bascule

To me it's right there in the preamble... promoting the general welfare is one of the things the government is supposed to do. Were you to ask me where in the Constitution it says the government can force you to buy something, I'd draw a blank.

Psst, charitable contributions are tax deductible. Helping children dying of blood cancer reduces your obligations to Uncle Sam. Something tells me healthy adults aren't going to be a big draw on the healthcare system. All that said: government services are a pooled risk system. We pay into programs we may or may not end up using depending on life circumstances we cannot predict.

I've noticed on the AJAX post editor that the label on the submit button is, well, often mislabeled. I've seen "Vote Now" and "Cancel" (so there's two cancel buttons)

That would be scientology.org

Crashtheteaparty.org appears to be the web site of a single guy, Jason Levin, who has since removed the original site and is now hawking t-shirts in self-support after getting fired from his job for creating the site. So... it's a guy? Am I supposed to interpret that any other way than "move on folks, nothing to see here"? As far as I can tell "this group" is Jason Levin. The entire web presence for this "group" vanished after the guy got fired. The sheer amount of hyperbole in this post is ridiculous. One guy => a group => "Liberal Groups seeks to defame Tea Party"? What? Although to be fair, given the grammar of the statement, perhaps it was supposed to be "Liberal Group seeks...". The site did claim they were a large group, but anyone can put up a site on the Internet claiming they're a large organization. Granted there were tea party crashers but I'm not really seeing any evidence they're organized in any manner, or that they really accomplished anything at all. And it's not like conservatives haven't crashed liberal protests...

Is your reference for that this link: http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=621 ...which is returning "Could not connect to the database server"

Screed? Look at what you just wrote, jryan... pot. kettle. black.

That's certainly a problem with politicians in general, and I agree that there are definitely concerns about the Constitutionality of the mandatory purchase requirement. However for me it's not entirely clear cut that it's unconstitutional. Compare to say, ordering the telcos to dump all their user data into the NSA (then having the audacity to grant them retroactive immunity). That's a little more clear cut to me. Also, your argument seems to be the opposite of ParanoiA's, which was he was willfully violating the constitution.

A really great article about Tea Party demographics on FiveThirtyEight: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/04/tea-party-bears-becks-imprint.html The one thing they have in common more than anything else: a majority of them (59%) have a favorable opinion of Glenn Beck, versus an 18% national average. Now take a step back and ask yourself why this country is so deep in the red...

I certainly don't support this, but this really is much ado over what appears to be little more than some poorly chosen wording. In a followup to this, Phil Hare made clear his commitment to the constitution: 6Obain3h-qo

Oh really Pangloss, do we have to go back and forth putting words in each others mouth? I guess we do... So you're saying no conservative protesters have ever done anything like that to Obama... like made death threats... Comparisons to Hitler... Burned him in effigy... Really? No Pangloss, actually what I said was this... Still waiting...

Show me one protester sporting a semi-auto rifle at an event Bush attended and I will entirely concede that point. You know, like this guy at an event Obama attended (source) (and no, he's not alone) (seriously this is commonplace?) For what it's worth, I own a semi-auto AK, and am permitted to carry it, but never did I think of bringing it to a protest, not as if I've ever attended any of these protests. But still, it's just the principle of the thing to me. If you're going to an event the President of the United States is attending, leave your guns at home, people.

I enjoyed this: Bush went his first 6 years in office without ever vetoing a bill. It was only when Democrats began to retake Congress that any vetoes started to happen whatsoever. You're seriously giving Bush a bye here, and making excuses for him. If you were legitimately concerned about government spending you'd concede he did an absolutely horrible job managing the federal budget: Republicans presidents have a terrible track record on the national deficit. You're criticizing Obama for spending intended to curtail the nearly complete global economic collapse years and years of deregulation and a "hands off" approach to managing the financial sector. Bush cut taxes and started an expensive, unnecessary war, and sat idly by while the financial sector collapsed. He is far and away responsible for the present deficits, and a substantial chunk of the national deficit. All that said, if you're legitimately concerned about the national debt, why in the world are you defending Bush? You should be heavily criticizing both Bush AND Obama...

Did you bother to look outside today? I'm not sure you live in a populated area, but today was April 15th, tax day, and the teabaggers were out in force... From one "partisan" to another, really jryan? Any of those venting their liberal anger bringing semiautomatic rifles to the events?

All I know is before the Democrats were in power we didn't have volcanoes erupting in Europe and earthquakes in Haiti.

Apologies for that post (booze and forums make for a tactless bascule), but the point still stands...

Check out The Road to Reality

Another reason this essay is wrong: it likens neoconservatism to modernism. Neoconservatives are not modernist. Nor are paleoconservatives necessarily postmodernists. Conservatives used to be modernists. Neocons are authoritarians. They are not necessarily modernists, and I think typically are postmodernists as well. Modern conservatives are typically against modernism and prefer a return to a "simpler life" and the ways of old. They are generally not fans of change. Progressives are much more modern.

No, but let me put it this way: The Republicans brought us warrantless wiretapping and retroactive telco immunity. These things kick me in my proverbial libertarian ballsack. Telco immunity isn't a bad thing so much because I want the telcos punished as I want a Supreme Court case which rules on this sort of crap. It is not kosher for the telcos to just dump immense amounts of telecom traffic into government servers without a warrant. Obama has continued this policy. That's bad. But at least Congress has amended FISA since then so what he's doing isn't outright illegal per federal law (even if it violates the fourth amendment, spiritually if nothing else). What Bush was doing violated both federal law and the Constitution, and he was the one who created the program. Bush had his name all over a program which violated not just the spirit of the fourth amendment but was directly in violation of federal law. And he has not been punished. I personally find that infuriating. Bush should be in jail. Being forced to buy healthcare? I don't see where in the Constitution the federal government is granted that power. It's stupid, but it's not an invasion of privacy, which is what the Republicans have been doing. All in all I find the Republicans, particularly the neocon contingent, far more authoritarian and completely willing to trample on our constitutional rights to privacy than anything the Democrats have done. Whether or not they claim ignorance is irrelevant to me. In my mind what they're doing is wrong.

My bad... That said do you care to opine on the issue of the fact that the actions of a single politician don't translate to the party as a whole? Willfully violating the Constitution is worse than violating it out of ignorance? And how do you know they're not willfully violating it then claiming ignorance?

This reminded me of all the hubbub surrounding LHC:

The result is a step forward albeit a rather poor compromise. I just hope having something in place will be a motivation for further reform. The process by which it came about was certainly a clusterf*ck

Let's modify your scenario a bit to remove ethical concerns about unnecessary surgery: The subject sits in a chair and has a device placed on his skin which creates a sensation of pleasure via transcranial magnetic stimulation. And let's just say the country in question is fairly certain it's safe. In that case, it's a bit of a gray area. One can imagine they'd submit a prisoner to weeks on end of constant pleasure, then take it away, completely. I imagine the withdrawal process would be pretty horrible

That's an interesting quote, however looking over Feynman's Wikiquote this is the one I was thinking of: Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

There's a similar quote, I believe from Richard Feynman, about people asking him if knowing physics hindered his appreciation of the beauty of nature, and he argued on the contrary that it improves it. My Google-fu is failing me, unfortunately, but if anyone knows the quote I'm talking about it'd be great if you can paste it.