PN-G bamatex

  Do you realize how asinine that argument is? What's the point you're trying to make? That the men and women who fought and died in Iraq didn't want to be there?   The last time we had a draft was 1971. Every single member of the United States military who has entered the armed services since then has done so voluntarily. Every single serviceman and woman who enlisted after 9/11 knew there was a good chance he or she would have to fight in the Middle East. Every single serviceman and woman who enlisted after March of 2003 knew there was a good chance he or she could go to Iraq. Obviously, those brave men and women willingly accepted the possibility of that assignment by enlisting with that knowledge.   Now, are you really trying to say or imply that people who believe we should be sending US forces into Iraq today should volunteer to go over themselves in place of others who don't want to go to Iraq? Because unless our servicemen and women somehow enlisted without any prior knowledge of the conflict in Iraq, those people you're trying to say don't want to go over there must have, at the very least, willingly accepted that deployment as a possibility.

  Saddam had the region stabilized?   The only thing Saddam Hussein ever had under control was his own people. A third of them, the Kurds, he spent a good portion of his tenure trying to systematically exterminate, and the rest were kept under extreme oppression. Not to mention that he actively allowed al Qaeda to train within his borders and probably handed Syria most of the same chemical weapons they've been using on their own citizens for the last two years.   The people who predicted that Iraq would become unstable predicted it would happen after a premature removal of US forces. And that's exactly what happened.   On that note, "solve your own problems" is a great way to piss off a lot of people in a hotbed for terrorism.

  You can strike for any reason, but let's be realistic for a minute: striking a juror for racially oriented activism can be easily construed as striking a juror for race. I think most attorneys would know that and would be very careful in striking a juror on those grounds for fear of a challenge that may raise that very question. So in that sense, I would think that the difference between a special interest group and a hate group would at least be somewhat relevant, seeing as it's a lot easier to fight that allegation if the juror was a member of a known hate group than if he or she was a member of an advocacy group.

  The KKK and the NAACP aren't exactly analogous. The Black Panthers can be put in the same boat as the KKK - virtually every organization that tracks dangerous organizations classifies both as hate groups - but the NAACP is less "torches and pitchforks," more political advocacy.   Like I said, the only way I can really consider this reasonable is if membership in the NAACP might have a direct bearing on a juror's ability to determine the facts of the case. Because most attorneys know this is a tricky game to play any time race even becomes remotely involved, I'm going to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and say he probably had some strong grounds. But until I see the facts of the case, I can't really say that conclusively.

The federal and most state judicial codes are pretty clear in prohibiting the striking of a potential juror on the basis of race, sex or religion. If that was indeed the case, then the termination is perfectly acceptable.   That said, activism in the name of a particular minority group could present a legitimate conflict of interest for a juror, and the lines between striking a juror based on minority status and striking the same juror because of activism can be very blurry. Any attorney who tried to do so would surely know he's on shaky ground, and that he would need significant evidence to legitimately raise a question of bias.   I would want to see the complete facts of the case for which voir dire was occurring and the facts surround the juror in question's supposed activism before formulating an opinion. On its face, though, I have to admit that a Facebook post and mere membership in the NAACP doesn't quite seem like enough. The case must have had some explicit, clearly identifiable link to racial issues for that to be reasonable.

[Hidden Content]   And we'd be one of the least corrupt states if we could figure out how to turn BISD over to Louisiana.  :D

Am I to take that to mean that since he wasn't there for any reason relating to the war, his death either isn't tragic or is less tragic to you? Because that's certainly the way that statement reads.

It really goes against my better judgment to continue this debate, particularly after saying I wouldn't, but out of respect for the Lovelady family and in full recognition of how much disinformation Big girl usually posts, I'll give this one more shot.     Victor Lovelady wasn't a kid, he was fully grown man. He wasn't a soldier fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, he was an employee of an energy company working in Algeria. Please, do some research before you try to respond to something, especially when you risk erroneously commenting on something as significant as the unnecessary death of one of our fellow Southeast Texans.   [Hidden Content]       And yet within the US, the country that spearheaded the response to terrorism, the number of annual terrorist attacks hit an all-time low in 2006 and is still lower now than it was 40 years ago.   [Hidden Content]

  You know, I was hesitant to respond to one of your posts at all. Statements like that are why.   Sorry folks, I don't have enough respect for the opposition to carry this debate any further.

  First of all, learn how to spell "inanimate" correctly.   Terrorism isn't an inanimate object. Hippy already pointed it out, but I'll say it again: you tell that to anyone who lost a family member to terrorism. Nederland lost a longtime resident to an act of terrorism in Africa last year - why don't you go tell his family it's an "inatimate object"? Let's see the reaction you get.   Terrorism is pattern of behavior predicated on a philosophy that the masses are best subjugated and conformed to a particular ideology through the use of fear and intimidation. It's the vehicle through which cowards, idiots, psychopaths and radical ideologues force their views upon the world. And it's contrary to everything we as a nation believe - contrary to the very principles of liberty, of freedom, and of the individual pursuit of happiness according to his own beliefs this country was founded on.   Now before you run off trying to reinforce some assinine point that this country has never fought a behavior, let's understand something: the history of military conflict in this country is very much a history of fighting different systems of beliefs and even to some extent, the predecessors to terrorism. The very incarnation of this country came through a war fought against oppression - political, economic, military and religious oppression carried out by a despotic monarchy halfway across the world. And after we beat it the first time, we fought it again a quarter of a century later and beat it again.   What's the next major war that sticks out in the minds of most Americans? A war against, in very many ways, a different kind of oppression carried out because of economic necessity, tradition and populist democracy run amok that applied our system of values in new and unforeseen ways.   And then we had the world wars. Are you really going to tell me those weren't wars against a different way of thinking? Those were wars against European and Asian imperialism, Nazism and ultimately, genocide. They were followed by a different kind of war against perhaps the most radical form of economic and political oppression to come out of the early twentieth century: communism.   What do all of those have in common? There different branches of the same tyrannical tree, and terrorism sprouts from it as well. You may think that wars prior to this one were wars against nations, but they weren't. They were wars against morally inferior ideologies that we typically didn't even start. This one is no different.       Yes. He did. And that's singular. Thank you for proving my point about how many wars we're fighting.

