Capt.Slog

Better than going out of business and living on a park bench.

chuckakers will chime in soon to tell us that Barney Frank made them do it. actually it had alot to do with Cox and clinton. I posted the article on another thread a couple days ago. The "Enron Loophole" of which you write was sponsored by Phil Gramm (R) and supported by John "the Deregulator" McCain. Nice try though. as it was pointed out it was wrote with a dem and signed by Clinton. if the left wants to blame bush for signing bills the last 2 years for everything the dem's wrote then i guess you need to blame Clinton for everything he signed. Lame. The bill was introduced by Phil Gramm (R Texas). Wendy Gramm, Phil Gramm's wife, coincidentally was the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. After leaving the CFTC, she took a seat on Enron's board of directors. In September 2007, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) introduced Senate Bill S. 2058 specifically to close the "Enron Loophole" This bill was later attached to H.R. 6124, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, also known as "The 2008 Farm Bill." President George W. Bush vetoed the bill, but was overridden by both the House and Senate while under (D) control. Clicky. Besides, this is quite irrelevant since no-one FORCED the AIG board to behave irresponsibly. They did it all by themselves out of GREED as Streetscooby wrote previously. Try again.

Ansd we all thought soccer crowds were dangerous.

I'm glad one Republican thinks executive bonuses in failing companies are wrong. I'm sure someone on here will wail "but it's in their contract".

More on US prison policy. www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/03/MN411682DN.DTL

Nice strawman - any more foolishness to share with the class? That's sarcasm, not straw man.

What we read was clearly not what you think you wrote.

Doubleplus ungood! For questioning Big Brother you'll get sent off to Room 101 in the Ministry of Love.

Not only are you establishing that you're arguing simply to be contrary, but that you also lack fundamental reading skills. That wasn't what I stated at all. Really? Your post (#153 in this thread) seems to say exactly that. Then I guess that establishes my previous statement to be accurate. RIF Whatever floats your boat. You know the Constitution better than the Supreme Court. OK, not much point in discussing this any further. Any further? You haven't "discussed" it at all. What's to discuss? Your assertion that the SCOTUS doesn't understand the Constitution is absurd and unworthy of ny discussion. Reading is Fundamental. [url "http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3499005#3499005"] INDEED!

So are my wife and I. We both have advanced degrees, we are well into the top 5% of earners, AND we are both liberals The one who fails to understand is Limbaugh.

It's silly nonsense. First he blames tax hikes in 2 years time for wealthy families cutting back, then he admits "Their incomes have been decimated by Wall Street’s collapse." Maybe he's representative of the Wall Street Whizzes who were the architects of this mess.

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ Published: April 23, 2008 The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. American Exception Millions Behind Bars This series of articles examines commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.) San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner. The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.) The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate. There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much. Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice. Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing. It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed. “In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.” “Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.” Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.” Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.” The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently. etc.

Not only are you establishing that you're arguing simply to be contrary, but that you also lack fundamental reading skills. That wasn't what I stated at all. Really? Your post (#153 in this thread) seems to say exactly that. Then I guess that establishes my previous statement to be accurate. RIF Whatever floats your boat. You know the Constitution better than the Supreme Court. OK, not much point in discussing this any further. Any further? You haven't "discussed" it at all. What's to discuss? Your assertion that the SCOTUS doesn't understand the Constitution is absurd and unworthy of ny discussion.

This is serious. If these guys can't define the problem properly, there solutions are not going to work. Comments? You went from "lack of agreement" to "can't define the problem" in a flash. Maybe they have defined the problem correctly, and the New Deal naysayers are wrong.

Of course, Bush inherited a surplus, whereas he bequeathed a financial fiasco to Obama. www.reuters.com/article/companyNewsAndPR/idUSN2732897920090227 A recession now in its 14th month. Biggest in a generation. Thanks, W. (Of course, the Republicans around here were in serious denial for a long time)

As opposed to this mess.

