PN-G bamatex

[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,.

All things being equal, I would actually disagree with you, hippy. However, all things are not equal.   In an ideal world, the police are a civilian force, not a military one, designed to keep the peace, not protect the country. In an ideal world, they should be armed and equipped as such. In an ideal world, giving the police access to military equipment would lead to abuse. And this has happened before. About a week and a half ago, I toured the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, located across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where four little girls were killed in a bombing carried out by white supremacists in 1963. On display in that institute is an armored vehicle left over from World War II, two of which were purchased by the Birmingham Police Department in military surplus auctions and both of which were used to forcefully suppress peaceful civil rights demonstrations during the social turbulence of the 1960s. That was the doing the infamous Bull Connor - the epitome of a tyrannical elected official who abused his power. That is one of the many examples of why, in an ideal world, local elected officials who administrate a civilian police force shouldn't have access to military grade equipment.   The problem is, we don't live in an ideal world.   The fact that we live in a world where the threats of terrorism, urban violence and protests gone amok is not, however, a good reason to give local police access to military equipment on its own. We have mechanisms in place by which federal authorities who have proper access to military equipment can counter such threats when necessary. A prime example of this is the LA riot following the Rodney King verdict in 1992. When a massive portion of Los Angeles had to be cordoned off and abandoned by LA police because it was consumed in such extreme violence that normal policing efforts were too dangerous and too ineffective, President Bush became the first (and so far the only) president to activate the insurrection clause of the Stafford Act, which gave him the authority to deploy 3,500 active duty military personnel to Los Angeles to restore order. In an ideal world, this would be the pattern for handling a severe threat as you describe, and any time riots such as those in Los Angeles broke out, the president would step in and take this exact action at the exact point it becomes necessary.   That brings us to the second problem: we now live in a world where the national political consequences of something as simple and routine as restoring order are such that no president is willing to do so, rendering that mechanism effectively meaningless.   Consider New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Stafford Act places constraints on what the president is capable of doing in response to a natural disaster. It gives primary administrative authority over relief efforts to state governors, whom it also requires to have a natural disaster relief plan in place in case of an emergency, to formally request federal resources from the president should they be needed, and to request a full federalization of the emergency response if the situation has reached a point where the state is no longer capable of effectively administrating those efforts. This is why it took so long to get federal aid to any part of Louisiana afflicted by Hurricane Katrina, when it didn't take long to get those resources to Mississippi or Alabama, or to Texas a month later during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita, or to Florida when it was struck by four separate hurricanes in 2004. The governor of Louisiana at the time, Kathleen Blanco, did not follow her disaster relief plan, did not properly request federal resources, and outright refused to request a federalization of the response despite her abject failure to handle the situation, against the recommendations of her own staff, President Bush and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. When faced with the fact that Governor Blanco wouldn't cooperate, the number of people dying in New Orleans and the destruction which was being inflicted by looters and vagrants, President Bush considered circumventing Governor Blanco via the same insurrection clause his father had activated 13 years prior. He wrote about his eventual decision not to circumvent her and provide immediate relief in his memoir, Decision Points, where he admitted that he couldn't do so because of the controversy and potential litigation that would have ensnared his administration if he effectively declared an open rebellion in New Orleans, relieved a female, Democrat governor of a Deep South state from her duties and deployed active duty military personnel, even if 95% of what those personnel would have been doing was disaster relief and it would have meant getting assistance to people trapped in New Orleans a week sooner.   Fast forward to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Regardless of the circumstances regarding the Michael Brown shooting, the fact is, Ferguson was wrapped in violence throughout the entire ordeal. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, repeatedly deployed Missouri National Guard troops to Ferguson in largely unsuccessful attempts to restore order from the days after the shooting right through the grand jury announcement. Unlike New Orleans, the circumstances in this situation were much clearer - from a legal standpoint, Ferguson was much more clearly in a state of insurrection than New Orleans would have been. In fact, the situation in Ferguson was largely analogous to the situation in Los Angeles two decades earlier. Yet we didn't get any formal declaration of open insurrection, and no federal troops were deployed to the area to restore order. Why? To be fair, it's hard to say in this case since President Obama hasn't written a memoir of his presidency in which that decision is discussed. Conventional wisdom, however, tells us that the calculus was probably similar in nature to the the calculus President Bush was forced to use in New Orleans. If he's ever asked, President Obama would probably say that the thought of deploying federal troops to Ferguson never crossed his mind - that a military suppression of "mostly peaceful" protests with some light civil disorder would be entirely out of line. Everyone on this site with any common sense knows that statement would be a farce. The president knows just as well as anyone who's seen pictures from Ferguson in the aftermath of the riot that its scope and violence entirely necessitated a military presence - Governor Nixon wouldn't have deployed the National Guard to Ferguson so many times if it hadn't. The truth is that if President Obama had deployed military forces to Ferguson under that pretense, it would have been all over the national news for the rest of his presidency, and even though it would have been the right decision and anyone close to the situation would know that, the vast majority of the American public who would only ever see media clips of soldiers containing and arresting black protesters would view it as the act of a despot (a racist despot at that, if President Obama were white).   That is why we don't live in an ideal world. In an ideal world, the right decision gets made. In this world, the politically savvy decision gets made. Missouri's Governor Nixon was able to deploy the National Guard to Ferguson without political backlash because his voters, the citizens of Missouri, were all close enough to the situation to know its true severity and, thus, that it was the right decision to make. President Obama couldn't because most of the rest of the country wasn't paying close enough attention to Ferguson and all of the rest of the country was too far removed from Ferguson to understand that a decision like that was necessary. He would have suffered backlash for it, just the same as President Bush would have if he did so in New Orleans.   The reality of this new world we're trying to live in is that mass media has advanced to the point where it shapes public opinion almost entirely on its own. As a result of this and a convergence of several other factors (most notably higher levels of narcissism manifesting in the political leanings of my generation and historically low levels of trust in government), popular sovereignty's ability to constrain tyranny and abuse of power is itself being abused via the constraints it now places on things as fundamental as the rule of law.   Because of this, the only people to whom military force is acceptable as a means of restoring order in 99% of cases are going to be the people whose lives, families and homes are at stake when civil unrest breaks out. Federal force is no longer an appropriate means because the vast majority of the country isn't going to support it except in the most extreme cases. That leaves state and local forces to shoulder that responsibility on their own. If state and local forces now bear that responsibility alone, then they need to be equipped to do so. As a result, whatever my ideological reservations about this issue may be, I have to side with my pragmatic sense and say that it is appropriate for local and state authorities to have access to military equipment.

