PN-G bamatex

​ I have every right to drive in front of your house. If I park on the street out front and sit in the bed of my pick-up with my carry gun strapped to my belt, I haven't broken any laws. Nobody can do anything about it. Doesn't mean I'm not doing it to intimidate you. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't be keeping a watchful eye with your own gun handy. At least, that's what I'd be doing. I wouldn't be ignoring it like the president seems to be. And I certainly wouldn't be alright with that like you seem to be.

[Hidden Content] "'Good morning, American pilots. We are here to greet you on your Fourth of July Independence Day,' the message stated... The long-range bombers were intercepted on July 4 just 39 miles from the California coast." That's not from a movie. That's real life, and it happened three weeks ago. This is intimidation, pure and simple.

Well, it's not like they can leave dog crap on the front porch and call it a prank. That's normal in Nederland.

There are some serious contradictions inherent in this whole "sanctuary city" concept. First off, isn't this a watered down form of nullification? Nullification was a somewhat popular theory in the nineteenth century that the states, being the sovereign entities that formed the union, retained the right to nullify federal laws and federal court rulings within their boundaries if the states viewed those laws as unconstitutional. Although the nullification theory actually began in the North, it became central to the slavery issue and a trademark defense for Southern states against anti-slavery laws leading up to the Civil War and against Civil Rights legislation during the 1950s and '60s. Every legal analyst with any sense thinks the theory is asinine, but we still hear it brought up in the occasional debate (normally somewhere on the internet) and liberals love to compare state actions taken against environmental regulations, labor laws and, now, gay marriage rulings in red states to nullification attempts way back in the day. But this, in a sense, is even worse than nullification - as insane as it may be when a conservative occasionally makes a nullification argument, at least they do so based on a belief, however ill-conceived, that the law in question is unconstitutional, whereas there's no constitutional basis whatsoever for a state or local government to declare an immigration law constitutional. Funny how, when the shoe's on the other foot, these kinds of comparisons don't get made and the people who make them most just tend to look the other way. The second issue I take with this is a broader issue I take with the immigration debate generally. Look at that map and tell me where most of the sanctuary cities are. Newsflash: at least 70% of them are in states that are nowhere near the border. Of the four border states, the only one with a significant number of sanctuaries is California. Judging by eye, I count three states - Iowa, Washington and Oregon - that have created way more sanctuaries than the ultra-liberal Golden State. Two of the four border states only have one sanctuary at all, one of those being the nation's second most populous state. What does that tell us? It tells us that most of the people who are all for opening up the border don't actually have to live with the consequences. It's not like that many corn farmers in Iowa have actually come across an illegal immigrant in their lifetime, and the few who have met one probably didn't exactly meet a cartel member. It's not like Oregon experiences anything even remotely approaching the level of violence, human trafficking and drug smuggling that we see on a normal day in Houston due to our porous border security. I'm actually a centrist on immigration issues who's for limited forms of amnesty, but having attended a university in a state nowhere near the border that's filled with out-of-state students from up North who've never stepped foot in a border state, there's nothing that drives me up a wall faster than idiots trying to make a statement as though they know the full implications of policies surrounding the integrity of a border they've never even been within 500 miles of.

Does anyone actually believe that "lax gun control laws" in Milwaukee and Chicago, two of the cities with the most restrictive gun control measures in the country, are actually to blame for the spike in violence? I have a feeling the police chief in Houston wasn't contacted because he would've given a different answer.

Microsoft's laying off people in its smartphone division because Microsoft makes crappy smartphones that don't sell.

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"At the same time the bombers were in the air probing the West Coast of the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Obama to wish him a happy July 4th." [Hidden Content] "A 'source familiar with the situation' told Interfax on Tuesday that the Russian Prosecutor General's office began checking the legality of the recognition of the independence of the Baltics... The report comes one week after the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 — back when Nikita Khrushchev was in power — was declared unconstitutional." [Hidden Content] I have been raising red flags about Vladimir Putin and Russian expansionism for years. I do not understand how people can constantly turn a blind eye to the modern day version of Adolf Hitler poking and prodding at Britain and France while annexing various European states during the mid and late 1930s. If the tone and nature of our relationship with Russia does not change soon, this series of events will yield the same eventual result as that one.