Do you know where she jumps, Wendy?

What's odd is the people who bitched about the Bush years and elected Obama on the promise of change are using "But the last guy did it" as a defense. But, but, but, the change is coming. If Bush had spent $Trillion building bridges and schools and other infrastructure, investing in US R&D, and supporting energy independence I'd have little objection. Wasting it on an unnecessary invasion of a country that presented no threat to us whatsoever was a sheer waste of money. BIG difference. At least it took bush a few years to piss away that kind of coin. The messiah and friends only needed about a month! Funny, I thought Bush signed TARP. That's close to $1 Trillion in one month, and he managed some $5 Trillion over 8 years. Maybe you should check your numbers.

Really?

Good point. Real Americans, you know the ones who support the Constitution, would never condone depriving someone of life, liberty, or property without due process. I guess Texans don't fit that description. FDR didn't think enemy combatants were alowed constitutional rights and privliges and were only subject to the geneva convention and we should hold that belief today. Geneva Convention rights would be an improvement over the Bush/Gonzales doctrine.

Sounds good to me. Why should anyone's contribution to running the country be reduced just because they want to give money to a megachurch or an art museum? Or a local mission for the homeless, or a battered women's shelter, or an orphanage, or the Red Cross, or an animal adoption center, or a boys and girls club, or a food bank, or a local scholarship fund, or a Goodwill store, or a home for runaways. It's called incentiving good deeds and it works pretty well....or did. Why would good deeds need incentives? Isn't being good incentive enough in itself? (Maybe not for Republicans.)

A reasonable question. And the answer is: of course they are, but only in generic terms. But many contexts or specialties have "terms of art" that are not necessarily identical to generic meanings at a particular point in the historical timeline. So back when the early provisions of the Constitution were drafted, the authors used the term "private property" as a separate concept from taxable assets. And that's why you're the lawyer and I install septic systems! I'm so dumb that I believe when the founding fathers said private property they meant private property. Blues, Cliff Well, I guess I'll call Andy if I need any legal opinions, and you if my sewer needs attention, AND NOT VICE VERSA.

Well Paul, the Bill of Rights expressly reiterates certain universal human rights, which pre-date and transcend any man-made laws including the Constitution of the United States of America. Blues, Cliff "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." I didn't see anything in there about freedom from taxation being an inalienable right. Can you provide a link to the source of that right?

I would prefer not to arm someone who is under psychiatric treatment. mnealtx's comments show that he only cares that they CLAIM not to be under psychiatric treatment. So.. how do you PROVE that someone isn't under psychiatric treatment? I understand your desire, but don't get to the practical application of your statement. Do you wish to have all psych records open to public review? I think you have a bad case of false dichotomy and appeal to emotion there, Dr. How so? I'm asking him to define a practical application of his desire. Just saying "I would prefer" doesn't give good guidance. I just want him to look at the problem and determine how to fix it. First - your answer WAS a false dichotomy, since the only alternative you give to self certification is open access of all psych records to the public. And that is certainly not necessary in order to have a better check than self certification. Next - just because you can't think of a process right now to better ensure that gun purchasers are mentally stable, doesn't mean that a process can't be devised. Yet another logical fallacy of yours.

No, he did not - he LIED on the form. Unfortunately, the state did not flag the NICS database, so he did not trigger an alert. OMG, people LIE on the form? Oh the humanity. Say it ain't so. I don't suppose it occurred to you that this might be a little problem with self-certification? No, I don't suppose it did. Now I have to go to work. I didn't say that - I said the current situation is the law. How would YOU solve what you percieve to be such a great problem? Before you trot out some bullshit about psych evals, recognize this - 1. It is a violation of HIPPA law. 2. You throw the door WIDE open to the same sort of scrutiny given to other rights, such as speech or voting. Now, you may proceed. This part of the discussion is not about what the law IS, it's about what you would be OK with. And you've made it very clear that you're OK with someone only claiming not be mentally deranged having a firearm.