The Democrat Thread

[mr_genius]

So explain to me what gun control laws would have accomplished here. You want to make it illegal for a 6 year old to carry a gun to school? Guess what... it already is, in multiple ways.

 

haha, good point

[lostfan]

Congress (by that I really mean the House) is kind of in la-la land on what the S&P was actually saying. One of the reasons they gave for the giant financial clusterf*** was political gridlock being unable to solve it. Then they, the sources of the political gridlock, say "see! we need to get it together because (insert rambling political bulls***)"

[southsider2k5]

Once upon a time, about two and a half years ago, the Dems thought the debt and deficit were important too.

[Balta1701]

Once upon a time, about two and a half years ago, the Dems thought the debt and deficit were important too.

Then the economy collapsed.

[BigSqwert]

This just in!!!

 

Apparently a group of radical Islamists in the 1960s forced a white woman in Kansas and her Hawaiian grandparents to raise a black child so that one day he would be elected President of the United States and make America a radical Islamist state run under Sharia Law while simultaneously occupying 2 Muslim nations and bombing a 3rd one, killing members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

 

I can't believe this isn't all over the news. Biggest conspiracy in history!

[Balta1701]

Have I mentioned recently how abjectly s****y our private health insurance system is?

 

I have insurance, I need to use it, and now I'm going to wind up spending the rest of the weekend on the phone figuring out how I actually can use it. Rather than just going to the damn place where I went last time.

[Balta1701]

Anti-tax advocates contend that higher taxes on the wealthy lead to millionaire flight. They say this has been seen in Maryland, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York. The rich are mobile, they say. They can take their money, taxes and jobs wherever they are treated best.

 

But a new study focusing on New Jersey provides some of the most detailed evidence yet that so-called millionaire taxes have little effect on the movements of millionaires as a whole.

 

The study, by sociologists Cristobal Young at Stanford and Charles Varner at Princeton, studied the migration patterns of New Jersey’s millionaires before and after 2004, when the state imposed a “millionaire’s tax” that raised rates on those earning $500,000 or more to 8.97% from 6.37%.

 

The study found that the overall population of millionaires increased during the tax period. Some millionaires moved out, of course. But they were more than offset by the creation of new millionaires.

 

The study dug deeper to figure out whether the millionaires who were moving out did so because of the tax. As a control group, they used New Jersey residents who earned $200,000 to $500,000–in other words, high-earners who weren’t subject to the tax. They found that the rate of out-migration among millionaires was in line with and rate of out-migration of submillionaires. The tax rate, they concluded, had no measurable impact.

 

“This suggests that the policy effect is close to zero,” the study says.

WSJ

[Balta1701]

Have I mentioned recently how abjectly s****y our private health insurance system is?

 

I have insurance, I need to use it, and now I'm going to wind up spending the rest of the weekend on the phone figuring out how I actually can use it. Rather than just going to the damn place where I went last time.

I just got the phrase "Let me transfer you over to the computer".

[bmags]

clearly the wsj has not seen atlas shrugged.

[StrangeSox]

clearly the wsj has not seen atlas shrugged.

 

lol

 

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

[Balta1701]

The government of Mexico has retained an American law firm and is apparently considering filing a civil suit/RICO case against American firearm manufacturers due to the flood of US made guns pouring across that border.

CBS News has learned that the Mexican Government has retained an American law firm to explore filing civil charges against U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors over the flood of guns crossing the border into Mexico.

 

Sources say Mexico's frustration with U.S. efforts to stop the flow of weapons has pushed them into this novel approach. The law firm is looking at charges that may include civil RICO. The contract was signed on November 2, 2010 by a representative of Mexico's Attorney General, at their Washington embassy.

 

On November 5, 2010 President Felipe Calderon expressed his frustration to CBS News correspondent Peter Greenberg: "We seized more than 90,000 weapons...I am talking like 50,000 assault weapons, AR-15 machine guns, more than 8,000 grenades and almost 10 million bullets. Amazing figures and according to all those cases, the ones we are able to track, most of these are American weapons."

 

According to sources, investigators will obtain makes and serial numbers of guns seized by Mexican authorities and trace them to their U.S. distributors and manufacturers.

As usual, I await people telling me that it's not actually happening.

[lostfan]

I've been listening to NPR a lot lately and its so funny, the way conservatives talk about it and what it actually is. NPR is about as neutral as you can get. Soooo much better than cable news because they don't talk about bulls***.

[StrangeSox]

I've been listening to NPR a lot lately and its so funny, the way conservatives talk about it and what it actually is. NPR is about as neutral as you can get. Soooo much better than cable news because they don't talk about bulls***.

 

If something isn't blatantly pro-conservative, then it must be super-liberal. They're consistently one of the best mainstream media sources out there, and the whole conservative campaign against them is a joke. But hey, O'Douche showed a couple of very heavily edited tapes showing a fundraiser maybe making some disparaging remarks about tea party people, so shut the damn thing down!

[BigSqwert]

Gotta love religious wackos.

 

There is an interesting account out of Waco, Texas where Bill Nye “The Science Guy” was booed for saying that the Moon does not generate it own light — in contradiction to the Bible. This will likely end any dream of Nye to open a new Bill Nye “The Religion Guy” line of products. The speech reportedly occurred in 2006 but the controversy was rekindled after critics cried foul at the removal of the story from the local newspaper’s online archive.

