PN-G bamatex

Actually, there's a fair amount of evidence that a Republican Congress is a stimulus package in itself, and has been since 1945.   [Hidden Content]

The only bad thing about Jeb Bush is that his last name has already been slandered by the media. He was a good governor and he'd be a good president.

  At the point of attack, I wholeheartedly agree with that. If a person has endangered my life, whether or not that person has a mental condition is of no concern to me, and it can't be because of the circumstances of the situation.   I was writing from a broader perspective than that, in a way meant to be analogous to a trial. In other words, my point was that society is going to impose a penalty against a person who commits a crime regardless of maturity level, unless that person has a debilitating mental condition that impairs judgment.

Alright, that's enough of the comments about Biggirl's son.   This argument is silly. Is every 18 year old mature enough to assume all the responsibilities of adulthood? No. Are most 18 year olds mature enough to assume at least most of those responsibilities? Yes. Is every 18 year old that hasn't lost his or her mind capable of figuring out that theft, assault, rape and murder are wrong? Is that really a question?   Every kid grows up at a different rate. Obviously, based on their life experiences, some are going to become mature, responsible and disciplined enough to be considered an adult at a higher age than others. But the fact of the matter is, for our society to function, we have to set some sort of cutoff age at which point everyone is considered, at a bare minimum, capable of carrying out the basic functions of adulthood. In most respects, we consider that age to be 18 in the United States, as established by the massive body of local, state and federal law which pertains to such issues. There are exceptions - 21 is the age at which all 50 states believe people are adult enough to handle alcohol, and 16 is the age at which several states think its appropriate to allow criminals to be tried as adults in certain instances - but the general conclusion is that 18 is the age of adulthood.   There's a reason 18 is the dividing line. That's the age at which most people graduate high school, it's the age at which most people, traditionally, have moved out of their parents' homes, it's an age by which most people have held some sort of job, and it's generally an age at which the overwhelming majority of people are smart enough to determine basic right from basic wrong.   Was Michael Brown experienced and mature enough to determine basic right from basic wrong? Well, given that he had just robbed a store, I suppose the evidence indicates that he wasn't, but the truth is, we don't know for sure and we have no way of ever knowing for sure. But it doesn't matter. That question, in truth, is irrelevant. The truth is, whether or not Michael Brown was mature enough to be considered an adult, society expected him to be. By statute, his local community expected him to be, his state expected him to be and his nation expected him to be, the same as they would expect every other 18 year old to be in absence of some sort of debilitating mental condition.   If we stopped to ask ourselves if someone was mature enough to distinguish right from wrong in every single case, we would slowly start to lower the bar, and we would start letting people off in greater and greater numbers until the point came where we were no longer holding anyone accountable for anything. "Immaturity" would become a defense to prosecution in every case where a criminal, regardless of age or mental condition, just "wasn't grown up enough" to understand what he was doing.   The fact of the matter is that no true, blue criminal is grown up; if they were, they wouldn't be criminals to begin with. But that has no bearing on whether they should be held accountable under the law, and rightfully so. Therefore, this conversation is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

[Hidden Content]   This was the scene at a protest led by Al Sharpton in New York City a week before this weekend's executions.

  That seriously surprises me. One of my professors went to UW Madison. I have a good friend there right now getting her Ph.D. in Political Science, and she already has a serious offer on the table to go to Georgetown to do her post-doc and begin her teaching career.

  Really? Wisconsin has some outstanding programs. They're a Top 50 university.   [Hidden Content]

  He may have been on board when it was signed, but he wasn't on board when the negotiations started. And my understanding is that those negotiations took a significant turn when the sudden change occurred.

If I understand it correctly, there was some fishy business going on with the AD position at CSU when that contract was signed. I don't know details, though.

Awesome pick for Florida. He'll do a heck of a job there.

Aside from leaving Amari Cooper in single coverage a few too many times, I didn't really see a problem with Johnson. I thought he did alright. Didn't see this coming.

I've never been to a UAB game, so I can't say from experience. I remember watching one on local TV once, and the attendance may have been in the neighborhood of 25,000. Can't recall who they were playing.

I'll be in Atlanta rooting for the Tide.

  ... which is why money was the excuse, not the real problem. The real problem here was that the Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama System wanted one football team to represent the entire system and one football team alone. That's the Crimson Tide, not the Blazers.   What's really sad about this isn't so much that UAB is losing its football team, it's that one of the last uses for Legion Field is its service as UAB's home stadium. Now the only thing there is the BBVA Compass Bowl and the occasional high school playoff game. I'm afraid that stadium's days are numbered.

  You have no room to talk. Your conference has West Virginia.

As a longtime scifi nerd, I have serious reservations about the new Star Wars. JJ Abrams is not known for paying much attention to canon (I'm still frustrated about several issues with the Star Trek reboot) and I've already spotted some inconsistencies just in the trailer.

  Yes, the Republican Party, with all the tens of millions of dollars Republican candidates receive from the major oil companies in every election cycle and the massive number of Republicans who hold office in districts where oil is a major part of the local economy, would be against the Keystone Pipeline if it had simply been the president's idea. That makes total sense.