I understand the push to take the Confederate flag down at the South Carolina and Alabama state capitols. But the Dukes? Really? I get that to a lot of people in this country, the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of racism - it's hard for black Americans not to interpret it that way when some of the most famous pictures of the most vehement racists of the twentieth century, like George Wallace, feature massive Confederate flags flying all over the place. The internet is covered with images of the flag at KKK rallies, past and present. But I also get that to millions of Southerners, many of whom are black as well, the flag is a symbol of Southern regional pride. To them, it's meant to identify a particular region, not a racial superiority complex. Charlie Daniels wrote one of the most interesting pieces I've read about this particular issue, in which he talked about growing up in the South during the 1930s, when most people in the United States looked down on the region and its inhabitants. To him, the flag symbolized the pride Southerners held in stark defiance of the condescending views adopted by Americans in other regions of the country. In the same way that the South has embraced the "redneck" persona despite the term's once pejorative connotation, the flag, to many Southerners, was a way to maintain some sort of pride while being looked down upon by everyone else - this is literally the exact same reason college football is so big in the South (seriously, look that up). This is true among even some of the most liberal Southerners; one of my best friends while in Alabama, who was so far left he bordered on communist, owned a Confederate flag and proudly espoused his Southern identity. I think the key element the media has missed in this debate is the context in which the flag and other Confederate symbols are used. Is the flag a symbol of racism at a KKK rally? Undoubtedly, but the American flag arguably is as well in those instances - after all, they're exercising their genuinely American right to free speech while calling for a purely white America, not just a white South. Is it a symbol of racism at bubba's fish camp up by the lake when he has it flying while he's kicked back on the front porch with a six pack? No, it's a symbol of a redneck telling the world that he's a redneck, that he enjoys being a redneck and that he likes to do redneck things and have good redneck times in a redneck part of the country. Is it a symbol of racism in a museum, in a textbook or at a reenactment of a Civil War battle? No, it's a symbol of one of the defining periods of American history, in which our character, unity and integrity as a nation were defined for generations to come. Is it a symbol of racism on top of the General Lee? No, it's a symbol of the rebelliousness that's embodied by the main characters, Bo and Luke Duke, while they're speeding down the highway at a hundred miles an hour, causing problems for the local sheriff, foiling the plans of the local corrupt political boss, straightenin' the curves and flattenin' the hills. Seriously, was the show racist? Absolutely not. Did any one of the characters on the show espouse anything even remotely racist for one second of air time? No. They never even came close. Is it a symbol of racism at the statehouse in South Carolina, where Strom Thurmond served as Governor and made numerous stump speeches advocating hardline segregationist policies? Yes, and it has no place being flown on the grounds of a capitol that should be open to all, that once voted to suppress the rights of millions of black South Carolinians, and that only ever started flying the flag as a protest against civil rights during the 1960s. Is it a symbol of racism at the statehouse down in Alabama, where George Wallace famously made several openly racist speeches, where Jefferson Davis himself oversaw the affairs of the Confederacy while the capitol of the short-lived nation was located in Montgomery during the early days of the Civil War, and which hundreds of black protesters were repeatedly barred from approaching during the marches from Selma? To argue that it isn't, and that it shouldn't come down as a result, would be asinine. Is its brother, the first national flag of the Confederacy, a symbol of racism at the capitol in Austin, where it flies alongside the flags of the five other nations of which Texas has been a part during its history? No, it's a symbol of the reverence with which Texans view their history - good and bad parts alike - just like it is when it flies next to those same five flags outside the Texas Historical Commission, and just like the seal of the Confederacy is when placed next to the seals of the United States, Mexico, France and Spain as those five seals encircle the seal of the Republic of Texas on the floor of the rotunda inside the capitol building. Context, folks. Context. I think most Americans - black, white and whatever other color - understand that. I think the media analysts and fringe elements, who are just about the only ones pushing this issue, don't. Maybe that's why they're all so surprised when they see the results of opinion polls like the one below: [Hidden Content] Leave the Duke boys alone. They were never meanin' no harm, and they didn't do anybody any either.

Kind of surprised this thread is this tame. Maybe it's just because I'm a college student, but campus carry has been a huge issue in some of the circles I run in.

