mpohl

"Nancy Lanza owned six guns and last I checked she's still dead. Next statement from the NRA will be that If those second graders had been armed this tragedy would not have happened!"

I'm assuming NRA members will pay for all these school guards? What about shopping malls, sports arenas, school bus stops, sidewalks and street corners? And who will guard the guards?

Honestly. I prefer a child molester as a neighbor. Vs. an Ar15/ AK47 owner. Whoever owns s.th. like an Ar15 is a potential mass murderer (27!). Armed w/ a dick, you'll get at most one. Let's take the gloves off, and expose gun nuts for what they truely are. NUTS!!!! So gun ownership is akin to child molestation (or merely being a kid sexting another)? I see the point of my post went well over your head. You don't see any issue with advertizing the location of the nearest AR-15 to steal? How fucking stupid would it be to give burglars inventory sheets? And of course unproductive - there's 300M guns out there already, and the felons can't be compelled to self incriminate themselves.

Very powerful speech by President Obama in Newtown. Let's just say: if we need a sex offender registry, we surely need a gun owner registry!!! For I like to know if my neighbor has an AR-15 or AK-47 in his closet. Actually, there are many mentally ill people who realize they are mentally ill and choose to seek treatment for themselves. It's already a difficult decision to make for oneself; mandatory reporting of all mental health problems would probably greatly reduce the number of people who choose to seek help. Just imagine the effect we'd see if HIPPA regs were pulled. People in the process of divorce would avoid therapy, knowing that it would used against them by their spouse for child custody, or for fault (are there states that haven't gone to no fault yet?). These are people who tend to be in a lousy mental state - discouraging them from working out issues can only increase the violence. People in jobs where others' safety is an issue could be suspended or fired. This would include pilots, cops, teachers, and who knows how much further it can go. Again, in order to "protect" us from the crazies, we ensure a lower state of mental health in these industries.

Speakers Corner is really the gutter. The WORST America has to offer... As the President said: "Our hearts are broken today." Which will resonate with anyone who has a kid. Nothing more needs to be said......

So why don't you get lost!!! I am tired of all the GOP'ers or NRA'lers to suggest that I take a flight out!!! Alternatively, why don't you relocate to Somalia. It's a government-free zone, right now! Good riddance!!!!

36 views and no response. An hour after posting. Seems the usual tea-partiers, Texans, pundits, are asleep at the wheel. Or they wholeheartedly agree...!

In Egypt, the people will fight for their rights. And risk death in doing so. But fight they will. In the USA, they just curl up and die! For lack of health insurance, employment, etc. What a nation of cowards!!!!!

Your insights are appreciated. TRUELY. Either way, another t-bagger is "over" and "out". Good riddance, West. Don't let the Good Lord hid'ya, where he split'ya!!!!!! You know they have assholes in the military just like in real life, right? I know it's hard for brainwashed 'patriots' to realise that. Umm, it is "Over" or "Out", not both, in this case "Out" is the proper one to use. Just sayin'. Matt

West will be ignored. Those who need his "command presence" can tune in to Faux News. This is from HQ. Over and out! You know they have assholes in the military just like in real life, right? I know it's hard for brainwashed 'patriots' to realise that.

"West is conceited, and now he has conceded. He is ignorant and now he'll be ignored. Nice symmetry there." P.S.: Quotation marks added.

The US is perfectly positioned!! We even have our religious extremists and fanatics in place already. Except here they attend church, not a mosque!

You have no clue. I suggest you travel to Continental Europe or Asia. Report back with your impressions!!! Hasta la vista, bebe! Right! It's like those other third world countries where over half the people have no toilet (as of he 2008 638 million Indians out of 1.1 billion didn't have one). Oh wait... the 2000 US Census revealed that 99.36% of us had indoor plumbing and they stopped asking about it. America is not like a third world country.

Man, if u are really serious, I'll show you the light :) As a first timer, the spot is Sosua. You speak Spanish or French? Creole would be a killer!

I give up. YOU WIN!

Why don't you join me on one of my trips to the Dominican Republic? Ready when you are. And yes, my "professional" contacts are from Germany, France, Europe. What astronomical amounts have you spent, dimwit??? Pretty sure because generators are the only way they get power. DO you realize how ignorant you sound when you say any 3rd world country? I'm very much sure that their schools haven't taught them why they aren't all speaking German or Russian and the astronomical amount of money that was spent by the US. If they really want to go back teary eyed perhaps they need to visit the Tomb of the Unknowns. I'm absolutley certain you should.

