GeorgiaDon

As long as they are not causing harm to others, why should people not be able to do whatever they want? Being offended is not being hurt. You also have no constitutional right to never be offended, or amused for that matter. Some people are offended at the notion that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor, instead of being specially created within the last 6,000 years, or pulled out of a clam shell by a raven, or whatever creation myth you subscribe to. Should I have to avoid teaching about evolution because some people may be offended? If we were all forbidden to do anything that might be offensive to somebody, what would be left that we could do? Anyway, why do you care so much what other people think? People said that about allowing women to vote, about allowing non-white-males to vote, and on and on. The nuclear family will always be the predominant arrangement, as most people are straight and I'd wager that most people find multiple partner relationships become complicated in emotionally hurtful ways. Still, other arrangements between consenting adults are possible, and as long as they work for the people involved I see no good reason to tell them that they have to abide by a one-size-fits-all model. Is jumping from airplanes "normal for the masses"? If not, I guess we have to ban it. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

If so, I'd suggest you reposition your nose. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I though OHCHUTE made it quite clear he doesn't "swing". Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

It would also be fun if you could select "all of the above". Aside from questions of the value/legitimacy of asking for the information in the first place, the choices don't really allow for mixed race, which is more and more common. So the "data" gained is inherently inaccurate, in a way that allows it to be twisted to whatever agenda the group collecting the data may desire. For example, is Obama black? Is he white? Depends on who is doing the asking, and the answer they want to get. It's time to stop asking about race. I do think there are legitimate questions that could be asked, such as "does this school system prepare kids adequately for college", but that requires tracking the academic success of individuals, not races. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Do you believe that every action that is less than noble should be a crime? What is the benefit to society to prosecute and imprison every person who strays from their marriage vows? Adultery is a civil matter, not a crime; it is a violation of a contract, and in the legal sense it is best treated as a contract matter in divorce proceedings, should the couple decide to divorce over the matter. For that matter, do you believe divorce should be legal? If so, you obviously are against the institution of marriage. Whatever. You mean, like human/troll marriage? Those cross-species pairings open the door to all kinds of crazy shit, and so they absolutely should be banned. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'm sorry if you got that out of what I wrote, as that was not what I intended. Do you agree or disagree with my argument that there can be a conflict between what is best overall (freedom to follow your own choice of beliefs) and passing (or voting for) laws that remove choice and force everyone to one belief system? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'll admit it takes a bit of sophistication to distinguish between one's personal beliefs and the best policy for making laws, but many people seem to manage it. There are a lot of things that people believe that I think are silly, and some that I think may be dangerous. Nevertheless, I would not vote for a law that would force those people to abandon their beliefs and adopt mine, because I can recognize the larger harm (loss of freedom) that would come from having the state impose my point of view on everybody else. So, for me at least, it is quite conceivable that I might vote against a law even if that law supported my beliefs. Here's an example that has some similarity to the gay marriage issue. I believe that adultery is immoral. It is a behavior that I have never engaged in, and it would cause me to lose trust in and respect for someone if I found they were cheating on their spouse. Despite that, I do not believe adultery should be a crime. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Out of curiosity, in "internetworld" is failure to maintain adequate security equivalent to "published"? Sort of like, if I forget to lock my door one morning that means anyone can come in my house and help themselves to my stuff? Indeed, is not locking the door equivalent to posting a sign "free stuff" on my door? Or, to make the analogy a better fit to the situation, if I use a lock but the lock is simple enough to be defeated by a moderately skilled thief, is that the same as if I took all my stuff and piled it on the sidewalk? In the pre-internet world, at least, "published" meant publicly distributed, including providing notice to the public of how to access the publication. For example, as a researcher I publish my work by submitting it to appropriate scientific journals, where the work is peer reviewed and then distributed to everyone with a subscription to the journal, including university libraries where it is available to a broad audience. If I fail to update my firewalls and some hacker is able to gain access to my research data, and they take it and post it on some public forum without my consent or knowledge, is that information "published"? In this case, no link was put up to say "for our customers private information click here". No effort was made to intentionally distribute the information, and indeed Auernheimer had to create a tool to access the information. From the article you linked: "Any customer could access his or her account data by going to an AT&T URL containing their iPad’s unique numerical identifier. No password, cookie, or login procedure was required to bring up a user’s private information. Auernheimer wrote a script to enumerate iPad IDs and promptly collected more than 100,000 e-mail addresses belonging to AT&T iPad users, which he shared with the Gawker news site to expose the AT&T flaw." So, AT&T provided a simple way for customers to gain access to their own information. Obviously too simple, as Auernheimer showed. However the information was not "published" (at least in any sense that I recognize the word). More like it was protected by a simple digital lock, and to break the lock Auernheimer just had to write some code that randomly generated a lot of numbers that emulated the iPAD numerical identifier, and used that to "try the door" a lot of times. The information was not "openly available", Auernheimer had to make a tool to try the lock enough times to sometimes guess the correct combination. Seems like "break and enter" to me. Then he posted the information, so he didn't just look in and leave after he opened the door, he took stuff. So add theft to the list. I hope this hacker version of "public" doesn't catch on outside the internet. Otherwise, it seems if I leave my rig unattended while I go to manifest, that'll be equivalent to giving it away. Finders keepers and all that. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I've experienced going through US customs and immigration from the perspective of both the foreigner and, more recently as a US citizen, and they are night and day experiences. In the Atlanta airport if you are arriving from Europe you'll find 2 or maybe 3 booths to go through for non-citizens (by far the majority of the passengers), and 5 or more for US citizens. The result is you get to stand in line for a really long time as a foreign tourist, and while waiting you get to watch US citizens walk right up to an booth with no lineup, or a really short one. Minor issue, perhaps, but quite obnoxious after an hour or two in line. If you want you can factor in that there are no bathrooms until you've cleared customs, which can make that couple of hours in line most unpleasant. When you get to the front of the line, as a non-citizen you will be "greeted" by someone who assumes you are a terrorist, so you had better be prepared to offer proof of hotel reservations, phone numbers where you can be contacted, etc for every day of your stay. As a US citizen, I've found it's not unusual to be told "welcome home". I've found it to be a little better driving across the border, but sometimes that can be quite painful too. My brother is in the Canadian Air Force, and was posted to NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs. When he entered the US at Detroit, traveling with his family, the customs guy refused to believe that Canadian military personnel could be posted to a US location, so he concluded that my brother's transfer orders and immigration documents must be forgeries. My brother had to park in a holding lot, and he and the family were not allowed to move from the car for over five hours. When the kids (aged 3 and 5) had to use the bathroom, he was flatly told that if they left the car he would be arrested. So he had them pee on the ground, at which point he was made to get on his hands and knees and clean it up! Also during this time some nice "friendly" customs folks had him empty all their luggage out of the car, and every suitcase and box was opened and gone through, with much of the contents dumped on the ground. They also removed the hubcaps from the wheels, and took apart the car doors, looking for contraband. After customs received confirmation from the US military that the transfer orders and immigration documents were legitimate, and that my brother was indeed expected at NORAD headquarters, he was sent on his way without being offered any assistance to put the car back together or repack and load his luggage. Since he didn't have much in the way of tools with him, and the customs & immigration folks wouldn't let him use theirs, he had to stick the various pieces of the doors in the car and go find a garage, where he had to pay to get the car put back together. Welcome to America, indeed! Maybe I'll post something about the immigration and naturalization process in the "immigration reform" thread. That experience was also quite unnecessarily painful, in my experience. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