Under the contemporary view of marriage - that is, the view of marriage as a legal institution as much as a religious or social institution - this ruling couldn't have been more spot on. While I agree with the reservations Justice Roberts has expressed in the past about the application of 14th Amendment protections to prevent perceived discrimination outside the text of a particular law as opposed to discrimination within the text of the law, the fact remains that marriage is an institution legally integral to the function of American society, and that the same-sex marriage bans deny access to that institution, and all the rights and benefits thereof, to a minority. This was the right and necessary thing to do. That being said, this never would have been a problem to begin with had the states stayed out of the marriage business. Western churches were proclaiming marriages long before governments ever had anything to do with them; indeed, the first laws passed regarding marriage in Medieval England were instituted by the Catholic Church in England in 1215, and, on that note, the earliest forms of marriage licenses in England weren't issued by any element of the English government, instead being issued by the English bishops themselves. Marriage was, at that time, a religious institution, not a legal institution. It had always been a religious institution prior to that, and it would remain a religious institution and a religious institution alone in the minds of the English and of the different peoples born out of the English commonwealth for centuries to come. It wasn't until much later that states became involved in the marriage business. Some states started issuing them far earlier than others; Massachusetts, for example, began issuing marriage licenses while it was still a colony in the 1600s. Other states took far longer; Texas, for example, was one of the last states to adopt the practice, not issuing marriage licenses until the mid-1960s (my grandparents' marriage licenses weren't marriage licenses, they were marriage certificates issued by their respective Methodist churches in the 1950s). The rationale behind the transition to marriage licenses varied among the states - states in the North largely adopted the practice to complement and enforce tax laws, while states in the South often did so to enforce bans on interracial and incestuous marriages. It should be noted here that marriage licenses, which are the legal incarnations of the institution of marriage, weren't adopted to expand or enable marriage, but to enforce preexisting laws that related to marriage. Also note that this occurred in a time when the "separation of church and state" was just beginning to be incorporated, and when many Americans, including the legislators carving out American marital laws, still viewed the wall between church and state as porous and unidirectional. Given this gray area between church and state which existed in the minds of most Americans when marriage licenses became a state practice, it probably didn't mean much to most people at the time - after all, how could a people who had attended public schools where prayer was said every morning object to state involvement in a religious practice? And so, the new laws were never really objected to, and were in fact embraced by the racists, social engineers and tax hawks of the era. No court cases came forth, no religious freedom arguments were made against them, and marriage licenses issued by the states became a normal part of American life. Now fast forward a few generations. The states have slowly incorporated several other elements of what's now understood to be marriage into the legal institution created by the license, itself. Visitation rights, power of attorney, tax benefits and other such things have created a robust legal union grafted onto the original religious institution. The word "marriage" has slowly transitioned from a word of deep religious and spiritual meaning into a legal concept and social practice. In the minds of many, marriage is no longer an institution proclaimed by God, it's an institution bestowed by the government that just happens to take place in a church under the officiating of a pastor because of religious beginnings. Our conception of marriage today is not what it originally was or, frankly, what it should be, it's the conception of an institution that has been gradually separated from the church and usurped by the state. This offends basic American political philosophy. If we're to be true to the "separation of church and state" - if we're to have a government which does not interfere in the internal workings of the various religions without just cause - then the states, in principle, should return marriage to the institutions which created it. Now, most of the people reading this post probably think that a move like that would be a death sentence for gay marriage. After all, if the churches were given sole domain over marriage, institutions that have defined marriage as between a man and a woman (or in some cases, a man and several women) for thousands of years aren't going to up and start marrying two men and two women, right? And that would effectively render the legal benefits of marriage off limits to same-sex couples, right? The answer to both of those questions is "no," and for two reasons. The first has to do with the legal rights of marriage as they stand today. There would be no legal issue with a sequestration of the legal and religious institutions if done properly. We've all heard about the "civil union" idea - it could easily be repurposed to serve as legal a union for any two people, not just two people of the same sex. And the word marriage can simply be relegated to churches by law as the symbolic, religious union, for the churches to bestow on whatever two (or more) people they please, regardless of sex or sexual orientation. This brings me to the second reason: there are churches out there that will marry two people of the same sex. In fact, there have been for a while, and I would argue that had states never started issuing marriage licenses at all and churches been left to control marriage from the beginning, gay marriage actually would have happened years ago. I'm sure there are people out there who think that's preposterous. Those people have likely never heard of the Episcopal Diocese in Alabama, which has openly supported same-sex marriage for the better part of a decade. In fact, the pastor at one of the largest Episcopal churches in Alabama, located in Birmingham, is a lesbian with a partner, and that partner has been extended benefits by that Episcopal church for the better part of that decade as well. If a church in Alabama, the heart of the Bible Belt, has been that dedicated to same-sex marriage for that long, it stands to reason that other churches in equally conservative states would have been as well, and that being the case, it further stands to reason that those churches would have begun performing same-sex marriages long before this Supreme Court ruling came down were it not for state laws preventing same-sex couples from obtaining state-issued marriage licenses, and thus that same-sex marriage would have been brought to those states years earlier. This might also make a good point in a discussion about why the government should have extremely limited involvement in the day-to-day lives of Americans generally, but that's a conversation for another time.

