PN-G bamatex

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,.

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.