Another example of Old Media shooting itself in the foot. Picture dinosaurs looking at the bright light in the sky.

You'd better watch your ass: If Belial notices you using his name to post your crap, he's liable to make a special trip from Hell to skin your ass and mash your raisins. And how is it hard to say who was the aggressor? Martin didn't know Zimmerman existed until he spotted him following him in his SUV. Martin even hid to avoid him but Zimmerman kept 'patrolling' -- against the instructions from the 911 operator -- until he found him in a different part of the community. The aggressor is obvious. Zimmerman is an asshole with anger management issues. He had been arrested for assaulting his girlfriend and was sentenced to take anger management counseling. Any man that strikes a woman is a cowardly piece of shit, just the kind of lunatic to go fishing for an opportunity to kill. On a seperate occasion he was arrested for drunkenly interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty. In some fit of delusions of grandeur, he believed he could exercise some nonexistent authority. (The closest he'd ever come to actually having any authority was a short stint in a police training course. He flunked out. Everything that has come to light about Zimmerman reveals a weak-minded, weak-willed miscreant that actively sought the opportunity to do damage and finally forced a confrontation with someone who had not so much as given him a dirty look, who didn't know he existed before being hunted and confronted by this murderous assole. He'll get along just fine in the Florida State Prison System, a/k/a, karma. So you wrap yourself in your comfy blanket of racist delusion and hope karma doesn't function for you. Now get on back to editing The George Zimmerman Fan Club newsletter.

The "black person" was seventeen years old. I don't know what planet you are from but in every jurisdiction in the USA, planet Earth, that is a child, you fucking brain-damaged putz. You won't be taken seriously by any thinking person until you master the time-honored strategem of accomplished rightwing facist motherfuckers everywhere and disguise your fundamental lack of humanity and honor.

That and the lead officer -- an experienced homicide detective -- was about to arrest Zimmerman for manslaughter when a state's attorney (a political position) overrode him because the state's Republican administration had a vested political interest in preserving the 'Stand Your Ground' law. "Stand Your Ground" was one of many reactionary conservative initiatives crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a shadowy group that brings together corporate henchmen with conservative lawmakers from all levels of government to create 'wishlist' legislative agendas. I think people were also outraged that, despite having his cel phone, the cops waited three days to contact Trayvon's parents while his body lay in the morgue and that Zimmermann ignored explicit instructions from the 911 operator not to follow Martin but, instead, took a loaded handgun and went after him -- an act that the Republican sponsor of the 'Stand Your Ground' law said negated any protection from prosecution under its standards. http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

Your proposal is problematic and probably unworkable. "[Electing] representatives who are clearly willing to create a constitutional amendment separating corporation and state" is problematic because (1) incumbency is like a super power in elections, and (2) even virgin candidates will say whatever it takes to win. We have an abundance of evidence -- to the point of it being cliche -- that campaign promises aren't reliable indicators of future actions. The amendment process itself is also problematic. As set out in Article Five of the Constitution, an amendment can be offered in one of two ways: It can originate in the U.S. Congress with a 2/3rds majority vote in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, or; by 2/3rds of the states holding Constitutional Conventions to propose amendments. All of the amendments currently in force originated in Federal legislative action. In the first instance, you would be asking -- for the most part -- entrenched politicians to act against their own selfish interests and the interests of their corporate masters. Good luck with that. The other option must be considered even more troublesome since, despite its being available since the adoption of the Constitution itself, it has never been exercised. Not only has no Constitutional Amendment ever been adopted via this procedure, none has even been seriously proposed. All amendments, proposed by whichever procedure, would then need ratification by 3/4s of the states, each by either state Constitutional Conventions (which has been done once) or by state legislative action ( the way all other amendnments were adopteded). So, if history is any guide, the only likely course is the first, a course which would require a greater nobility on the part of a majority of federal legislators than they have ever previously demonstrated . Again, good luck with that.

Yeah, and would have punished the victims. The workers in the auto plants and their supply chain, the retirees with 401K's, etc., would have suffered while the fat cats simply wrote off the losses and moved on to the next table in the casino.

What we have in the US and Europe is a blatant plutocratic oligarchy: there is nothing 'crypto' about it. Anyone who doesn't realize it is either not paying attention are lacks rudimentary cognitive faculties.

Hope they aren't using a metric bolt in an ASTM hole. Otherwise, I recommend WD40.

Save the righteous indignation: the headline is bullshit. Nothing is banned. This is a simple recall of the magnets sold prior to 2010 when the package listed the wrong allowable age (13 instead of 14). The problem was solved by dropping the age and stating simply "Keep Away From Children." 'geekoid' provided the following link deep into the comments. I reproduce it here to prevent a rash of apoplectic strokes and unwarrented rightwing crowing: http://www.cpsc.gov/CPSCPUB/PREREL/prhtml10/10251.html [cpsc.gov]

It seems that any actual negligence would be on the part of the parents. For the manufacturer to be negligent, the product would need to be harmful when used as intended. The manufacturer in this case went to extremes to inform consumers that swallowing the magnets was stupidly dangerous, as was allowing access to the product by a child too young to grasp that fact.

I, too, am "50+" and still have a healthy respect for creative destruction, but what I want to see is more in the nature of restoration. It's somewhat baffling that those screaming against change can't remember that it was their champions -- Reagan and the Cheney/Bush interregnum -- that put us on the path to insolvency. It was Reagan's tax cuts (which Cheney said "proved deficits don't matter") that plunged us into the state of perpetual, monstrous debt that chokes off our options in dealing with the present financial dangers our country faces. It was Cheney/Bush that threw open the nation's treasury to plutocratic plunderers (Bush called them "...the haves and the have mores...my base") then failed to act on reliable information (that "bin Laden [was] determined to strike in America) and used the preventable tragedy to lie us into a ruinous war in Iraq. Now, when the immoral, cretinous Paul Ryan pushes his heinous plan to impoverish millions of the most vulnerable members of our society, who does he invoke? Reagan. And what is the only firm economic detail he reveals while obsfucating his fictitious 'cuts' and 'savings'? The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy must not be touched, must remain in full force So, I want restoration: of equality of opportunity; of economic fairness; of honest elections; of civic sanity.

I think that's great but, assuming you are an American and not a foreign troll, you should be taxed at the maximum rate on all US earnings, pay a penalty for expatriation of funds and face sufficient jail time for any evasionary tactics so as to make your personal expat status permanent. Any citizen that chooses to benefit from the US financial system while declining to participate in its civic life with its concomitant duties and responsibilities (the1%?) deserves no consideration beyond contempt. Any noncitizen who games that system, or aids citizens in doing so, should also be held to account -- as the gnomes of Pictet and Credit Suisse have learned.

WRONG! Buffett called for tax code revisions to fix the problem of inequitable rates which include ALL income, earned and unearned.