PN-G bamatex

Really? Are you sure about that? The biggest complaints levied about the budget over the last ten years were the size of the deficit and the fact that for the first six years of the Obama presidency, no budget was passed. I'll tackle them separately. The deficit began its cataclysmic rise in FY 2008, which started in October of 2007 with the first budget approved by the Democrat Congress that won a majority in the 2006 elections and took office in January of 2007. The deficit reached $1 Trillion for the first time in FY 2009, which began in October of 2008 and was the first fiscal year administrated by the Obama administration, ending in September of 2009. The deficit was bolstered first by TARP, passed by a Democrat congress and signed by a Republican president in late 2008, and then ARRA, passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat president in February of 2009. The deficit would hover in a range of $1.3 to $1.4 Trillion until FY 2012, the first fiscal year administrated by the Obama administration after the Republicans won the House - the critical centerpiece of the Congressional budgeting process - in November of 2010 and officially took over in January of 2011. The deficit has done nothing but decline since that point. The second issue underlies the first. Congress did not perform its constitutional and statutory duty to pass a budget for six whole years. Neither Nancy Pelosi's House nor Harry Reid's Senate passed a budget for FY 2010 or FY 2011. When the Republican-led House took office in January of 2011, John Boehner's first order of business was getting a budget passed for the upcoming FY 2012, and he did exactly that. Unfortunately, Harry Reid refused to so much as take up that budget for a debate, much less a vote. The exact same thing happened again for FY 2013, FY 2014 and FY 2015. Thanks to Harry Reid's shocking refusal to carry out the budget process required by the constitution and outlined in the Budget & Accounting Act of 1921, Congress was forced to fund the federal government entirely through a series of recurring stop-gap resolutions for six years straight. It was not until May of last year, after the Republicans took the Senate away from Reid, that the first budget of the Obama administration was passed. That budget, by the way, included massive spending cuts. The critical thing to understand here is that, constitutionally speaking, the power of the purse lies with Congress. People think the deficit rises and falls based on which political party the White House belongs to. In truth, that's only a secondary factor. Spending, deficits and federal fiscal responsibility generally have correlated with who has control of Congress for the last 25 years. This case is no different. When the Democrats had outright control of Congress from January of 2007 to January of 2011, federal spending ballooned to all-time highs. When control of Congress was divided after that and eventually returned to the Republicans altogether in January of 2015, spending fell dramatically. Is the budget perfectly balanced? No, but it's roughly a third of what it was five years ago. That is significant progress, and you have the Republicans to thank for it. Personally, if (and hopefully when) we take the White House and have total control of the federal government, I think we'll find a way to balance it outright. Until then, we still have a Democrat president to deal with. Next.

Yes, the GOP is conservative. I welcome any one of you to pick any single issue where you think the GOP in general has not taken a conservative stance, and I will gladly debate you on it.

In theory, Texas could make it on its own. In fact, I would grade it as a high probability of success for Texas as its own country if we meet two conditions. The first is good leadership (I think we have a mix of good and bad at the moment). The second is how we would structure our national government, which is dependent on the first. As it stands right now, I would rate our current bureaucratic structure as very well set up for national governance. I would not, however, say that our judicial structure is, and our executive branch could use some retooling at the top as well.

[Hidden Content]

