tvashtarkatena

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That guy would look better on fire

Win The Future!

Then maybe we just shouldn't worry about it that much.

Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips stated on Faux Nooz last night that "the majority of tea party members are against legalizing marijuana". Sarah Palin followed up with a similar claim. The movement is mostly social conservatives who want to tell the rest of us how to live with just enough of a sprinkling of libertarian to make it seem like it offers something 'new'. Same ole GOP repressive bacon-wrapped-turds, different day....

Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, so far... ...come on, Iranians, time to break some shit!

And THAT is boring.

Of all the posters here, you're pretty much just a prick without a point.

If you want to get a government's attention you've got to seriously fuck some shit up.

Why don't they Egyptians just park a single tank a kilometer into Israel and let them put the insurrection down with better hardware? As for shooting civilians, the Tunisians were already on that...with snipers, no less. CORE!

Conservatives aren't exactly known for their originality. Still, the mileage they try to squeeze out of a tired joke is impressive.

I wasn't necessarily responding to you, nor did I take your raw comment literally. I don't really focus on you much. You might try the same.

I don't agree that sticking it to bondholders by destroying a state's credit rating is less politically costly than cutting the public employee compensation budget. Most voters, who neither work for the state nor hold these bonds, will care about the state's future ability to do its various jobs. It would seem that reducing the state's ability to obtain credit would have a greater, more long lasting negative effect. I do agree, and this seems obvious, that public employee compensation is, by far, the largest part of any state's budget. Massive deficits mean that has to be reduced somehow, and there are only three ways to do that: layoffs and furloughs, cuts in direct compensation, or cuts in benefits. That's just simple arithmetic. How we got here is instructive, but doesn't remove the problem.

Lawmakers in attendance: 3 Ouch. Damn you, Jared Loughner!!!!!

Idahoans are prohibited from carrying firearms on the campuses of public and private schools. Aaron Tribble, a law student at the U of I, is suing his school over the right to have a gun in his on campus family dorm: U of ID law student sues school over right to have a gun on campus This tests a 'time/place/manner' restriction. Many such restrictions have already passed constitutional muster. The state could argue that the risk of accidental shooting in a crowded dorm outweighs Tribble's interest in self defense. Tribble's case might also be further weakened because he's always got the option of moving off campus if personal security is such an important issue for him.

The raw movement is pretty funny. Proper cooking makes available a lot of otherwise unavailable nutrients. America has got to have the most dysfunctional, schizoid relationship with food of any culture in the world. The majority of any given sufferers 'food allergies' don't actually exist, vegetarianism and its more austere sister, veganism, is a nutritional disaster without extreme ATTENTION and FOCUS, but you can always go the other way with a Double Down and 44 oz Dr. Pepper. Corporations constantly push the 'eat and run' ideal (BUSY MOMS! BUSY KIDS! BUSY PETS!) - which of course pushes processed food. Anyone who bucks the factory food trend gets labeled as indulging in 'boutique cuisine'. I'm sorry, but Americans just aren't that busy, unless channel changing constitutes being fully occupied. Half the households in this country are single people who do not volunteer, play sports, or have to take care of anyone but themselves. In other words BUSY BUSY BUSY!!!!!

After independence, Paine temporarily returned to England, wrote The Rights of Man in support of the French Revolutionary ideals, and was indicted for treason. He escaped to France in 1792, wrote The Age of Reason, but was imprisoned by the Robes Pierre government for protesting the execution of Louis XVI. The new American government did fuck all to get him out until James Monroe finally got it the act and secured Paine's release after 10 months in the slammer. Ever civil and generous, even in poverty, and ever the shit stirrer where shit needed to be stirred, Paine was truly one of the greatest Americans. He was, without a doubt, the founding father of liberal thought in this country.

And yes, this may be the beginning of the end of American backed middle eastern dictators. Yeah, that's worked out so damn well so far.

Tunisia's been liberal for a long time. They had abortion rights 8 years before we did. Women are treated as equals. They're highly educated. They'll do fine. And when they do, the rest of the Arab world will be watching. It's hard to set your prejudices aside and see people you consider your enemies as real and complex as you are. It's the conservative's curse.

That's their main selling point, actually. Remember who their base is.

Narcissistic, Midwestern born Tiger Mothers should guard our southern border!

Paine was well known and, for the time, well read. His book The Age of Reason sold 25,000 copies and had 18 printings. He was not an atheist, but a deist - roughly corresponding to nature-as-God - he strongly believed that the idea that God's ways were 'mysterious and unknowable' was crap - an idea designed to concentrate power to a few. He believed in transparent morality - no mystery required. As the century drew to a close, Paine was reviled by the colonial religious establishment and many of his countrymen and abandoned by many of his closest friends as a wave of fundamentalism swept the over the nation. Jefferson, notably, stuck by him. Franklin, pretty much an out and out atheist, warned him not to poke Christianity in the eye. In the end, Paine's funeral was attended by fewer than a dozen people. It wasn't until the mid 1800s that historians began to resurrect the great man and revolutionary that was Thomas Paine. Prior to that, the influence of Paine's books was falsely minimized. Even today, when you here evangelical zombies channel their fantasy versions of the founding fathers and their mythical guiding faith, you somehow never hear Paine's name mentioned.

The popular term for deists and freethinkers in 1776? "Infidel".

But hey, religion's always been big bidness, and we are the nation of bidness, if nothing else.

I'm just glad the Constitution doesn't include God. It damn near had God written all over it, but for the diligent efforts of a handful of principled Freethinkers. Had it been written twenty years later, during a particularly religious reactionary period, it probably would have mandated an official state religion.