And I'd say I can't claim to be able to read people's minds. Gay marriage is a socially complex issue, which forces anybody over the age of about 40 to reassess values that were dogmatic when they were in their "formative years". So in such a case I'm willing to cut people some slack and accept that it is possible that their thinking has just evolved. Maybe I'm not cynical enough for Speaker's Corner? Now if she took diametrically opposite stances on the issue on the same day, when talking to different audiences, I'd be happy to accept that as evidence of politically opportunistic flip-flopping, as was typified by Romney in the last campaign. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So, have you never changed your mind about any issue? I wouldn't have taken you for the sort of person who crystallized their ideas when they were 12 and have never reappraised them since. Chasing polls isn't a good character trait in politicians, but neither is intellectual ossification. I prefer people who can reassess their position based on new data, or who can actually shake off small minded prejudices they inherit from their upbringing. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

the stock response to that is "you hate gays so much, that you'd rather delete it for everyone rather than allow it for them" So a discussion that actually, and rationally, focuses on individual rights, is viciously shut down because it doesn't push the short term goal. Perhaps. But perhaps this is also a case of "the perfect being made the enemy of the good", which is of course a classic strategy for making sure nothing ever changes. I think much of the hostility towards gay marriage stems from confounding the religious and the legal aspects of "marriage", and the obvious solution is to make a clear distinction between the two by making the legal union a civil contract, and reserving "marriage" strictly for the religious union. But tradition is a strong force, and (as we can see even in this thread) some people have no problem with the idea that the law exists to reflect their own religious beliefs, so it will take time for the logic of divorcing government from marriage to sink in. In the meantime, what are people to do? Should women have waited for the vote until Jim Crow was relegated to history's wastebasket? To use a (typically bad speaker's corner) analogy, it's obviously better to cure a disease than it is to treat it to mask the symptoms. Should AIDS patients forego treatment, waiting instead for a cure? Sometimes half a loaf is vastly better than no loaf at all. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Well, the solution starts with Principles. "The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor-indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one." Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88, 79 L. Ed. 1314, 1321, 55 S. Ct. 629, 633 (1935). I would say the DA in the OP, needs to brush up on his duty. It's a fundamental aspect of human nature that rules, such as the ones you cited, will come to be ignored if there is no penalty for violating them, or even worse if people are rewarded for violating them. As a research scientist, I face penalties that start with a ban on receiving funding for my research, and can escalate to criminal prosecution, if I am caught fabricating data. I don't need the penalties to motivate me to be honest, but continued employment, tenure, promotion, and all the other aspects of a successful career depend on maintaining a successful research program. Medical schools typically require their faculty to obtain most or all of their salary from research grants. So when things aren't going well in the lab, and inability to get papers published directly threatens your continued funding and so your ability to support yourself and your family, temptation can certainly rear it's ugly head. However, even the minimum penalty for falsifying data (loss of eligibility to receive research grants) is career ending, so the more prudent course is to work even harder to get things done honestly. For prosecutors, on the other hand, there seems to be no adverse consequences of any sort attached to even the most egregious violations of the rules. Innocent people can rot in prison for decades, while the prosecutor who concealed evidence that would prove that person's innocence reaps the rewards of a successful career, knowing that even if the truth comes to light they are shielded by prosecutorial immunity. Why do some face harsh penalties for unethical conduct, while others escape even the most cursory wrist slap? I can only assume it's because it's usually lawyers who get to write the rules. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