Are you really sure about that? I've already talked about the inherent differences between this situation and the Baltimore and Ferguson riots. Now let's talk about a situation that's about as closely analogous to Oregon as I can find: Waller County after the death of Sandra Bland. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement, the New Black Panther Party and various other black activism groups spent weeks in front of the Waller County Jail in the wake of Sandra Bland's death. They didn't riot as was the case in Baltimore and Ferguson; they were decidedly more peaceful. Much like the Bundys in Oregon, though, they carried around rifles and other firearms in an open and intimidating manner, using angry rhetoric and calling for others to join them. There are really only two differences between Oregon and Waller County: where the Bundys seized the building, the Sandra Bland protesters stayed in the parking lot, and where the Bundys have only called for "fellow patriots" to "stand up to the federal government," we know for a fact that the Sandra Bland protesters openly called for the murder of police officers with eerie and unsettling, albeit impersonal, specificity. Did the Waller County Sheriff's Department, or any other Texas law enforcement agency for that matter, make any move that would inhibit or disperse the Sandra Bland protesters? No. Not at all, in fact. While those protests lasted for days, the Waller County Sheriff's Department remained largely disengaged from it and went about business as usual. About the only difference between the two reactions has been the amount of media attention devoted to the two of them; the Bundys have gotten an incredible amount while the Sandra Bland protesters got little to none. The bottom line is, excessive force wasn't called for in Waller County, and it isn't called for at the moment in Oregon. It was called for in Baltimore and Ferguson. This isn't a matter of race, it's a matter of the actions the groups have taken. Nothing the protesters did in Waller County warranted a forced dispersal, nor does anything the protesters in Oregon have done yet. The things done by the rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson did.

Dumbarses, yes, but they have not all done equally dumb and violent things.

This occupation is totally out of line. The Bundy family has gone a step too far. Technically, they've committed an act of insurrection against the United States, which is wholly out of proportion to the government action they're protesting. That said, the argument that the government's reaction to this as opposed to the reactions in Ferguson and Baltimore represents a double standard is total crap. Let's boil this down to the facts. The Bundys and their accomplices have occupied a building on federal property, and uploaded a YouTube video calling for others to join them in their occupation. Most of the others who they've called upon to join them have rejected the request and denounced the action; indeed, the overwhelming majority of them were remarkably peaceful in carrying out the protest that preceded this seizure. The Bundys themselves have damaged no property, and injured no person. They've held not one person against his or her will. They're likely well armed, but as of yet haven't fired a single shot. When you get right down to it, all they've done is take over a small federal building in the middle of nowhere, which is responsible for performing no vital government function and is of little to no importance, while spewing angry rhetoric that targets no specific person and conveys no threat. Granted, in principle, this takeover is a serious violation which should be taken seriously. In practice, however, it's less than a minor inconvenience. In Baltimore, on the other hand, no buildings were seized, they were just looted and burned instead. On the night of April 27, 2015, alone, the Baltimore riots resulted in 144 vehicle fires and 19 structural fires. One innocent bystander was injured by the widespread arson, and numerous police officers suffered broken bones and other injuries while bricks and other objects were hurled at them as they attempted to control the crowds. More than 200 people were arrested for various criminal activities. Unlike Baltimore, where the unrest was contained to a matter of days, the unrest in Ferguson cropped up at various points over the course of a full year. During the worst of the rioting in the last 10 days of November, 2014, at least one person was shot and burned, more than a dozen buildings were burned, and over 150 people were arrested for various criminal acts. As both a matter of principle and a matter of practice, the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson were decidedly more severe, more costly, more dangerous, more injurious and in every way more significant incidents of lawlessness. The punishment must fit the crime. The reaction must be roughly equal and opposite the original action. In Maryland and in Missouri, the state governments reacted with appropriate force to prolonged and severe periods of chaos and destruction. In Oregon, we have yet to reach that stage, and may not; personally, I find it hard to believe that a bunch of ranchers with real world responsibilities will actually occupy that federal building for "years" as they claim or even more than a few days. In any case, Oregon is not analogous to Baltimore and Ferguson at this time. Likewise, the reactions shouldn't be, either. Any comparison which assumes that they should be is factually unfounded.

