Firestarter

So am I.

- CNN story And now I believe we've wasted enough time on this filthy animal. Click here to read about Dawn Garvin's life and death, if you'd like to get a better understanding of just how obscene it is that we're being asked to worry about her murderer feeling pain.

I don't keep up with that kind of trivial bullshit.

Uh, you think the President stops receiving briefings, taking decisions, having meetings, issuing orders, and reading reports when he's not in the Oval Office? News to me. Re: edit I've seen the inside of that "ranch," and it's more like an operations center out of a sci-fi movie than anything else. If I wanted to "rest up," I'd pick somewhere else.

Not that I disagree with this column at all, but pretty much any statement starting with "At least Dole had the balls" is poor rhetoric at best, Mike.

"Kimo treatment?"

Or, perhaps, like saying there's no WMDs in Iraq and there never were when they suddenly start showing up all over the place. Or insisting that Saddam and al Qaeda would never have worked together when there's decades of hard evidence proving they did. Oh, wait...

They're private citizens. They can refuse anyone non-emergency treatment for any reason.

You're arguing semantics? Excuse me, I'm not trying to say you're defending this and I never thought you were, but we're talking about Americans watching other Americans getting killed, taking ghoulish pictures of the dead and dying and using them to fatten their wallets and gratify their egos, and you're arguing fucking semantics? I'm sorry, I didn't know the word "evil" was the moral equivalent of absolute zero in your book. For me, and I believe most other people, "evil" is a qualitative assessment, not a quantitative measure. So, in my opinion, inaction leading to death is pretty much the same as picking up a gun and shooting our fellow countrymen. Maybe that's -272.8º Celsius rather than -273º, but it's still pretty fucking cold. I don't give a shit if there's something colder. It's still pretty fucking cold.

Guess you're not getting to the front of the line in an ER anytime soon...

Shut your fucking mouth. Letting innocent people die because you want higher ratings is evil. There's no other word for it.

Excellent. The world needs fewer and better lawyers. Anything that serves to diminish their health or numbers is just fine with me.

O'Reilly's a coward and a shithead, much like William F Buckley, who criticised Ayn Rand without having read her (oh, and I loathe Rand, too). Three points for the lefties.

Jesus, you people are stupid.

And we saw how well that worked...

So, let's see. You want John McCain on your ticket, presumably because voters respect him for his perceived honesty, straightforwardness, and the courage to stick to his principles. And for him to sign on to your ticket would comprise selling out the pro-life movement, the Second Amendment advocates, consumer advocates and the industrial lobbies, in favour of NARAL, the Brady Act, and labour unions. In effect selling out his principles, dishonestly and deviously compromising everything he's worked for his entire life in order to get a man whose policies he DOES NOT AGREE WITH into the highest office in the land. And you think he'd still win people over. Huh. And you think the press is SO biased in your favour it wouldn't even bother to note any contradictions between his record and a hypothetical opposing-party platform for the presidency of the United States of America? Even I'm not that cynical. I think the main point of this discussion, Tyler, is that you're just really, really dumb. You're like a little schoolgirl clapping her hands bouncing up and down and shrieking over a toy pony you got in a big cardboard box, telling Mummy and Daddy how you're going to take it out for a gallop in the meadow behind the house, brush its mane and feed it oats and sugarcubes. Only problem is, it doesn't have articulated joints so it can't gallop, its mane is made of moulded plastic, and it doesn't have a mouth, much less a digestive system. So you're basically just stuck in your living room, rocking back and forth in a puerile daydream. Kind of like your nominee.

Why, if you were Kerry, would you be promising anything to someone you didn't think would run on your ticket under any imaginable circumstances? Your initial disclaimer was toothless; the rest of your post betrayed your rather pathetic excitement at a ridiculous impossibility. Not to mention your follow-up post, in which you said Next. Way to completely miss the point, which was: The "unnamed Democrat" thing was exactly parallel because it postulated hypothetical virtues in a candidate with no flaws. The parallel is drawn to McCain because the average Democrat does NOT know about his actual voting record, which the press rarely mentions in its eagerness to paint him as a rebel. THAT is why he has your so-called "drawing power," and if he ever WERE to be on a ticket, his positions and record would be front and center, and he would lose all support from your side of the aisle in an instant. Mike once said that your so-called "polisci professors" are depriving you of an education. I have nothing more to add.

