt to deny this is predicated on the fact that you share their private conception of morality, and nothing more. If your neighbor decides that the state is destroying the environment by granting you the right to drive your car on public roads, and he uses non-violent methods to prevent you from exiting your driveway, I presume that you'll gladly accept the proposition that his notions of morality trump the rights that you've been granted by the legislature, and heartily congratulate him on his keen civic engagement. Ditto for those who oppose vaccination blocking shipments of state-funded vaccine to their final destination, etc, etc, etc.

I guess that you are attempting to compare the political status of these protesters to that of blacks under Jim Crow laws. "When every adult has access to the voting booth and appeals to the courts to preserve the rights defined in the constitution and the bill of rights - the moral and intellectual justifications that one can employ on behalf of such actions are few." Were the folks in Olympia systematically disenfranchised? If not, then the comparison you've made is ludicrous. A more apt comparison would be that of Bull Connor and George Wallace. They lacked nothing in terms of political rights or representation, didn't like the laws that resulted from the actions of Congress and the Courts, and tried to take matters into their own hands.

When every adult has access to the voting booth and appeals to the courts to preserve the rights defined in the constitution and the bill of rights - the moral and intellectual justifications that one can employ on behalf of such actions are few. I believe that the only reason that the first "action" succeeded is because the protesters included non-consenting parties - in this case children - in their ranks, and the police felt that they weren't properly staffed or equipped to forcibly remove the children from the scene. Nice. I'm not comfortable leaving it to the mob to define what's legal and what's not, which purposes the infrastructure can and cannot be used for, etc. I may not always agree with the law or the legislature - but in cases where everyone has recourse to the courts and the voting booth - I much prefer letting the courts and the legislature make these decisions. I lived through the sixties and lost friends in VietNam. If we invade Iran, these "kids" in the video will be forced to man the front lines of another unwinnable war. Do you believe the war in VietNam was a just war? Did we belong there? Would the legislature have done anything to stop it without the protests of "the kids" of the 60's? I seriously doubt it. Your abortion arguement is not about an external war we CAN and should avoid engaging in. Why launch more huge machines in order to take more human lives? Abortion rights WERE legislated via MASSIVE citizen involvement including huge marches. I understand that we are both talking about human life. I submit that the cause and effect are different (money, power), and therefore require different tactics. The religious right continues to support candidates, including Bush, who only pay lip service to pro-life legislation. Why don't THEY pull the plug on these candidates they so heartily support even after they know they have been used and lied to? If I were arguing against protesting in general, I could see where you were coming from with this one. That wasn't the argument that I was making, however. These people could have exercised their right to protest and "have their voices heard," from the side of the road. There are people who have convictions that are just as sincere who oppose abortion, mixed race marriages, school integration, etc - and the question is whether they should be applauded for taking their private morality and taking it upon themselves to determine which uses of public infrastructure are acceptable, which legal rights established under the law others should be able to exercise, etc. I'm not arguing that every law enacted by the legislature is perfect, but that those who object to a given law should do so in a manner that doesn't involve taking the law into their own hands. The alternative is mob rule, and while this mob may be acting in accordance with your convictions, the next mob that gathers to take "direct aggressive action" may not.

Must be Vern Troyer in the green parka...

The moral and practical equivalent of Civil-War Re-enactments/Renaissance Fairs for today's Leftists... There's a fortune out there waiting for the first person to who monetizes the experience with an "Activist Land" theme park.

When every adult has access to the voting booth and appeals to the courts to preserve the rights defined in the constitution and the bill of rights - the moral and intellectual justifications that one can employ on behalf of such actions are few. I believe that the only reason that the first "action" succeeded is because the protesters included non-consenting parties - in this case children - in their ranks, and the police felt that they weren't properly staffed or equipped to forcibly remove the children from the scene. Nice. I'm not comfortable leaving it to the mob to define what's legal and what's not, which purposes the infrastructure can and cannot be used for, etc. I may not always agree with the law or the legislature - but in cases where everyone has recourse to the courts and the voting booth - I much prefer letting the courts and the legislature make these decisions.

I presume we can expect those behind these efforts to extend their applause to those who employ the same methods to take "millitant and dramatic action against" to prevent access to abortion clinics.

But a prelude to the most amusing rant that I linked in above this one. Worth watching if you can stand more than 10 minutes of Pat Condell in any given day...

I think he'd agree with you on most of those points. It's a shame you didn't watch the entire clip. ReYfDlIa-Z8 atTSwau9fwM

200 lashes? Isn't that more or less a death sentence? It's worth pointing out that the report JayB posted posits that terrorists are more likely to spring from countries that lack civil rights. This news item tends to support that conclusion. As an aside, it seems to me that Americans who are most "terrorist like", who justify torture, advocate nuking the general populace of other countries, support terrorist "freedom fighters" who are on "our side", and generally believe in brutal responses to opposition are often those least committed to civil rights for anyone who isn't just like them. If poverty caused terrorism, world history would be even bloodier than it is. I think that the link between political repression and terrorism is certainly more defensible than the notion that poverty breeds terrorism, but the connection is a rather loose one. There's been plenty of political repression in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, etc - and there was extreme, sustained political repression in the Soviet Union, China, the Baltics, etc. In the latter cases, the severity and brutality of the state's repression was orders of magnitude more severe than anything that's been seen in the Middle East, with the possible exception of perhaps Iraq. This suggest to me that there's perhaps more to the story than political repression.

"UK's Brown Says Poverty Breeds Terrorism, Urges More Aid" http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/terrorwar/analysis/2004/1101breed.htm "Poverty 'fuelling terrorism'" World leaders meeting at a development summit in Mexico have called for increased aid to poor countries to help stamp out extreme poverty as a motivation for terrorism." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1886617.stm "Finally, A Not-So-Bad Bush Doctrine: Poverty Breeds Terrorism" http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?pid=39 "Archbishop - terrorism down to poverty" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article644776.ece "UN warns poverty fuels terror." "The war on terror cannot ever be won if the war on poverty isn't won," said Sachs, the UN Secretary-General's special adviser on the UN Millennium Development Goals." http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200508/10/eng20050810_201426.html Et.....cetera.