No, I never said I thought abortion should be illegal. I think it should be legal, because you have a right to choose what you do with your body. For instance, if the only way for you to live was for me to give you my blood for a transfusion, neither you nor the state has a right to force me to give you my blood if I don't want to. I can say "no," for any reason or no reason at all. However, that would make me a terrible person. I would give you my blood. Similarly, I believe terminating a pregnancy makes one little better than a murderer, but no woman should be forced to carry a baby she doesn't want to.

So I'm pro-life and pro-choice. I just want people to choose life.

Not true. Catholics do not legislate their morality (abortion is a special topic as that involved murder), and economically, we're redistributionists. There are a lot of liberal Catholics. Please do not get us confused with the fundies. We're nothing like them.

I think "pro-life" is the better term, as I'm not politically against abortion. I think abortion should be legal because yes, you have a right to your own body, even if that kills someone else. For instance, if you have a disease that can only be cured by a bone marrow transplant from me (the only one of 7 billion people you're a match for) neither you nor the state has the right to force me to give you my bone marrow. And let's say I choose not to. For any reason or no reason at all. But, my choice for what I choose to do with my meat kills you.

Now, I would absolutely give you my bone marrow, because I am not a dick. Similarly, if a woman chooses not to use her body to give life to a child/infant/fetus whatever word you want to use, she has that right. But I also have the right to think she's little better than a murderer for doing so.

The NSA spying scandals proved what blowhard, paper tiger pansies the 2nd amendment crowd are. "We need our guns to overthrow the gub'ment if they takes away our freedumbs!" They're opposed to national gun registries because "then they'll know who to come for first!" Meanwhile, the NSA builds a national spying aparatus that can tell who has guns better than any registry could ("SELECT * FROM RUBES WHERE DATE_LAST_BOUGHT_BULLETS > GETDATE() - 100 OR DATE_CELLPHONE_AT_FIRING_RANGE > GETDATE() -100") and do any of them grab their stupid rifles and march on Fort Meade? Or go stop the Utah data center from coming alone? Nope, not a one. Government spies on every single American, including them their wives their children their grandmas and there's not a peep from the 2nd amendment crowd. If anything, they support these atrocities against freedom.

The only reason they want their guns is to play make-believe and pretend like they're Paul Revere, when if anything they're Benedict Arnold.

I mostly agree, except this didn't start after World War I. The first things the founders did was restrict who could and couldn't vote. White male landowners. And in many places there was a wealth tax requirement to hold office. If you didn't have 1,000 pounds of wealth, you couldn't hold office in some states. Voting was effectively restricted to the top 10% of society, and holding office was for the 1%.

And there really was never a time when the working class wasn't being exploited. There were strikes and riots all through the 1800s, complete with harsh crackdowns by the national guard and private police forces. The robber barons of the gilded age were made fantastically wealthy on the backs of the poor. Things got briefly better thanks to the rise of unions in the first half of the 20th century, but we've been backsliding ever since Reagan.

Class warfare started the day one man said to another, "here's a boot, go stomp on that guy's face and I'll make things a little better for you," and it hasn't stopped yet. It will never stop until the last king and the last capitalist swing from a rope.

I'm a liberal (leftist, socialist, whatever. Farther left than the democrats for sure) and I'm pro-life. I have no interests in controlling women's reproductive lives, but as a Catholic I believe life begins at conception, and abortion is murder. Put any other false motives in my mouth, but the truth is, I'm pro-life because I'm anti-murder.

There are no reliable metrics that indicate FOSS is safer. None.

Can you propose a metric that would compare the "safety" of FOSS versus closed-source/proprietary software?

(I thought not.)

When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,

I'm curious about what "organized interest groups" were "controlled for". Did that include things like the AARP and the NRA, the two largest public pressure groups in the country? How about the various organizations called The Tea Party?

When a lot of people at the grass roots level want to redirect the government, they often join together and form orgizations to lobby for their interests. These groups are generally what gets things done. If the study counts such organizations as "organized interest groups" and subtracts their policy impact from the impact of the "Average American", it's no wonder the latter's impact is measured as " minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant".

Also: What counts as the policy desires of the "Average American"? Are they averaging out people with opposing oppinions on government policy?

You lift the limits on campaign spending, declare that corporations have the right of political speech and are now surprised that the rich people have all the say?

Actually, the campaign spending limits are aimed squarely at the grass roots.

The McCain-Feingold act of 2002, for example, was passed in reaction to the massive volunteer efforts that took down Mike Roos from the California legislature in 1991 (and caused trouble for David Roberti in 1994), and Tom Foley from the House in 1994. It makes the equivalent value of volunteer work and supplies (such as paper, envelopes, and stamps) subject to the spending limits and reporting requirements, as if they were contributions, but provides no caps for campaign spending for such people as labor unions, media conglomerates, and billionaires such as George Soros.

The other truth is... the American Revolution wasn't started by a bunch of serfs, it was started by rich land owners who didn't like their deal...

Like Cliven Bundy?

Never heard of an abacus?

Idiot, he was referring to the documentary about the asteroid that they blew up with the nuke. You know, when Daredevil makes out with Arwen.

I'm guessing the investors expect Amazon to become and stay the Walmart of the internet (or perhaps the Sears and Roebuck from catalog days) and be be able to either ramp up margins or pay them at that level for a LONG time.

IIRC, the standard deduction this year was $6900 for single payers. Pretty easy to top that via mortgage interest.