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Anyone hear about this?  It could end up influencing tribal rights, adoptive rights, and paternal rights.

http://www.examiner.com/article/baby-veronica-may-set-precedent-as-her-case-heads-for-u-s-supreme-court

So I will comply with your request while noting that it is just hostility for the sake of it.

Well I'm glad you are so easily pleased! Hey how about this:

I wish you guys would stop disliking me like that, it's not fair! I am actually likeable! And I make fritters and call them savoury pancakes! Your rudity is hurting my soulses! What have I done to deserve? Please? Puhleezeeee!

There.

In all fairness, holist, we only dislike you when you're here.

Haha Holist,  I beat you.

(see sig for why)

http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/1352?share_ref=Ft-tZSqE2iY

Judge tells woman groped by police officer that she shouldn't have been in a bar.

It's more that he'd bring ideas to the table that the other candidates won't touch.  Sure, I disagree with 75% of what Ron Paul has to say, he is a republican, but the remaining 25% is stuff that no major party candidate would consider saying.  He's opposed to both the drug war and drone strikes.

I also can't see any of his really wacky ideas, like the gold standard or completely dismantling the social safety nets, actually happening.

Oddly enough, there's a very similar discussion going on in leftist circles in Israel, despite the fact that we basically have a multi-party system. People who are left of center end up voting closer to the center than they'd like just to make sure their vote gets counted. But in Israel as in the US, not voting doesn't empower anybody. It just allows your perspective to continue being ignored. Of course the system is geared to encourage this. In the US more than Israel, I'd say. Voting doesn't make anything better, but not voting contributes to things going the way they're going already. I think the only solution is to vote for a party that has more than a snowball's chance in hell and focussing your energy on changing things outside the electoral system. Voting is just putting your finger in the dam. You still have to work on repairing that hole or pushing back the tide, and that requires real work, not just putting a piece of paper in a box.

BTW, in Israel there's a significant movement of lefties registering in Likkud (the big right-wing party) in order to participate in primaries and try to keep them from veering off too far to the right. They then vote for a leftist party come real elections. It's a response to right-wing extremists (settlers) who do the same thing, except come elections they vote for the outright fascists, whom their plants in Likkud give a place in government. In America you have the Tea Party doing that kind of thing to the GOP, and I wonder why no lefties have registered as Republicans to sabotage that effort (or maybe they have and I haven't heard of them). Probably because of how entrenched partisan lines are and because of the idealistic hope that if the GOP goes off the far end they'll never win an election again. And I think we're starting to see that people are way too stupid to be expected to act that way. The GOP has for a long time been really bad for most of its voters and outright crazy, but they manage to win some races anyway because their tactics aren't based on sound policy. Even their politics aren't based on policy.

I'm a registered Republican for that reason.  I tend to get idealist and do stupid things like vote for Ron Paul though.  I have yet to vote for a Republican in the general election.

Funny fact: that does not mean what everyone thinks it means. Jesus, in the full context of the time (an oppressed colonial backwater with an awful lot of frothing anti-Roman religious radicals in the countryside), meant that Caesar was owed nothing because he owned nothing that was in Palestine.

Sorry, but there's only one church that matters this election cycle, and it's located in Utah.

The funny thing is, American liberals don't want to talk about it, presumably out of fear of offending people with money.  And they don't come much richer than the Church of Latter Day Saints, it must be said.

Jesus christ, yes. The Mormon church owns huge swaths of farmland. I've always thought they ought to be taxed on that, if nothing else.

I'd disagree about Christ saying Caesar was owed nothing.  He specifically mentioned the face on the coinage, that face was Caesar's.  So Caesar was owed the coin, which had his face on it.

I encountered a magnificent thought experiment, which your mind initially rejects but, the more you think about it...

To paraphrase it. You accept for sake of argument that at some point in the future, if technology and Moore's law and we don't wipe ourselves out or blow up the planet, that we'll have a way to simulate, at subatomic level, something as complicated as our solar system. To set it motion with predetermined conditions for life on Earth and then just let the bugger go, with the outcome that consciousness, as we would recognise it, emerges "inside" the simulation.

So, at that point, if this is a valid, plausible scenario it immediately turns out that you have, at best, a 50/50 probability of being in the "real" original reality and of being a product of the simulation.

If you accept that this, in a hundred or a thousand or a million years time, will be possible, then there comes the question of where this tech will be in another hundred, thousand, or million years. There's got to be a fuckton of these simulations going on by then, right? With every simulation run, across a global, perhaps trans, or even inter-galactic interbutts of teh future, the likelihood of you being in the original reduces to the point where you have more chance of winning the lottery.

I've mentioned that possibility before.  It was barstooled and considered to be useless wankery.

You said Green Party. I'm a Green. I'm going to talk about Greens.

I don't really know a whole lot about Dr. Stein's running mate. Hey, Rev, I seem to recall you saying something about the Greens in Maine being a little looney tunes. Could you expand upon that point?

A vote for the Green Party is a vote for Romney.  Just saying.

Only if you would otherwise vote for Obama...

Mittens's campaign slogan is an old KKK one, used starting in 1922. This is honestly even better than Eastwood's speech.

Proof:
http://books.google.com/books?id=44UKwOoPB7sC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=%22keep+america+american%22+kkk&source=bl&ots=MRLDHX6IVE&sig=7rhRyWIDB5b4EKsILKBZYfu8d9E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Fp5BUPv5HKmI6AHZtoDgAQ&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22keep%20america%20american%22%20kkk&f=false

Snopes disagrees.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/slogan.asp

Romney's campaign slogan is actually "Believe in America"

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/28/justice/georgia-soldiers-plot/index.html

They're pretty clearly not Anarchists, they might be idiots, but on the other hand they might not.  I'm not surprised to see US soldiers planning this sort of thing to be honest.  They're coming back, trained to kill, having dealt with IED's and insurgents, having learned a lot about their tactics, to an unemployment rate that is even higher than the already unreasonable one suffered by the civilian population.  They're in many cases being mistreated by the government.  Angry people trained to kill, with few options, is bad news.

A lot of our products are metric, people just ignore it. A liter of hootch is still called a "fifth" by most people.

A liter is closer to a quart.  A fifth is roughly .750 liters, and is what most alcohol is sold in.

Die in a fire you pedantic ass.

Apparently he has no awareness that the legally-sanctioned sizes of alcohol bottles VARY FROM STATE TO STATE.

I used to sell it, I make and bottle it now and have to be aware of bottle sizes for batch calculations, bottle labelling is regulated by the federal government.

*proudly lasted longer than 2 of Alty's forums*

Another interesting side note-

The Green Party's pick for candidate is Jill Stein. What's interesting about this, is that she ran against Romney in 2002 for MA governor. Not sure if that's happened before- two candidates for president have run against each other for governor.

I actually don't hang up the phone on political pollsters, unlike most.  They don't include third party in the polls, not even as "press 3 if you are voting for a different candidate"  it's Romney, Obama, and undecided, and if you go with undecided they want to know which way you are leaning.  I'm voting Jill Stein, but apparently nobody wants to hear that.

A lot of our products are metric, people just ignore it. A liter of hootch is still called a "fifth" by most people.

A liter is closer to a quart.  A fifth is roughly .750 liters, and is what most alcohol is sold in.