Yep. AFAIK he's the only man in the history of the Academy to ever manage that.

Not really, no. He won't run, now or ever. Full stop. This is the same phenomenon we saw in your farcical primaries: the guy most of your party favoured over President Bush was a hypothetical, an unnamed Democrat. When any of your candidates were actually named even Democrats didn't really want to vote for them. Same here. All you people seem to know about Senator McCain is that he wants to reform campaign finance laws, he's a "maverick" (actually, he usually votes the party line - the press just likes to paint its own pictures for its own purposes, and you lot buy it hook, line, and sinker) who ran unsuccessfully against the President in the 2000 GOP primaries (so I suppose you immediately leap to the conclusion that he must've become as bitter and megalomaniacally deranged as Al Gore), and oh yeah, he's a real war hero (as opposed to your nominee). Here's a clue: NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the NEA, the Teamsters, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and anti-gun advocates, among many, many other liberal interests, regularly give Senator McCain a 0% annual rating on his voting record. That's zero percent. Zero. As in he voted the way Democrats approve of NONE of the time. None. Understood? He doesn't agree with you. He's a fucking conservative on every issue under the sun, and he doesn't like your ethanol bullshit either. The man is a goddamn Republican. He's not going to run as a Democrat. Frankly, I don't know what the hell you morons are smoking, but it says a lot about your hopes that your principal victory pipe-dream involves pimping the credibility and stature of someone on our team. Now I'm not sure if you're clear on the whole confusing concept of presidential elections, but see, usually they involve running with PEOPLE IN YOUR OWN PARTY. Because if the best guy you can find for a Democrat ticket, the best guy to embody Democrat values (isn't that a contradiction in terms?) is a REPUBLICAN, well, you're pretty much on your last legs. I mean it's pretty fucking sad. Do you see us going, "Well, the public isn't really excited about Vice-President Cheney... hey, let's call Mary Landrieu and see if she'll run on the GOP ticket, whaddaya say?" I'm really beginning to think you guys are trying to butcher and crucify yourselves well before November, very carefully and very deliberately, just to deprive us of the pleasure of beating you in a stand-up fight. You know you're going to lose, so you're not even going to get in the ring. Well, I think that's despicable and unfair, and really bad sportsmanship.

Actually, it was the French ambassador to London. BBC story

The Constitution does, however, make a reference to "the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven," which could possibly be seen as offensive by the American Atheists, Moslems, and adherents of the CSEI millenial cult, so we might want to dab a bit of white-out over that part. Oh my goodness, did I just say "white-out?" I must be a racist fundamentalist Christian, and thus on the same level as Al Qaeda...

Just finished watching The Blue & The Gray again. Good movie overall, but Robert Symonds is absolutely perfect as General Lee. Only appears in two scenes, but still, it was great casting for the portrayal of one of the finest men in history.

Yes it was, and it was written by Reginald Rose. Brilliant play and a good movie, but a godawful argument. In war? Doesn't exist. Gets you killed. "Gee, that soldier coming towards me with the Nazi stormtrooper insignia on his uniform might be the enemy, and yeah, the rifle he's carrying might be loaded, but I don't think it'd be right to shoot him until I'm sure beyond a reasonable doubt..." <bang> <thud>

Click here for an image of the sheet music from 1814. This link leads to the subject page at the Library of Congress site.

As stated previously, several ratifications of the Constitution clearly and explicitly declare that "the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will." (The text is from Virginia's; New York's and Rhode Island's contain similar lines.) The fact that these states and others were accepted into the Union means that their specified conditions, including this one, were acceptable and satisfactory. Secession is not treason, and the dissolution of the Union and the establishment of the Confederacy was absolutely and inarguably both legal and honourable. In the instant that any government is imposed by force, that government ceases forthwith to be a democracy. The will of the people is supralegal, and the Declaration of Independence has a far greater authority than any mere statutory instrument.