LA riots, v. 2.0.

"Hey, let's point out that somebody did something bad a couple hundred years ago, and use that to justify doing something illegal now."   So much for that progress stuff.

  That's a pretty big part of it, and it touches on a much larger issue.   The main driver behind the global warming scare isn't some coalition of environmental groups. It's companies that have thrown massive amounts of money into "green" technologies. When a company invests a lot of money in a technology that is environmentally friendly, but isn't economically competitive, creating artificial economic advantages to level the playing field against more economical technologies is in that company's best interest. The quickest way to do that is to put money into environmentalist groups that will obstruct the process for companies invested in older technologies on environmental grounds, and to put money into political campaigns for candidates who promise stronger, costly regulations for those same companies and more tax breaks and government investments in the newer, greener technologies.   General Electric is a prime example of this. We've all seen the figures regarding how little GE pays in taxes because of special breaks for companies that invest in certain technologies posted here a thousand times. We've also seen how much money GE throws into Democrat campaigns, and we've all seen the number of commercials GE puts on television advertising how environmentally friendly it is. Why do you think GE does all of that? It's not because they have any special love for the environment or Democrats, it's because establishing that narrative and funding those political initiatives makes their investments more profitable, their tax bill smaller and their share of the different markets they compete in larger. It's all about the bottom line.   Where Keystone's concerned, we find a similar example. The original reason for blocking the Keystone project was because of the potential it had to disturb the ecosystem in the Nebraska Sand Hills. TransCanada responded by eliminating that concern - they altered the project so that the pipeline would no longer run through the Sand Hills.   When that issue was eliminated, Keystone's opponents raised another one: the possibility of an oil spill contaminating the Ogallala Acquifer, one of the primary sources of freshwater for cities and farms across the Midwest. James Goeke, a hydrogeologist from the University of Nebraska and incidentally one of the world's leading experts on the Ogallala Acquifer, examined the project, spoke with TransCanada officials, and determined that the risk of a spill was so minimal as to be nonexistent, that the risk of any contamination resulting therefrom was equally minimal, and that if a spill somehow occurred and contamination somehow resulted from it, it would be so localized that it would be virtual non-issue.   When that issue was dismissed, a third one was raised: apparently, the process of extracting oil from the oil sands of Canada puts more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than extracting oil the old-fashioned way. Liberals are scared that building the pipeline will result in more oil being extracted from the oil sands, thus causing more greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere than would be otherwise. One report went so far as to say that more activity in the oil sands would result in so much greenhouse gas being released that the entire planet would fall into "runaway global warming" and life on Earth as we know it would come to an abrupt end.   Are we seeing a pattern yet?   The goal here was never to address a substantive environmental issue. If it had been, this project would have been approved by now, because the only substantive environmental issues were, in fact, addressed in a way that would more than satisfy any reasonable person with legitimate conservationist sentiments. The goal was to block the project from going through by any means necessary, no matter how ridiculous things had to get to accomplish that goal. And the reason that was the goal was because it's in the economic interest of some of the Democrat party's largest financial contributors.   The sad part in all of this is that there are people out there who actually believe that Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Elizabeth Warren and Warren Buffet and all the other Democrat fat cats who oppose Keystone do it out of some idyllic, innocent concern for the well-being of Mother Earth. The reality is that the Democrats and the people who back them, just like the Republicans in many instances, are concerned about their pocketbooks and nothing more, and most of the hardcore liberals out there are too blind to see it. There's a reason for that as well, but that's a conversation for another day.

  That's because it is.       There are already pipelines running through that very region of Nebraska. They weren't upset over those pipelines when they were built. Why are they so upset now?   And that's not rhetorical. There's an answer. I'm just curious to see if anyone gets it.

Bowl eligibility after all the quarterback issues and disciplinary dismissals. The first real defense Texas has had since Will Muschamp left for Florida.   Looks like a very bright future ahead for the Longhorns under Charlie Strong's leadership.

There's still time left in the season. I'm concerned about Alabama against Auburn - the Iron Bowl is still the Iron Bowl.   But, props for owning up to it.

  That doesn't make it acceptable, and even if we do it back, the increasing frequency with which actions like these are occurring is only further proof that the tension between the US and Russia is approaching Cold War levels.

Russia has never put them in the Gulf of Mexico, not even during the Cold War. That's explicitly stated in the article, sourced to an unnamed senior US military official. Recon flights are fine. Flying planes into the far extremes of US airspace along the West Coast to poke and prod at us is arguably okay; it's simply the resurrection of a Cold War tactic. This, however, is not something explicitly called for by treaty, or rooted in a thirty year old precedent. This would be considered a highly aggressive move, even by Cold War standards. View it in conjunction with Russia's recent deployment of a guided missile cruiser to Havana, and the leak of the US Navy's knowledge of Russian submarine operations in the Gulf of Mexico a couple years ago - another tactic that wasn't used in the Cold War - and you're going to have a pretty hard time convincing me this is innocent, much less routine.