Sometimes I feel a very small minority on that. Which is acceptable, but not always pleasant. FWIW, after a few years with this community, I think my contributions as a whole were more positive when I took heat for excessive length as well as the time to say things carefully and with ample qualifiers. People may have teased me for length, but far fewer got mad, and those who did usually got mad because of what I said rather than what they thought I said, because it was a lot harder to misconstrue my statements.

I can blame them, because they had no reason to take what I said at anything but face value. Why ask permission to search if you're going to do it anyway? A token acknowledgment of the Fourth Amendment only works if saying, "no" stops the search; if the guy really felt he had probable cause he didn't need to ask permission. But no problem; I happen to be among those liberals (and there are millions of us) who know full well who paid dearly for our freedom to complain, and appreciate it more than I can express. Reminding some ass is a pretty small repayment.

Maybe in OH (though that doesn't square with what I've heard of OH) but not in TX, and definitely not in Williamson County. Here the implication you're willing to sue for wrongful arrest and the like is more than offset by how mad the cop will be when he sees the ACLU sticker. And Williamson County Sheriffs (which this was) are notorious; one of my neighbors is a retired trucker who says a California friend still hauling will drive 100 miles out of his way to avoid coming through here.

The main thing with laws against concealed carry is that it will stop law abiding citizens from carrying concealed weapons, so that if you find one in the course of routine police work you already have a charge without needing to find an additional more serious one. It's not going to get anyone 20 years to life, and it shouldn't, but I think it's an effective stopgap. Again, that's coming from someone who thinks gunracks and hip holsters should be perfectly legal; then the only reason I can see for concealment is to say, "SURPRISE! You're dead. " That's not a culture I want to encourage legally or otherwise.

Oh, believe me, I hear ya; like I say, I favor allowing people to carry clearly visible weapons, anything short of a LAW, really. The proposition is not reversible; anyone who'll murder won't be stopped by concealed carry bans, but many who'd illegally carry a concealed weapon would never think of murder. But believe it or not, as adversarial as my attitude toward law enforcement can be based on some insane experiences of my own and others (I'm pretty sure I almost got shot one night in Georgetown for having car trouble, and the best part was that once they knew I was just a distressed motorist they left for their cop shop two blocks away) I recognize the police axiom that the most dangerous thing they do is "routine" traffic stops, because they never know whether it's Farmer Brown back from the market or a couple bank robbers with a teller bound and gagged in the trunk. Forcing them to ask if you're carrying a legal but concealed gun just makes life more dangerous for everyone, and something about making an already nervous and armed man more nervous is unappealing.

Fair enough, it was a tangent. That said, I do think it was treason, and I also think setting the precedent the US would or could be made to negotiate with terrorists had severe and enduring consequences.

I understand that, but I disagree with the whole setup for primaries. If we're going to have a two party system where nearly every major office will be filled by either a Democrat or Republican I think the citizens have as much right to vote for both party nominees to an office as for the officeholder in the general election. Why should I be barred from voting for my preferred Republican (or Democrat) Nominee for President just because I voted for the other? If I vote for the Dem nominee (or vice versa) and the other one wins, am I any less subject to his jurisdiction?

I live in TX; a few years ago I voted in my ONLY Republican primary to date for one simple reason: All the candidates to replace the disgusting Williamson County Sheriff (who was caught drunk and relieving himself by the side of the road only to be driven home by cops who recognized him, not once but twice) were Republicans, so the winner of the primary ran unopposed. If I wanted ANY say in my next Sheriff (and given how bad the one running for re-election was, I did) I had to vote in the primary, but when the State Democratic Party called up asking if I wanted to be a delegate to the State Convention, I had to say I couldn't because my voter registration card said I voted in the Republican Primary. I think people should be allowed to vote in all party primaries; it's more democratic, and removes the spoiler effect without disenfranchising anyone.

Show Me the Compromise, Jerry. Tort reform instead of healthcare reform isn't a compromise, it's a bait and switch; I'm well aware Republicans want comprehensive tort reform, but that's not the issue we're debating, not the one two Presidents got elected on, so maybe we should have that debate separately and on its own merits rather than in place of healthcare reform. Bringing up the New Deal doesn't help you much there; Republicans started "reforming" it as early as Taft-Hartley in '46 (that's before we consider the conservative SCOTUS rubber stamping the whole thing unconstitutional until FDR attempted an unconstitutional court packing scheme his own party rejected. ) By the time I was born, taking us back off the gold standard (revived by the New Deal) reduced minimum wage to nothing more than a spur to inflation. Deregulation and removing segregation of lenders, investment banks and insurance did the rest under Clinton and, rhetoric aside, that drove the high risk, high interest subprime housing mortgages far more than political pressure to lend to minorities (many of whom pay their mortgages just fine, thank you, and they didn't get all the bad loans either. ) Hell, Reagan even gave us a tax on Social Security benefits that were taken out as taxes in the first place. No, there wasn't "the better part of a century" of New Deal; there was about forty years, from 1933 until 1973. Contrast those years with the ones before and since and tell me how bad the New Deal was. Remember when the evil liberals were in charge and even our enemies respected us morally and strategically?