From this comment, and your earlier post about it costing too much to allow people to exercise a basic human right, I'm getting an impression that you put a lot more importance on your wallet than you do on allowing other people to exercise their rights. Should the supreme court have considered the expense of educating non-whites when they decided that whole Brown vs Board of Education thing? Here's a great piece of music with a message you might want to consider. You should be aware that there are some things that are more important than putting more money in your pocket. To some extent, yes. But the fact remains, and will always remain, that women and not men can have children. And it is a fact that the system you propose would make it impossible for a couple to collaborate to share responsibilities for raising a family. Your system would penalize any woman or man who chooses family over career. Any time spent not "working" (in the sense of getting a paycheck) would be paid for dearly down the road in terms of an impoverished retirement. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Personally, I think the government should get completely out of the marriage business. There should be no special treatment awarded to anyone just because they are married. The government should issue civil unions to cover the legal stuff relating to medical treatment, survivor benefits and whatnot. If you want to get married in a certain church that is your own business and should have nothing to do with the government. That being said, until that comes to pass (which I doubt it ever will) then you can’t treat one group differently from another. If the laws are changed for everyone then great but for now, same sex couples are being discriminated against. I honestly just wanted to hear promise5 come right out and say that my mother doesn’t deserve the same rights that she does. People like that want to restrict the rights of others just because they don’t like their lifestyle. To me that is disgusting and goes against what this country is supposed to stand for. The part that bothers me the most is that people like her think of themselves as patriots and believe they are trying to save this country. It truly is no better than those that opposed the civil rights movement. This I agree with, right down the line. However, there is one thing in your post where I think we disagree with some others. You mention "survivor benefits". I get the idea from rehmwa and ManagingPrime that they think that married couples (of any combinations of genders) should be treated as two completely separate individuals. That means no such thing as survivorship benefits. If you and your spouse buy a house together, when you die if you leave your share in the house to your spouse they will have to treat it as taxable income. If you or your spouse decide to take a few years off of work to raise the kids, it'll cost whoever takes the time off big time because they won't be contributing to their individual retirement, and they won't be able to rely on their spouse's pension to make up the difference. Whatever you do, don't have any joint bank accounts, because if you or your spouse should die everything will be tied up until you can prove, to the dollar, exactly how much you put in vs how much is the estate of the deceased. If you have kids, once they turn 18 they'll be adults not dependants. If you decide to help them out by paying for college, they'll have to treat your payment of their tuition and expenses as income. Also be prepared to spend big bucks for a lawyer to draft up lots of different contracts so your spouse can make medical or financial decisions for you, should you become incapacitated. I have no idea what legal web would be generated to enable you both to make decisions regarding kids, if the legal relationship between you and your spouse would be assumed to be exactly the same as the relationship between you and a complete stranger from the next county. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, and are entitled to live your life according to your own ideas of right and wrong. I may not agree with you, but so what? Where I think you go too far is in supporting a constitutional amendment to impose your opinion on everybody else. That's what changes the nature of the game from a disagreement between people about morality to an attack on freedom of religion. No. But can you really not offer any reason for your beliefs deeper than "that's the way I was raised"? Do you never question the ideas you were handed as a child? I do think an interested discussion can be had, but the discussion tends to be more interesting when people have actually thought about their beliefs, and can debate based on rational ideas. Also, I have on occasion changed my position on things, based on discussions with other people, even discussions here in speaker's corner. I for one am always interested in arguments that make me think about my own beliefs; if I can refute the argument, then I understand my own belief better, and if I can't refute the argument then I have to modify my beliefs. I was raised in a fairly conservative family, and this process has definitely trended towards a more socially liberal perspective, but some of my ideas have gone in the opposite direction. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So what does that mean? That you shouldn't marry outside of your town? Your country club? Your congregation? I seriously doubt that the biblical passage in question means you shouldn't marry outside the human species. Are you ever going to explain how you can reconcile a constitutional amendment to force your religious beliefs on every American with the guarantee of religious freedom in the First Amendment? That seems downright un-American to me. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So, you support amending the constitution to force everybody to live according to your religious beliefs. Which means that you disagree with the first amendment guarantee of religious freedom. Do you consider yourself to be an American? What kind of country do you really want the USA to be? Remember, there is no constitutional guarantee that you will never be offended by someone else's behavior. Do you really want to change that? What if someone else is offended by something you do, something that doesn't harm them but that they just dislike? Should you be forced to change, just so they won't be "offended"? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Any system of holding people accountable for crimes will have the potential for abuse. What is your solution to the problem? Would it be better if the government (i.e. "we") did not ever prosecute anyone for anything, just in case the prosecution is tainted in some way? I think the notion of "prosecutorial immunity" could use some reconsideration. I don't think it would be good for prosecutors to be penalized when they abide by the rules to prosecute someone who they really believe to be guilty, based on evidence they believe was legally obtained, if it subsequently turns out the defendant was innocent. On the other hand, the lack of consequences for concealing evidence and other sorts of misconduct, coupled with the rewards that come from getting convictions in high profile cases, encourages prosecutors (and sometimes police) to stretch and sometimes break the rules. I'd also include the election of prosecutors and judges in the list of things that encourages abuse of the judicial process. It seems to me that part of the problem is that the whole legal system revolves around very narrow interpretations of rules, where a path to career success is finding "loopholes" that allow people to circumvent the intent of laws. For example, in the story Wendy cited the prosecutor (now a state judge) was ordered (back in 1987) to turn over all documents to a court review of the case, but he left out several pieces of evidence that indicated that the defendant was factually innocent and pointed to a different suspect. His defense of his actions was that he "interpreted the court order very narrowly", whatever that means. The point is that these cases become a contest in which the lawyers involved battle over who can best twist interpretations of rules to their benefit. If "justice" results from this process, it is merely a happy side effect. Here's another example of slavish adherence to rules resulting in extreme injustice to an innocent person, this time at the hands of defense lawyers. Two lawyers sat and did nothing as a man they knew to be innocent was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole. The man was imprisoned for 26 years while the guilty party was shielded by the lawyers. The fact that the legal system has no mechanism for preventing such a miscarriage of justice, that it in fact mandates that lawyers permit such things to happen, is strong evidence that the legal system is only tangentially related to any concept of justice. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I have a couple of probably quite naive questions about this. First, I thought the 46% growth was in stock value. How does stock revenue relate to revenue? If I buy stock in company X, and later sell it at a 46% increase to somebody else, it is my understanding that that 46% would come to me, not that it would go to company X. Now, company X may well hold some stock that they could use as collateral to raise capital, or maybe they could sell some of it. Nevertheless, I just cannot see how a 46% increase in stock value means 46% more money coming into Yahoo's accounts. What am I missing? Second, I have read/heard from several news sources that a motivation for banning telecommuting is to reduce the Yahoo workforce by forcing those employees without the commitment or ability to physically come into the office to quit. Indeed, a constant mantra these days seems to be that companies are racking up huge profits but they are not hiring, which is why we have this crazy "recovery" in which the financial sector is doing great, business profits are way up, yet unemployment remains stuck at almost 8%. Why hire when you can threaten/bully your employees into working 60, 70, or 80 hour weeks for 40 hours of pay? People I know are required by their employer to clock out at 5, then go back to the office for another 4 or 5 hours "off the clock". And, they all know that even asking for vacation marks them as lacking in "company spirit", moving them to the top of the layoff list. So, why do you say growth in revenue means jobs are being created? As far as I can tell, the relationship between the two is tenuous at best, certainly not cause and effect. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

