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Use a roux....

Perhaps I didn't state my intended meaning well enough. To clarify, we went to Iraq because of Saddam. We remain in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government because of the growth of terrorist elements there following Saddam being deposed. We are not there because of 9/11. We are there fighting a battle for the Iraqis that is not our battle to fight.

So you're saying the original invasion of Iraq was motivated by Al-Qaeda being in Iraq? Can you support that. And you're saying that we would have denied Iraq's requests for us to remain there or that they never made such a request if my comment were true? Can you support that too?

Why does anyone think we're in Iraq to go after Al-Qaeda in Iraq anyhow? We're in Iraq because of Saddam Hussein. Once that was over Islamic Fundamentalists saw an opportunity to bring the fight to Iraq and the new Iraqi government asked us to stay. The ongoing battle in Iraq has never had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. At present it is nothing more than an attempt to keep Islamic Fundamentalists from turning Iraq into another Afghanistan. It is an effort that I'm tired of paying for and I do support an accelerated departure from Iraq but we need to get rid of the spin that is diverting us from discussing the truth of the matter.

For the record: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE HEALTHCARE. All healthcare in national healthcare systems is paid for by someone and it's not the government. The only money the government can give to anyone for anything is money that it's taken from its population. I challenge you support this. I went looking for stocks to invest in and none of the sites I visited listed any health insurance companies as good picks. Stock charts for national companies like Aetna and Humana reflect a decrease in stock value. A look at Tenet Healthcare's stock, one of the nations largest hospital chains with more than 510 hospitals and over 450 other facilities, in both the 5 and 10 year charts shows a loss. Consider also that health insurance is not like car insurance. Everyone has to buy car insurance whether they will ever use it or not but the majority of health insured are those that need and use it. Health insurance companies are not making tons of money collecting from people that they are not having to pay out on. Why are health costs what they are in the U.S.? Many factors are costing the few that pay into the health system an exponentially growing cost. Doctors are passing on the ever increasing cost of their malpractice insurance netted from the ever increasing rate of malpractice claims. Not that there's an actual increase in malpractice, just the expectation of many to use the court as a lottery to win big money. Doctors are not allowed to be human anymore, they must be perfect, no mistakes allowed. Hospitals are passing on all of the increasing costs of liability insurance netted from increased litigation and the increased cost of treating an exponentially growing population of illegal aliens. Every product they buy has increasing liability insurance costs attached. Fear of class action reprisal has companies spending more and more to protect themselves from a catastrophic award that could put them out of business. 2 hospitals in a 30 mile radius from where I live have gone bankrupt and closed their doors in the last 10 years. This is not because they are making tons of money in the current system. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions on R&D for a hundred drugs only to get one approved and then they have to consider that one drug may yield a class action suit 30 years down the road. They are passing on all of the R&D costs and the price of liability insurance in the small percentage of drugs that make it to market. Big companies like Pfizer, Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb all show losses in their stocks. They are not good investments at this time. Health insurance for everyone is a goal we should ultimately try to achieve but the current system has many problems that need to be fixed and putting the government in charge is not a good way to get things fixed. Most of the time it is only a way to make things worse. IMO we should work toward fixing the problems in our system instead of simply putting the government in charge of it.

So you would have us believe that at the very center of our core where pressure is the highest, it is cold, and as you move towards the surface where the pressure decreases that the gas gets hotter, so hot that it melts rock? Kind of like anti-refrigeration?

What origin does this hypothesis suggest for magma?

All hail the pessimist. Even a squalid life in a third world country is better than no life at all. Then again, some people can only see the negative side of anything. I pity them....

No matter how bad things are I'd envision that anyone can imagine how bad someone else has it somewhere else in the world. Someone's always got a worse life than you have so be appreciative of what you have.

More accurately the article states, "The universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide." For me it says nothing about what may or may not lie beyond that boundary.

Misery loves company. Fight the good fight, love life and be happy. All the negativity in the world is not worth getting depressed over. There are too many positive things to enjoy to waste time being depressed about the negatives. The road of life may have some potholes here and there but I'd rather have a bumpy road to travel and enjoy the scenery than no road at all....

So we should all just take L Ron Hubbard's word for it and become Scientologists then?

I didn't turn to science to back my claim, I simply stated a simple fact. Until there is evidence of mythical beings then they don't exist. That doesn't exclude the possibility that they might but it is unreasonable and illogical for mankind to assume that anything man can dream up, exists by default. One does not need science or atheism to use reason. FWIW, my own atheist position is a lack of belief in any Gods, not an affirmative belief that they can't exist. I am literally not-theist. If and when some theist can PROVE that a God does exist then I'll believe it. Until then quit worrying about what an atheist believes and get busy proving what you believe. You cannot prove your own POV by simply trying to discredit others.

The burden is on those that claim the existence of anything. Do you just presume that Leprechauns exist because you can't prove that they don't. How about gnomes? Gremlins? Ghosts? Uniciorns? Thysrtlks? If you want to claim that any of these exist it is your burden to prove it, not everyone else's to prove they don't. There is zero evidence for any Gods. Until you can prove they exist the4n they don't!

This one?

Well, I'd prefer not to say that outright myself but I do notice in the thesaurus that "smart" is an antonym of "stupid" and I certainly would not claim that smoking is a smart thing to do, I think it's quite the opposite. Would you claim it a smart thing to do? BTW, I smoked for 25 years and I freely admit how stupid I was for doing so...

But if Joe Bloggs down the street wants to exercise his freedom of speech and speak over someone else exercising their freedom of speech then he can do that and the government cannot pass any laws to prohibit him from doing so....

The right of free speech is not a right to protected speech. If someone wants to shout over you they can. A permit to speak somewhere does not abridge the right of someone else to speak there as well. The permit is only permission to march, not a permit to suppress anyone else's rights. Even a heckler at a private event on private property can shout out over a speaker. The owner can have them ejected for trespassing but cannot hold them accountable for speaking. This may be old news but as of 12/6/1865 the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery. Last I checked the Constitution has not been amended to abridge the right of free speech of anyone on any subject. Feel free to correct me if I've missed something there...

No, I believe freedom of speech applies to everyone, not just the people you think should have it. The point you seem to be missing here is that EVERYONE is guaranteed, by the Constitution, the "Right" of free speech and no one has any right to abridge those rights of the people which are guaranteed by the Constitution, not even someone with a parade permit. BTW, the POV is Libertarianism, not liberalism... Because the Constitution says so!

Rationed out liberty is not liberty. Just because someone else opens their mouth is no obligation for me to shut mine...

And who's to say which side are the counter-demonstrators? Which side is the one disturbing the peace? Isn't the freedom of speech equal for all sides? Freedom of speech is not the right to be heard...

Sure. No one's right of free speech should be inhibited except where it violates the rights of someone else...

That would seem to imply that the state of a body, inertia, at motion or rest, is an intrinsic property of matter....

I understand that and never said it didn't contain a condition. That doesn't change the fact that the law effectively says that motion would continue forever, perpetually, unless affected by an external force...

How so? I understand his law to state that the a body in motion stays in motion unless something stops it. Does it say something else?