Maybe the point was: "Why spend money towards a weapon of destruction, when you can't even bury a power cable in the ground?" I thought your grasp was better than this! P.S.: Any 3rd wold country, banana republic, can deal better w/ power outages (via inversors, generators) than NYC. I know first hand!!! P.S.: Every time I have professional tradesmen and engineers (most of them friends) visiting from Europe, they can't stop laughing and falling all over themselves. Be it cars, infrastructure, standards, or construction standards. They all go back teary-eyed!!!! The country is backwards by at least a 50 years!!! And you ask why?

Maybe that's the problem!!?? Ever heard of an open mind? And that an open mind is like an open parachute. Of course, a closed mind...you get the idea! Best wishes to your con'd existence!

Destroyed by Total Capitalism America Has Already Lost Tuesday's Election A Commentary by Jakob Augstein The United States Army is developing a weapon that can reach -- and destroy -- any location on Earth within an hour. At the same time, power lines held up by wooden poles dangle over the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey. Hurricane Sandy ripped them apart there and in communities across the East Coast last week, and many places remain without electricity. That's America, where high-tech options are available only to the elite, and the rest live under conditions comparable to a those of a developing nation. No country has produced more Nobel Prize winners, yet in New York City hospitals had to be evacuated during the storm because their emergency generators didn't work properly. Anyone who sees this as a contradiction has failed to grasp the fact that America is a country of total capitalism. Its functionaries have no need of public hospitals or of a reliable power supply to private homes. The elite have their own infrastructure. Total capitalism, however, has left American society in ruins and crippled the government. America's fate is not just an accident produced by the system. It is a consequence of that system. Obama couldn't change this, and Romney wouldn't be able to either. Europe is mistaken if it views the election as a choice between the forces of good and evil. And it certainly doesn't amount to a potential change in political direction as some newspapers on the Continent would have us believe. A Powerless President Romney, the exceedingly wealthy business man, and Obama, the cultivated civil rights lawyer, are two faces of a political system that no longer has much to do with democracy as we understand it. Democracy is about choice, but Americans don't really have much of a choice. Obama proved this. Nearly four years ago, it seemed like a new beginning for America when he took office. But this was a misunderstanding. Obama didn't close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, nor did he lift immunity for alleged war criminals from the Bush-era, or regulate the financial markets, and climate change was hardly discussed during the current election campaign. The military, the banks, industry -- the people are helpless in the face of their power, as is the president. Not even credit default swaps, the kind of investment that brought down Lehman Brothers and took Western economies to the brink, has been banned or even better regulated. It is likely the case that Obama wanted to do more, but couldn't. But what role does that play in the bigger picture? We want to believe that Obama failed because of the conservatives inside his own country. Indeed, the fanatics that Mitt Romney depends on have jettisoned everything that distinguishes the West: science and logic, reason and moderation, even simple decency. They hate homosexuals, the weak and the state. They oppress women and persecute immigrants. Their moralizing about abortion doesn't even spare the victims of rape. They are the Taliban of the West. The Winner Makes No Difference to Europe Still, they are only the symptom of America's failure, not the cause. In reality, neither the idealists and Democrats, nor the useful idiots of the Tea Party have any power over the circumstances. From a European perspective, it doesn't matter who wins this election. Only US foreign policy is important to us -- and Obama is no dove and Romney no hawk. The incumbent president prefers to wage his wars with drones instead of troops, though the victims probably don't care if they're killed by man or machine. Meanwhile, despite all the criticism, his challenger says he wouldn't join Israel were the country to go to war with Iran because the US can now no longer afford such a thing. In any case, it is wrong to characterize Republicans as the party of warmongers and Democrats as the party of peace -- or even to call the latter a left-wing party at all. After all, it was Democratic presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who started the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Republican presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon ended these wars. And Ronald Reagan, who Europeans see as the embodiment of both the evil and absurd aspects of American politics, was a peaceful man compared to the standards we have since become accustomed to. He only ever invaded Grenada. The truth is that we simply no longer understand America. Looking at the country from Germany and Europe, we see a foreign culture. The political system is in the hands of big business and its lobbyists. The checks and balances have failed. And a perverse mix of irresponsibility, greed and religious zealotry dominate public opinion. The downfall of the American empire has begun. It could be that the country's citizens wouldn't be able to stop it no matter how hard they tried. But they aren't even trying.