If you want a supermajority to increase whatever level of care created, with or without medical tort reform worthy of the name (I certainly don't think other torts should be a part of the healthcare bill) fine. But except for the Snowe Amendment I've yet to see a single Republican proposal to provide universal care. We're back to '93, when Phil Gramm got a GAO scale and threw the Presidential Healthcare Bill on it to theatrically demonstrate its size, and Majority Leader Mitchell removed the paperwork, pointed to the empty scale and said, "THIS is the Republican plan!" Show me an alternative (note: Tort reform is not an alternative to universal healthcare. ) Additional note: The current healthcare bill is a dogs dinner than needs rewriting from the ground up, just not for the reasons usually cited.

Again, I have no problem tolling an alternate and superior travel route for those who choose to drive it. The tolls should still be proportionate to the private investment though, and people shouldn't be forced to drive it, either by retroactively tolling other existing roads or making the "free" roads too dangerous to drive.


Well, Merck developed an entirely new vaccine and one of their competitors developed a competing one (which was never considered for use by Texas government) so that one's off the table here. As I've said elsewhere, as long as it doesn't become a moratorium, I think limiting grounds for suit is much superior to limiting damages. It prevents ANY damage for suits by people victim only to their own negligence, without preventing real victims and/or their survivors from full compensation when wronged. When I was a few years old State Farm sold my parents (and millions of others) a life insurance policy on me that promised a monthly annuity in retirement once it was fully paid when I turned 25. They subsequently changed that to a $5000 life insurance policy ONLY, and only if I kept paying every month for the rest of my life, even though my mom had already paid more than $5000. A LOT of people sued, were combined into a class action suit, and offered a few hundred dollars each out of the eventual settlement. Clearly, we need tort reform to restrict suits for breach of contract, though I remain fuzzy on what this has to do with healthcare....

I don't think it's fear mongering, it's acknowledging real risks, but not overstating nor marginalizing them. There's an assumption of risk involved and any sex ed worthy of the name should make that understood. I do strongly agree with you that deceiving kids with horror stories destroys all credibility (as an aside I'd like to note that I've seen no research showing marijuana creates physical addiction, though it can create psychological dependence, which isn't the same. ) That's why I think the teaching should be thorough, because if you try to stack the deck by only presenting part of the whole picture, kids WILL find out the rest (either that birth control isn't perfect or that unprotected sex without pregnancy or STDs is common) and that will cast doubt on all the TRUTHFUL things you told them. In some ways that's worse than not teaching them anything; at least that way if they ask you a specific question and you give an honest answer they might believe you.

People used to be a lot less black and white, more thoughtful and deliberate. There are always trolls, but "back in the day" as exhausting as it was (and I was unemployed then; I literally could and did spend double digit hours a day on the CMB) a single thread could generate DOZENS of discussions like this with many diverse, intelligent and reasonable people. It almost never descended into a shouting match, and those who looked for that didn't get much attention, for precisely that reason. That, and the seemingly inexhaustible and genuine caring between members were the two things that made me a wotmaniac. For a lot of reasons, I wish you could've been around for that, wish I'd gotten there years earlier; maybe RAFO will be similar some day, but never the same, and as of now it's not even close. Not that I don't enjoy the one on one with you, and you in particular, but it didn't used to be as hard to have a meaningful, informed, diverse and civil discussion. I've done mea culpas for my role in reducing that, but more and more I wonder how much of it was me affecting the site rather than the reverse.

No, it wouldn't; technically I don't think capping judgments would violate the LETTER of the amendment (just the whole of the spirit) but such guidelines that still allowed juries to use their own discretion, while ensuring judges were there to prevent juries turned vigilante, is in the same vein as regulations, without outright bans, on firearms. It's a fine line; someone referenced permits for protests earlier, and IMHO that's turned into a legal expedient for repealing freedom of assembly in practice if not on paper. Don't get me started on "free speech areas" which on the UT campus is something completely opposite to what a former Austin resident made it in DC.

Then, once again, produce the alternative first, if only so there's not a vacuum where anything goes in between abolishing the old system and creating a new one. I'm dubious of the logic there anyway though; laws are written to say they supersede old ones all the time, and there's no reason a comprehensive reform package can't do that. Indeed, it's common. If you want a big rather than small reform, fine, but reform is more than "dump this, kill that, repeal this other. "