This was a crying shame.

  ... or maybe 73.   [Hidden Content]

You're hearing it here first, folks. If Jeb Bush wins, Mitt Romney will be Secretary of Commerce or Secretary of the Treasury. Mittens done made a deal.

  Don't remind me.  :D

  This is a political issue. You know every bit as well as I do that the low taxes and relaxed regulatory climate in Texas have just as much to do with our state's economic prosperity as our abundance of natural resources and global energy demand.   The state economy isn't going to bust wide open because the the price of oil dropped now like it did in the '80s. Our economy is much more diversified and much, much stronger now than it was then. The price of oil will slow our growth, but it won't stop it and it certainly won't reverse it. That's a testament to our state's leadership, and the economic sensibility of the political philosophy Texas has embraced.

  That's not what I said at all. I didn't say to win for the sake of winning, and I certainly didn't say not to cut. I said that we have to cut in a pragmatic fashion, and that you have to support someone willing to do that - not cut haphazardly and altogether - if you want to get someone who will make cuts at all.

  FIFY   As I said, George Washington more often embraced the federalist view than the anti-federalist view. He more often sided with the father of the federalists, Alexander Hamilton, than he did Thomas Jefferson, the father of the anti-federalists and the Founding Father who espoused views most closely aligned to yours. Don't mistake anti-federalism for a view held by all of the Founding Fathers. John Marshall, the first notable Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and one of the men who led the fight for the Constitution's ratification alongside James Madison, laid the bedrock for Congress's Commerce Clause power, which is arguably their most broad and influential one.   I can agree that the states are where most of the issues should be debated and resolved via legislation in principle. On issues of education, healthcare and others that are similar in nature, it seems logical to have state legislators be the ultimate power since each individual citizen finds stronger individual representation in smaller legislative districts than they do in large congressional districts, and because state legislators are, as a result, more easily held accountable to their constituents. That said, the bottom line is that for the last 80 years, that's not how things have operated. There is no effective way to take federally funded programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and so on, break them up, and hand them to the states. That kind of transition would be disastrous for the states at the administrative, regulatory and financial levels. You would bankrupt half the states in the country or more, and fracture massive portions of the federal government in the process. The fact is, whatever the principle of the matter may be, it just isn't practical. It is just as important to cut the budget sensibly as it is to cut the budget at all.   And most importantly, we're not going to get a winnable presidential candidate who says things like that. Governor Romney, as I recall, made those exact statements in his bid for president two years ago. Despite that highly conservative stance, he didn't win. The point of that article I wrote and the point that I'm trying to convey in these posts now is that we have to accept that in politics, principle has to be balanced with pragmatism if we're to have our core interests be served at all. That's why all this "true conservative" business just doesn't make sense.