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​A threat is a threat is a threat. Was the Russian ambassador saying that Denmark's allegiance to NATO would put their vessels in the crosshairs right now? No. The fact remains, however, that he was still telling them their navy would be in the crosshairs. Not only was that clearly intended to intimidate the Danes into acquiescence, it was intended to send a message that NATO is an enemy of the Russian state, which underscores the point of both my statement and Mr. Romney's in 2012.

[Hidden Content]   If there is anyone out there who still thinks Romney was wrong when he said Russia is our greatest geopolitical foe, you might as well give up on trying to understand foreign policy.

    That's the general dictionary definition of treason, which is the incorrect one for the purpose of you assertion. The legal definition of treason, as provided in Article III, Section 3, the United States Constitution, reads as follows:   "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."   47 US Senators banding together to send a letter to the leader of a foreign country informing said leader that a deal he is currently negotiating with the President of the United States will not be upheld by the United States Senate, as the Constitution requires, does not constitute treason under this definition.

  Oh, there's not a doubt in my mind that they had them. Or that they got them to Syria with Russian assistance. We had intelligence that indicated a former KGB official who worked as a liaison with Iraq in the '80s was in Baghdad in the months leading up to the invasion, and that Iraq was moving massive amounts of unidentified supplies across the Syrian border - one of Obama's own intelligence directors has given that (largely ignored) testimony on several different occasions.   Ever wondered why Russia was so adamantly against our involvement in the Syrian crisis? Or where those chemical weapons Assad turned on his own people came from? Or perhaps what those private conversations Obama was having with Putin and Medvedev were about?

Do we know exactly what the demands are?

  That's right.   That doesn't mean I can't form conspiracy theories, though.  :D

I don't know why anybody's surprised. Everyone over in Port Neches and Groves knows nobody's been teaching math in Nederland for decades.   :D

[Hidden Content]   This article stems from recently declassified documents, that add to other declassified documents released to the public a few years ago about similar clandestine operations.   I still don't understand why we're just now finding out about this. The Bush administration would have saved itself and its party a lot of political headaches had this information been made public 10 years ago. I can't help but think they're hiding something more - something with grave potential consequences which massively outweigh the political benefits a release like this could have brought for the Republicans.

If the prosecutors are smart, they'll be willing to cut deals with the 10 that have been indicted so far in exchange for testimony that incriminates people further up the line. I'd ride that strategy all the way up the ladder until I could bring down the Butch himself. When he's behind bars, you'll know corruption has come to an end in BISD.

  I know they're the three countries which take the worst hits. What I'm saying is that Iran and Venezuela are probably just lagniappe. I'd be willing to bet the primary target here was Russia. There have been a lot of policy articles lately citing rumors that the US convinced the Saudis to increase production with the aim of sending the ruble into the ground.

  Right idea, wrong country. Try Russia.

  The title of this thread, which you started, is "Polio, Measles, Smallpox - Why Are Conservatives Anti Vaccination??". You did not add any quantifying descriptor which would indicate that you were referencing a limited number of conservatives, you simply referenced "conservatives" in general. In a case where the portion of a group you reference isn't specified, the implication is that you are referencing all of that group, or at least most of it. The implication is not that all of the people you wish to discuss happen to fall within the group you reference.

"A lot of conservatives" does not constitute most conservatives. Most conservatives I know think the anti-vaccination thing is ludicrous. Your assertion that conservatives generally oppose vaccinations isn't well founded,.