You're very welcome. I think that when you can get to the root of these stories, almost always it turns out to be something quite reasonable and uncontroversial. Unfortunately it's all too easy for those with a political axe (of any persuasion) to grind to reduce the story to a loaded headline they can spin to bludgeon their "opponents". If people would look beyond the headlines there would be a lot less aggravation all around. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

You're quite welcome, Marc. I don't know of anyone who says that. Certainly that isn't my point of view on the subject. If someone were to steal my car and use it as a getaway vehicle, no-one would be demanding that I be arrested for bank robbery; stolen guns are no different. I do think responsible gun owners would take some reasonable measures to make it less likely that their guns would be stolen or used without their permission, but no measures would make theft absolutely impossible. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

NO he just loves criminals and tax cheats I'll put you down in the "totally disinterested in letting facts get in the way of your prejudices" column. What a surprise! Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I read about the details of this case somewhere, but of course when I googled the guy's name I got 20 pages of links to conservative/Republican/"gun rights" types going apeshit over Obama being hypocritical and whatnot. I did eventually recall that I saw the article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. For those who don't want to read the whole article (it is 1/2 a page after all), here is the relevant bit: "Thornton said that in 1974 he was living in Macon and gave a friend a ride to Atlanta. After arriving, the friend came across a gun he wanted to buy but he didn’t have the money. Thornton gave him $20. When the friend returned with the gun wrapped in a towel, Thornton decided to keep it in the trunk of his 1973 Monte Carlo until the friend paid the $20, plus other money he owed. “When he brought the gun back, he said, ‘This is what I bought,’ ” Thornton recalled. “I didn’t know it was illegal. I was just thinking about getting back my $20.” Two weeks later, Bibb County detectives arrived at his Macon home and went straight to the trunk of the car. To this day, he said, he doesn’t know how they knew he had the weapon, but he suspects his friend told them. “I found out after I was arrested that the gun didn’t even have a firing pin.” In case anyone cares to assume Thornton is some sort of a career criminal, consider this: "The conviction had prevented him from voting but, luckily, did not stand in the way of Thornton landing some pretty good jobs over the years, including one at Georgia Power, where he worked 28 years before retiring seven years ago." So there you have it. Forty years ago (were you even born then, 1969912?) a guy loans his friend $20 to buy a gun, and keeps the gun in the trunk of his car until the "friend" pays back the debt. A couple of weeks later the police show up, knowing all about the gun in the trunk. [According to another article I read somewhere, the "friend" got in trouble with the police over something else, and cut himself a deal by turning in the guy who gave him a ride and loaned him $20, a guy who never saw the gun or had any knowledge that it had been altered.] After serving four months probation [consider how minor this offense had to be considered at the time, for a black man to get probation in Georgia] this guy goes on to work a full career at Georgia Power, retire, and become a great-grandfather. This is the guy you gun-o-philes want to hold up as the shining example of Obama hypocrisy? This is the guy you want to argue doesn't deserve to be pardoned? Really, that's just totally fucked up. Either that, or you're just totally disinterested in letting facts get in the way of your prejudices. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

The type of facility she was living in suggests her health was at least good enough that she didn't need a nursing home. Dropping dead of a heart attack at 87 sounds a lot better to me than a protracted debilitating illness or spending the last years with dementia. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)