  I agree that spending cuts are necessary as a matter of national life and death. The issue of whether education and public health are federal or state issues, however, is not, except where financial matters are concerned and solely where financial matters are concerned.   On the subject of the Founding Fathers' interpretations of the Constitution regarding the safeguards they implemented to protect against government gone wild, the earliest Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution interpreted the Bill of Rights as limitations only on the federal government, not the state governments, and favored very broad interpretations of federal powers such as the Commerce Clause. It wasn't until the Fourteenth Amendment that things as basic as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion and the Right to Bear Arms were incorporated as restrictions on the state powers as well. The Founding Fathers saw popular sovereignty as the strongest defense against a federal government that is too powerful, with the codified limits on federal power setting up the framework for public debate. This means that they felt public opinion should be the deciding factor on matters such as whether the federal government has gotten too big except in the most extreme cases, and I doubt public opinion would favor doing away with the Department of Education, Medicare or the rest. Additionally, George Washington himself sided with federalists more times than not, embracing a stronger national government and in particular a stronger executive branch. Therefore, it's hard for me to accept that things like the Department of Education, Medicare and so on are outright affronts to the Founding Fathers' views. I think it's reasonable to say that they would have felt these things better handled by the states (again, in principle, I feel the same way), but I don't think they would be horrified at the thought of the federal government becoming involved in them.

  One wouldn't see Reagan or Cruz seeking out those professors or speaking to SDS simply because they have that "R" beside their name. Just like one wouldn't find Hillary Clinton speaking at a tea party rally.   Your most substantive evidence so far is the hiring of Van Jones. That's still not much.

  "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States...."   See that general welfare part? I've got news for you: no modern day Supreme Court justice - not even Justice Scalia - is ever going to accept an interpretation of the US Constitution in which "general welfare" is not construed broadly enough to allow for spending on a public health or education issue. The justices provide "extreme deference" (there's a reason that's in quotation marks) to the legislature on that matter. Trust me. I've read more majority opinions than I can count.   I can agree, on principle, that public health is an issue best left to the states. That doesn't change the fact that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, for better or worse, are federal programs. They've been around for sixty years and they're not going anywhere. Whatever the principled approach may be, the practical one is to accept the reality that none of those programs will ever be broken up and handed to the states, and that conservatives will just have to do the best they can with what they've got.   Where education is concerned, the situation is similar. Obviously, it's not quite as drastic given that the federal government, even with NCLB, is nowhere near as involved in education as they are in public health, and that states have exercised much firmer control over education issues than public health issues throughout our history, but the fact of the matter is that DOE isn't going away. We might as well get something for the money.

  W. spent money like a drunken sailor?   Bush 43's average deficits were roughly half of Obama's average deficits. Most of Bush's deficits stemmed from unfunded liabilities in the form of preexisting programs that came due when the baby boom generation started hitting the right ages (i.e., Medicare, Social Security, etc.). In fact, in that regard, Bush saved us some money; I can't imagine what we'd be spending on Medicare had we not reformed Part C to force the private health care providers to get competitive. The only spending that is truly a result of the Bush administration is the spending on Homeland Security and the War on Terrorism, which was a fraction of the deficit and an absolute necessity following 9/11.   That brings us to the Patriot Act, in which case I'll say your assertion is just flat out wrong. There's plenty in that bill that's conservative. In fact, I think it's fair to say that was an extremely conservative security bill passed with overwhelming support in the hysteria and paranoia following 9/11. Are there parts of it that I don't agree with? Absolutely. There are parts of it that I think are an outright affront to our core liberty interests. I nonetheless look at it as a highly defensive bill passed by a highly defensive nation in the wake of the worst attack on American soil in US history - in essence, that it was a natural result of the circumstances. In any case, that's beside the point, which is simply this: while the Patriot Act may have gone too far, it's no secret that strong national defense is a core value for conservatives, and the Patriot Act went a long way toward shoring up that defense.

  Medicare Modernization pushed Medicare along the path to greater privatization. I don't see how that can be painted as anything other than a preexisting program taken in a conservative direction.   The only thing that NCLB really did was attach strings to preexisting federal funding. That's liberal in the sense that the federal government played an augmented role in a sphere that had traditionally been under the purview of the states. It's conservative in the sense that it made sure our tax dollars weren't going to keep funding mediocrity. Either way, education has a proven economic benefit, so at best, it's politically neutral.