To answer the original question posed in this thread, Carly Fiorina won the debate with Marco Rubio in a close second, and I think they'll experience moderate rises in the polls as a result. Jeb, Christie and Paul did alright. Trump bombed it - I think Fiorina's one liner about the face comment has to be the only thing that's ever made Donald Trump blush. Carson's performance was meager, as were those of Walker and Cruz. So far, the polls seem to reflect my views. The latest RCP average shows a drop of around two points for both Trump and Carson, a rise of two points for Rubio and a rise of three for Fiorina, with everyone else's numbers staying virtually stagnant. I think we could be seeing the very beginning of Trump's demise. I think Trump realizes that too. When Trump's numbers leveled off around 30% a few weeks ago and Carson really started to gain on him, Trump finally agreed to sign the Republican pledge to support whoever the eventual nominee is. I think he did so as part of some kind of deal with the party leadership, although I have no idea what it would entail. It would fit the pattern of behavior for a man who made his money in real estate - buy low, sell high. Additionally, I think there are a lot of moderate and establishment Republicans that just aren't answering polls right now because we're so far out, which causes the numbers to overrepresent the hardcore elements of the base. As we get closer to the primaries, I think more of those establishment voters will start making their allegiances known and that the numbers of whoever the "true conservative" darling is, whether that remains Trump or becomes someone else, will naturally diminish as a result.

The picture I've attached at the bottom of this post depicts the clock in question. I want everyone in this thread to stop for a moment. Put yourself in the teacher's shoes. You work at a large school during an age in which public schools have become the target for various incidences of mass violence. You teach English, and thus probably don't have a real acumen for electronics. One day, at the end of class, one of your students comes up to your desk and places this on it. What is your first thought? I can tell you what mine would be: "bomb," pure and simple. I would see in front of me a metal suitcase filled with various wires, electrical components and a digital display that's obviously used to keep track of time in some manner. The student's race would never enter my mind. Frankly, nothing about the student would enter my mind at all. Why? Because my mind would be singularly focused on the device in front of me that looks exactly like every portrayal of a compact, portable explosive device I've ever seen on TV or in the movies, and what I would need to do to eliminate what I perceived as a threat. Regardless of all the rhetoric used in this forum, I find it incredibly hard to believe that any one of you would have a different reaction. That's not racism, it's not prejudice, and it's not malice towards anyone. That is man's most basic instinct, self preservation, taking over. I've seen a whole lot of people on social media work really hard to try and distinguish this image from that of an actual suitcase bomb. Their entire argument hinges on a single idea: that there aren't any explosive components visible inside the suitcase... as though the average American, who has little experience with electronic components such as those pictured below and none with explosives, would be able to discern that at a glance. Frankly, I find it very hard to believe that the people who raise this argument, who often don't even know enough about weapons to distinguish between a magazine and a clip, would be able to deduce such a discovery for themselves were they put in the teacher's position. I think it's far more likely that they're simply buying into a popular argument on social media to feed their narcissistic need to feel better than everyone else by highlighting inventing an example of racism committed by an average American that they can point at and ridicule. In any case, the argument they present is crap. The fact that something that looks like a bomb doesn't have "C4" written anywhere on it doesn't mean it doesn't look like a bomb. Now that we've put the teacher's actions in some context, let's discuss the police officer. Put yourself in his shoes. You've been dispatched to a local high school over a possible bomb threat. You've likely experienced fake bomb threats at local high schools before; unfortunately, they've become fairly frequent at many schools. You arrive at the school, go into the office, and find both the student and the suspicious device. You're likely a little better versed in matters relating to explosive devices than the average citizen simply because of experience and training. You examine the device, and are likely able to determine that it's not a bomb, although you instantly recognize the visual similarities and how it can be perceived as one. You're given the story of what happened - that a student came up and put this on the desk of an English teacher and that she perceived it as a threat - by school administrators or perhaps the teacher herself. You speak with the student, asking him questions about the device. All he'll say in response is that it's a clock, nothing more. What are you thinking now? Admittedly, this is a little harder to determine. We weren't there. We don't know the context in which this information was conveyed to the police officer by school officials, or the manner in which the student responded to the officer, only what he said. So much of good police work depends on the officer's ability to read the facial expressions and interpret the tone of the person he's questioning - we weren't there to witness any of those things. What we do know, though, is that the police officer felt it necessary to take the student into custody on charges of a "hoax bomb" - the crime of creating a device that looks like a bomb with the intention of intimidating someone - while his department looked more deeply into the matter, and that nobody else close to the situation felt this was out of line except, shockingly, the student taken into custody and his family. We also know that once the department had received enough information to conclusively determine that there was no intention to harm or intimidate anyone with the device, it released the student. Given the facts as they've been outlined here, I fail to see anything that suggests the arrest was out of line. It truly amazes me how the same side of the aisle that constantly calls for increased salary and benefits for teachers, police officers and other public officials is so quick to excoriate them for making a mistake doing their job, and then use their actions to incite controversy for political gain.