From the NYT. September 18, 2012 Mitt Romney, Class Warrior It turns out that Mitt Romney was right. There is class warfare being waged in the 2012 campaign. It is Mr. Romney who is waging it, not President Obama, and he’s stood the whole idea on its head. When you think of class warfare, you probably think of inciting anger, resentment and jealousy among the have-nots against the haves. That’s what Mr. Romney has accused Mr. Obama of doing, but those charges have always been false. The truth is that Mr. Romney has been trying to incite the anger of a small slice of the richest Americans who need no government assistance but get it anyway, against the working poor, older Americans, the disabled workers and veterans, and even a significant chunk of middle-class Americans. That was the message of remarks that Mr. Romney made in May at a private fund-raiser held at a private equity manager’s estate in Florida, a moment when he thought he was safe from annoying reporters and cameramen, and other Americans who are not rich enough to have bought a ticket to the event. A video made public on Monday by the magazine Mother Jones showed a Mitt Romney who felt free to speak candidly about his campaign and how he would conduct a presidency. In that safe zone, Mr. Romney spoke with a bone-chilling cynicism and a revolting smugness. If he is elected, he said, capital will come back and “we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.” That’s the state of trickle-down economics in the 21st century. Gone was the pretense that he will be a president of all Americans. Mr. Romney rather neatly divided the country between the people who matter and the 47 percent he does not care about. To Mr. Romney, that 47 percent consists of people who do not make enough money to be required to pay federal income tax. They are freeloaders, he said, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” It is not his job, he said, as a candidate nor apparently as president if he is elected, “to worry about those people.” By his definition, those undeserving freeloaders include workers in low-paying, menial jobs (sometimes more than one job) who don’t even earn $9,750 a year, the amount at which they would start to owe federal income tax. Also included are older Americans whose Social Security pensions are too low to be taxed, disabled veterans and people who were maimed on the job. This group also includes some middle-income Americans who make, say, $50,000 a year but are not required to pay taxes after they take advantage of child credits, marriage penalty relief and other tax breaks, many of which are part of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Romney backs with a blind ideological fervor. But, of course, Mr. Romney was not talking about the Americans who make so much money that they are able to avoid paying any tax at all or who, like him, are able to shelter their incomes in overseas banks or tax loopholes that permit them to pretend that ordinary income comes from investment and thus pay lower taxes. Mr. Romney has been paying, by his own account, about 13 percent to 15 percent of his enormous income in federal income taxes. Just compare that with your own tax return. Everything about Mr. Romney’s characterization of this mythical slice of lazy, shiftless Americans was wrong. A vast majority of Americans pay federal taxes, either income tax or payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare — or both — as well as other federal fees. They also pay state and local taxes and sales taxes. The government’s revenue problem does not start with the poor but with the richest people, through the Bush tax cuts and other changes. The tax cuts for the richest people should expire now, and the middle-class cuts should do so eventually. But that will not happen as long as people like Mr. Romney protect the rich by turning the working poor and middle class into the enemy. Mr. Romney may have been talking about electoral tactics: those people are going to vote for Mr. Obama, so let’s concentrate on our kind of people. It’s also possible that he was mouthing the words of the extreme right without really believing them. But all the possible explanations say terrible things about Mr. Romney’s character. The right wing has long been whining about people who don’t pay taxes and who, therefore, don’t deserve a say in government. They have it backward. The shame is not that those people don’t pay income taxes. The shame is how many poor people there are when the top 1 percent can amass uncountable fortunes fed by tax breaks and can donate tens of millions of dollars to political candidates to keep it that way. MORE IN OPINION (3 OF 25 ARTICLES) Op-Ed Columnist: Thurston Howell Romney Read More » Close

What kills me, is that the GOP gave prime-time to an 82-year old lunatic. He had no script, no msg!!! Anybody remember NRA Heston? Glad that he is gone! Too bad he couldn't take his gun-loving pals to the grave w/ him.

Care to explain yourself a bit more on a rational level????? If you can! Which I doubt!

SAUL?? It's you, Saul!! I am sure. I highly recommend this guy for anyone's legal needs. Here is his web site, http://www.bettercallsaul.com. Thanks Lawrocket (Saul) for all your services. I couldn't have done it w/o you. You are one of a kind!!!!

CS, relax!! You think it is bad on the Internet? Try living in a primordial society. :) You call yourself a lawyer. I call your entire post an embarassement for your guild. I would not spend a penny to hire you. That's it.

Spence, you are right! Maybe Police in the US needs to be outlawed, too. They certainly are deadly, don't have a clue what they are doing. And I never experienced them as public servants!!! They certainly have never served me! :):) It should be pointed out that it's looking like 10 of them were shot by police.