 

Nye ran afoul of the faithful by remarking that it is not true that the moon generates its own light as opposed to reflecting light. This contradicted Genesis 1:16, which says quite clearly (if only Nye bothered to read it) that “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Fortunately, there were educated people in the audience who proceeded to boo Nye and walk out. One woman with three children reportedly screamed “We believe in God!” while storming out.

 

Now what is particularly interesting is the Waco Tribune broke the story and ran an article with quotations from the audience. However, it has been removed from the online site, as noted at an atheist site. However, it has now been returned, here. Why would the newspaper remove a clearly important story with international interest? If the story was false, there should have been a retraction and an investigation. If it is simply embarrassing, the newspaper is engaging in self-censorship. Either way, the newspaper owes people and explanation.

 

In the meantime, Nye needs to answer for his rejection of biblical science. Recently, Texas legislators moved to help create a master’s in creationist science. Perhaps Nye should be required to get a real science degree in creationism as opposed to that ridiculous Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Cornell.

 

Next he is going question the fact that the sun revolves around the earth and find himself in a papal trial.

 

via

[StrangeSox]

Why is this a clearly important story with international interest?

[BigSqwert]

Why is this a clearly important story with international interest?

Eh, just dumb blogger commentary.

[Balta1701]

Sigh.

When Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. ordered the release of a Guantánamo Bay detainee last spring, the case appeared to be a routine setback for an Obama administration that has lost a string of such cases.

 

But there turns out to be nothing ordinary about the habeas case brought by Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, a Yemeni held without charges for nearly eight years. Uthman, accused by two U.S. administrations of being an al-Qaida fighter and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, is among 48 detainees the Obama administration has deemed too dangerous to release but "not feasible for prosecution."

 

A day after his March 16 order was filed on the court's electronic docket, Kennedy's opinion vanished. Weeks later, a new ruling appeared in its place. While it reached the same conclusion, eight pages of material had been removed, including key passages in which Kennedy dismantled the government's case against Uthman.

 

In his first opinion, Kennedy wrote that one government witness against Uthman had been diagnosed by military doctors as "psychotic" with a mental condition that made his allegations against other detainees "unreliable." But the opinion the public sees makes no mention of the man's health and discounts his testimony only because of its inconsistencies.

 

The alterations are extensive. Sentences were rewritten. Footnotes that described disputes and discrepancies in the government's case were deleted. Even the date and circumstances of Uthman's arrest were changed. In the first version, the judge said Uthman was detained on Dec. 15, 2001, in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities. Rewritten, Kennedy said in the public opinion that Uthman admitted being captured "in late 2001 in the general vicinity of Tora Bora," the cave complex where bin Laden was thought to be hiding at that time.

 

The creation of the additional opinion stemmed from a mishap inside the Justice Department: Kennedy's first opinion was accidentally cleared for public release before government agencies had blacked out all the classified information it cited.

 

While the government privately took responsibility for the error, it initially refused to correct it. Two people familiar with the discussions said prosecutors in the Justice Department's Civil Division gave Kennedy a choice: his entire decision would remain classified or he could write a new version that did not reference classified evidence.

[Balta1701]

Wikileaks/the NYT/the Guardian also did a document dump on Gitmo today. A summary:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

Turns out that wearing a Casio watch was enough to raise suspicions/get on a list of reasons why you could be sent to Gitmo, because that was the brand Al Qaeda used at the time. I'm wearing a timex now, but I'm not sure what I had then. Should I be scared?

[StrangeSox]

I hate this country.

.

[BigSqwert]

.

 

Why don't you just leave then, commie!

 

USA! USA! USA!

 

[StrangeSox]

99% sure I won't be voting for Obama.

[BigSqwert]

99% sure I won't be voting for Obama.

I'm closer to 99.9%

[bmags]

it worked in november!

[StrangeSox]

it worked in november!

 

So it's time in 1964 to wake up. And when you see them coming up with that kind of conspiracy, let them know your eyes are open. And let them know you -- something else that's wide open too. It's got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get on out of the country; you should get back in the cotton patch; you should get back in the alley. They get all the Negro vote, and after they get it, the Negro gets nothing in return. All they did when they got to Washington was give a few big Negroes big jobs. Those big Negroes didn't need big jobs, they already had jobs. That's camouflage, that's trickery, that's treachery, window-dressing. I'm not trying to knock out the Democrats for the Republicans. We'll get to them in a minute. But it is true; you put the Democrats first and the Democrats put you last.

 

Look at it the way it is. What alibis do they use, since they control Congress and the Senate? What alibi do they use when you and I ask, "Well, when are you going to keep your promise?" They blame the Dixiecrats. What is a Dixiecrat? A Democrat. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise. The titular head of the Democrats is also the head of the Dixiecrats, because the Dixiecrats are a part of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have never kicked the Dixiecrats out of the party. The Dixiecrats bolted themselves once, but the Democrats didn't put them out. Imagine, these lowdown Southern segregationists put the Northern Democrats down. But the Northern Democrats have never put the Dixiecrats down. No, look at that thing the way it is. They have got a con game going on, a political con game, and you and I are in the middle. It's time for you and me to wake up and start looking at it like it is, and trying to understand it like it is; and then we can deal with it like it is.

 

 

[Soxbadger]

Who would you vote for over Obama that meets the following criteria:

 

A) Will be either the Democratic or Republican nominee for President,

 

B) Would approach the GITMO situation differently than Bush or Obama.