I'll give credit where it's due. Quanell X, for once, got something right. That said, I still have vivid memories of this man hosting a rally in Lumberton at which he called for the entire city to be burned to the ground on live television in the name of ruining the lives of four police officers, citing entirely premature allegations made against them on very shaky grounds that were later utterly refuted by the detailed analysis of an independent, unbiased authority. Perhaps he's learned something in the six short years since then. If he has, only time will tell. Personally, I'm not holding my breath.

Due to my generation's endemic social media "shaming" problem, I've generally elected to stay very quiet about the mounting tensions between police officers and the black community in this country. This predilection for silence mostly stems from an incident following the targeted killing of two NYPD officers in Brooklyn last December in anger over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (Link 1), shortly after a Manhattan protest staged as part of the #blacklivesmatter movement descended into chants of "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!" by throngs of protesters marching through the streets (Link 2). After the ambush, I posted a short Facebook status calling for the rhetoric of that movement to change to emphasize the importance of all lives instead of the importance of the lives of a particular racial group, on the grounds that emphasizing one particular group's value as opposed to the value of all people only served to further entrench preexisting divides and invite more incidences of racial animus. Put simply, I was excoriated for that status. A litany of comments was posted in response from a fairly sizeable group of Facebook users - interestingly enough, all of them white and male - which leveled everything from harshly worded criticism of the position on a pseudo-factual basis to personal insults aimed solely at humiliation and ostracism. In my usual way, I attempted to counter with the facts; I attached video of the aforementioned protest in New York which preceded the Brooklyn incident, made reference to the riots which took place in Ferguson following the grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson over the death of Michael Brown, and as the argument broadened, I delved deeply into the actual statistics regarding race in officer-related shootings and how their rough correlation to the proportion of national crime for which each demographic group is responsible substantially undermines any assertion of real bias on the part of the nation's police against black Americans (Links 3 & 4). To them, none of that mattered. One of them tried to nitpick some of the data and substitute some of his own, but when I rebutted his only real point, he managed to quickly disappear. The rest stuck to abstract generalizations, emotional appeals and the age old informal fallacy of appealing to ridicule. No matter how many times I tried to take a rational, articulate, factual approach, the users carrying on the verbal sparring were simply too impassioned to listen. In an attempt to sum things up for one of them, I gave them a singular warning: that if this kind of rhetoric continued both at #BLM events and on social media, it would become a justification in the minds of many for carrying out severe acts of violence aimed generally at law enforcement, although not exclusively. Now, nine months later, I sit here typing this post under the burden of having been proved right when I had hoped I would be proven wrong. The last year has revealed an explosive growth in the number of law enforcement officer deaths incurred in the line of duty (Link 5). Counting Deputy Goforth this past weekend and the two officers killed in Brooklyn last year, we now have three officers that we know for a fact were targeted and killed without provocation solely for being police officers, with several other cases in which speculation of the same is not unreasonable. Additionally, an officer in Birmingham, Alabama, was beaten to the point of passing out on the side of the road last month, while onlookers took the opportunity to glorify the incident on social media rather than render aid to the injured officer (Link 6); that same officer later admitted to hesitating to discharge his weapon in his own defense for fear of being labeled a "racist cop" as so many others have been of late (Link 7). Ferguson has not been the only riot stemming from this movement; numerous small altercations took place around the country in conjunction with the events in Ferguson, and Ferguson seemed to be put