You know, I really get tired of this whole "two wars" thing. By what standard are we fighting two wars? Is it the fact that we invaded two separate countries? In World War II, we liberated what, 20 or 30 separate countries? While fighting three relative superpowers and committing millions of troops - not a mere few hundred thousand - to the fight? Did you know we lost more men in those four short years than we've ever had on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan together at any point in thirteen years? So was World War II really "two wars"? In fact, shouldn't it really be three, since we were fighting Japan, Germany and Italy all at once? Or maybe a couple dozen based on how many different countries we fought in? Should the same standard apply to World War I, since we were technically fighting three different countries there, too? How about to the Spanish-American War? We fought the Spaniards in Cuba, Guam and the Philippines. That's three separate countries. Was that really three wars? Cut the "two wars" crap. It doesn't support your argument and it's at best a poor attempt to vastly overstate the amount of men, material and money we've committed to the front. That having been said, do you know how much the Global War on Terrorism (meaning Iraq, Afghanistan and every other counterterrorism operation we've carried out everywhere - that's right, one single war) is estimated to have cost? The most liberal estimates out there put it between $4 Trillion and $5 Trillion. That's less than $400 Billion a year, and well below the amount of debt added since President Bush took office. What's the source of this discrepancy in the numbers? Reality, that's what. And the reality of the situation is that we spend more than 50 cents out of every federal dollar on some sort of social program. Whether it's Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, stipends, this education program, that after-school program or whatever, the bottom line is we've spent fifty years putting together unfunded liabilities that we simply can't afford anymore.

The debt didn't triple during Reagan's presidency, the deficit did.   Reagan may have raised taxes eight times, but the cumulative hike in those taxes still never came anywhere near the tax rates at the beginning of his presidency. The net cut that was a result of his presidency was still substantial.   The day Bush left office, the national debt stood at approximately $10.63 Trillion. Today, it stands at approximately $17.55 Trillion. $6.92 Trillion of the total national debt, or 39.4% of the total debt accumulated in the entire history of the United States, has been borrowed during the five and a half year tenure of Obama. By comparison, Bush added $4.9 Trillion in his eight years, or 27.9% of the total debt.   Since we were talking numbers....

When Congress won't let you shut Gitmo down, I guess you have to empty it out somehow....

  What do you mean, what about them? All operations under the Global War on Terrorism would be counted within the fiscal year in which they took place.

  No, they don't. Different surveys use different methods. They do the same thing for other statistics inherent in the usual assessment of presidential efficacy as well. For instance, some surveys will show Clinton's job numbers slightly above Reagan's, while others will show Reagan's well above Clinton's. Those surveys hinge on where you put the first year of each president's administration; some scholars believe it's more accurate to give that first year to the previous president, based on a belief that each new president's policies haven't really had enough time to have an effect in that first year.   But, for the sake of argument, we'll assume you're right and that all studies of fiscal prudence allot president's only the budgets passed within their terms, and no budgets that were already in effect when they took office. Even then, FY 2009 should still be attributed to the Obama administration because of the special circumstance that is the 2009 bailout, which more than tripled the projected deficit for that fiscal year all on its own, a month after President Bush left office.

I've heard this argument about a thousand times, and every time it involves the same assinine assertion. This all hinges on FY 2009. Democrats love to blame Bush for the FY 2009 deficit since the FY 2009 budget was passed in September of 2008, at the end of Bush's last term. The problem with that is, the FY 2009 budget passed by Congress and signed by President Bush only had a deficit of roughly $460 Billion attached to it, not the $1.4 Trillion you see listed above. What accounts for the disparity? Try the trillion dollar bailout passed in February, 2009, a month into President Obama's first term and four months into FY 2009. So, essentially, Democrats want to pin a deficit on Bush that he didn't sign off on, in a fiscal year he only administrated the first three months of, when the reality is that five sevenths of the deficit and three quarters of the fiscal year fall squarely on the shoulders of Obama.

It's alright. Kinda pricy for what you get if you ask me, but that's from the perspective of a college student.

I thought that reaction was underwhelming as well. But Bush still didn't back down on missile defense, and Putin didn't annex Georgia or any part of it like the situation we're presented with now.

He actually kind of likes the name. It's on his license plate.

It's also worth noting that the statistic correlating party identification and higher education levels is probably skewed by the sheer amount of university professors, who are required to attain a doctorate in their respective fields before drawing a salary normally paid for by tax dollars, that vote Democrat as much out of self interest as ideology.

"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left." - Margaret Thatcher   Thanks, hippy.

  And I think you're either trolling or you have no legitimate response at this point and you know it.

  And you think you know more than the rest of us. No matter what we say, you're going to spin it around to say that we're only opposing President Obama's actions because he's president or because he's black or because of something arbitrary and irrelevant.

  Glad to know I can count on your vote.

  Then what, exactly, was your point?