Read up on Sherman's March to the Sea or about German and Japanese casualties during WWII. From the standpoint of fighting a war for survival, which the state of Israel is doing (read the stated goals of Hamas and other Arab organizations which are waging wars of terror against Israel), Israel has inflicted insufficient casualties on the Palestinian Arabs. For that matter, why should Israel be condemned just because they do everything they can to protect their civilians, while their opponents do everything they can to maximize casualties among their own civilians? Hamas, and other Arab groups fighting against Israel, intentionally take actions so as to maximize the deaths of civilians, and particularly children. They store the missiles they fire at Israeli civilians in schools and hospitals. They use civilians, including children, as human shields while firing on Israeli soldiers. It is Hamas that is responsible for the death toll of civilians in Palestine.

Since both the Arabs in Iraq and the Arabs in Palestine are seeking to establish the "Caliphate" I believe that the term "compatriot" is applicable.

Have you noticed what their neighbors are doing to their citizens? I would rather be a non-Jewish citizen of Israel than a citizen of the neighboring countries.

Well. except for the fact that nobody is paying much attention to Syria AND the Syrian government is slaughtering more Arabs than the Israeli government.

You ask a very good question, and it is a very good one. If the contractor screwed up, he should get fired. However, the failure to fire the private contractor is not a problem with privatization, but with government. As an example, the VA administrators who went beyond screwing up to active misconduct not only did not get fired, they received bonuses...and their bosses initially attempted to claim that those bonuses could not be withdrawn.

Well, the death toll for two days in Syria during those same two week was 700, would you care to guess how that will scale over the rest of the year? My guess is that it will be significantly higher than the death toll in Palestine over the same period.

Umm, have you paid attention to what the people in charge on the Palestinian side of this have done, and are doing? You know, things like killing people for being homosexual? Such that Arabs who have homosexual desires often seek, and receive, asylum in Israel. Or perhaps you have not noticed that their compatriots is Iraq have mandated female genital mutilation in at least one city which they control? Perhaps you have not noticed that the Syrian government has killed more Arabs this year than Israel has, by a wide margin?

No, the assumption is that when the private operator screws up he will get fired and replaced. This is unlike someone protected by the Civil Service Act, who is next to impossible to fire. The template of most in the privatization crowd (excepting those who are really just pushing to move that money to their cronies) is that the private operator will have greater incentive to avoid screwing up in order to avoid getting fired, while the "civil servant" has no such fear. Whether or not that template is accurate is another question entirely.
Apparently you are unaware of this basic economic principle which those who push privatization take as a basic assumption.

Well, actually, yes. Oh, they don't word it that way and they do not tell you to switch ISPs. They do however tell you to contact your ISP if you want to access the website. I forget the exact wording because a month after telling me that my complaint against ESPN's practice was completely unwarranted since they did not pay for ESPN360 access, my ISP proudly informed me that I could now access a website I had no interest in because they had agreed to pay ESPN's extortion.

You need to work on your reading comprehension. I said ESPN360, which is a website. If you can access this website, your ISP is paying ESPN a fee. If your ISP is not paying ESPN that fee (which is based upon their total number of Internet subscribers), you cannot access that webpage.

Umm, ESPN ALREADY charges the ISPs in order for any of their customers to access EXPN360. ESPN360 is "free" to the consumer, but you can only access it if your ISP pays ESPN a fee for each and every subscriber to your ISP's service.

What happens when BOTH people involved are visibly intoxicated to the point that they cannot make a reasonable decision? In that situation, who raped whom? That is the problem with counting it as rape when a woman went to a college party, had too much to drink and had sex with a guy she met at the party. Chances are good that the guy had too much to drink as well. So, when doing statistics on rape, if the woman feels that she was not raped in that situation one might want to accept her opinion unless you have more information than just that she was too drunk to legally consent. Perhaps, the woman was the sexual aggressor and convinced the (drunk) man to have sex? Perhaps the woman went to the party intending to have sex with the man she ended up having sex with? There are many reasons why a woman would not consider sex in that situation to be rape. Is it not sexist to assume that she does not know whether or not it was rape? Especially when we assume that the man, who was also drunk, was not raped because he wanted to have sex.
PLEASE NOTE: This is not a defense of any man who uses alcohol (or any other substance which reduces the ability to make rational decisions) to engage in sex with a woman who would otherwise turn him down.

Because it reflects a mindset where people call for the government to be granted more power to solve problems created by the government.

No, my theory is that raising the minimum wage is either bad for the economy, or has no impact because it is insufficient to actually make any difference whatsoever.

You apparently have a problem with reading comprehension because you QUOTED his answer to your questions "1) be irrelevant because the minimum wage is set below labor market rates"