on replay in Baltimore earlier this year (Link 8). #BLM's own website states that the organization embraces a "diversity of tactics" in the name of social change as opposed to the nonviolent approach embraced by prior generations of black activists (Link 9), and many #BLM supporters have even ostracized fellow #BLM activists for, of all things, advocating peaceful protests in place of abrasiveness and apologizing for outrageous conduct associated with #BLM such as that outlined in this post (Link 10). #BLM leaders, on that note, have been callous in statements during and regarding such instances; the most damning example of this, in my opinion, came in relation to the death of Deputy Goforth, when a leader in the #BLM movement chose to respond to the ambush by criticizing Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman, perhaps hypocritically, for "politicizing" the incident with the statement that "cops' lives matter too," and failing to express any sympathy whatsoever for Deputy Goforth or his family in the process (Link 11). After scouring the internet in search of some redeeming statement by a #BLM leader somewhere in relation to the Harris County incident, I am deeply disappointed to report that the above is the only relevant statement from a #BLM supporter of any kind that I could locate at all. A cursory review of the social media accounts of several personal friends and acquaintances who have actively expounded on the principles of #BLM and highlighted so-called instances of "racial injustice" over the last year revealed the same result. Worst of all, just two weeks before the the murder of Deputy Goforth, during Black Panther protests at the Waller County Jail in just the next county over from the site of Goforth's murder, one of the protest's leaders threatened to retaliate against police in a manner eerily similar to the one in which Goforth was assassinated (Link 12). On its face, this makes it look as though last year's Brooklyn incident has repeated itself. I have read statements on this board and elsewhere from a number of individuals claiming that #BLM has nothing to do with these incidents of violence targeted at police. I will admit that there is no definitive link between the two. Nonetheless, such a link is easily inferred, and I believe it exists. We know for a fact that the Brooklyn shooter acted in retaliation against police regarding the Brown and Garner cases. Is it really so hard to believe that whatever anger he harbored was nurtured by protests such as the one caught on video in New York? Men are not moved to commit heinous acts by rationality, they're moved to do such things by poorly governed passions and a misguided sense of justice - especially those with emotional or mental disorders, as I imagine the killers in the Brooklyn and Harris County cases had. Given the totality of the circumstances in the Goforth case, is it so hard to believe that it is of a similar nature? And considering the two in tandem, is it not reasonable to intuit the potential beginnings of a grim pattern? #BLM as an entity offers no condolences for or discouragement against acts of violence carried out for purposes in line with its own mission, and explicitly rejects pacifism as an approach to social change. Its leaders meet radical, inflammatory rhetoric that indisputably cites people to violence with tolerance, and fail to utter a single word of disapproval when actions are carried out almost in perfect accordance with that rhetoric. #BLM repeatedly withholds condemnation for incidents of mass violence the likes of Ferguson and Baltimore. Is it really implausible that these stances can become implicit encouragement and justification for acts of violence in the minds of fringe elements? When coupled with the outright rejection of pacifist protesters such as the girl in Seattle that apologized for the incident at the Bernie Sanders campaign rally, is it not easy to see how others infer that #BLM, if anything, endorses such rhetoric and its inevitable, injurious ends? In that light, the phrase "diversity of tactics" takes on new meaning. Link 1: [Hidden Content] Link 2: [Hidden Content] Link 3: [Hidden Content] Link 4: [Hidden Content] Link 5: [Hidden Content] Link 6: [Hidden Content] Link 7: [Hidden Content] Link 8: [Hidden Content] Link 9: [Hidden Content] Link 10: [Hidden Content] Link 11: [Hidden Content] Link 12: [Hidden Content]

I can report that Travis County did in fact have Blue Bell today. I can also report that I have a bad case of case of brain freeze this evening, which I'm pretty sure is a symptom of listeria poisoning. So, you know. Nobody else should buy any.

Far be it for me to defend Donald Trump in anything, but I was going to say something similar. We need more of a "f*ck you" attitude with the Russians - maybe not as much as Trump has, but a lot more than any of the Democrats have. That's the only thing Putin understands.

Now's the time to be in the rental business. Between the impending mortgage issues you've outlined and the number of people who are underemployed who just plum can't afford to buy either away, rental property's going to be in high demand. If I wasn't headed for law school....

What message? No, seriously. What message? So far, Donald Trump's message has been that Megyn Kelly's a mean reporter dealing with the bad time of the month and we need to make Mexico pay for a wall to keep Mexicans out. Go look at Donald Trump's website. Notice something missing? I do - it's called the "issues" section. You know, that part where candidates articulate their platforms? Yeah, Donald Trump doesn't have one. But, I try to be thorough and diligent when I research candidates, so I watched the debate last week, thinking (perhaps naively) that he might articulate his positions there. And what did I get for my trouble? "The moderators are being mean to me." At least he doesn't try to hide the fact that he's a whiner; he publicly acknowledged that much in a phone interview I listened to today. In another attempt to be thorough, I scoured the internet for policy positions. Didn't find a single one. I even went out of my way to contact the Trump campaign and ask for a list of positions or a platform summary or at least a statement giving me some idea where he stands on the issues. You know what I got in return? Neither do I, because I'm still waiting on it a week later. So I'll ask you again: what message? I'm betting you can't actually give me an answer. Why not? Because there is no message. Why is there no message? Because Donald Trump is an entertainment mogul with an ego the size of Mt. Rushmore who sees this primary as nothing more than a cheap way to put his name in an infinite number of headlines and sweeten his reality TV deals. He's not actually in this because he cares about the country, he's in it because he cares about his checkbook. If any part of him actually wants to be president, it's his ego talking, but I strongly suspect that he doesn't want to be the President of the United States. He just wants the publicity, and he's going to ride that wave of tweets and primetime interviews until he loses steam, grassroots donations stop coming in and he actually has to put up some of his own money to stay in the race. When that moment comes, the return on investment takes a nosedive and it won't be worth it anymore. He'll walk away having played the system and gotten exactly what he wanted out of the deal. The sad part is that he'll leave his supporters out to dry in the process. The most hardcore elements of the conservative base - the ones that have been claiming that Obama supporters are "low information voters" or whatever else for years - will have fallen victim to the exact same trickery that they claim everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 fell for. Why? Because Trump and Obama are the exact same thing at heart: demagogues, and dam good ones at that. Don't believe me? Let's consult Dr. Google. Oh sure, they have very different styles. Obama prefers charm and eloquence, whereas Trump is frank and bombastic. Obama likes to be relaxed, articulate and optimistic, while Trump prefers to be fiery, to speak in generalities and to remain obstinate in the face of opposition. Obama wants to appear levelheaded, while Trump likes his reputation for stubborn brashness. But at the end of the day, those two personas are two sides of the same conman's coin - their only differences exist solely because they're contrived to appeal to the two very different bases on which they feed. And in the absence of substance, both are the trademarks of - you guessed it - a conman.I hope you enjoy losing again in 2016. Because if you keep egging your buddy Trump on, that's exactly what's going to happen to us.

Donald Trump is a flip-flopping opportunist who sees this election as nothing more than an opportunity to put his name in the headlines. In the process, he's become the official mascot for the senility problem that currently exists in the modern body politic and made a mockery of the Republican Party - my party. Fox News was completely fair to him last night - when you've got a history like Trump's, those are the kinds of questions you deserve. He wasn't targeted unfairly, he made himself a target. Welcome to politics, Mr. Trump. Enjoy your brief stay.

​Not just smarter, stronger. North Korea could have Stephen Hawking for a leader and I'd still consider Russia more of a threat. Russia is to North Korea as the Titanic is to a rubber dinghy. It doesn't really matter what the IQ of the guy at the helm is, one is still obviously superior to the other.

​ 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.

[Hidden Content]

"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.