>But I also value to the right of people to do as they please, and not be forced to serve anyone they disagree with.

Do you also think they have a right to refuse to serve you if you are black ? How about if you're Native American ? Maybe if you're Irish ?
No, your freedom ends where other's freedom begins - and your right to hate gays ENDS where their right to shop at any business they choose to begins.

Wait, who were you responding to ?
I'm not sure if you were agreeing with me or being a butthurt libertarian ?

Sorry, maybe it's the lack of tone in text but I honestly can't tell which side of this you are on...

Possibly because Roddenberry was dead ?

> I was a Republican until the core Republican party went batsh*t crazy.

One down... only all the rest to go...

Which is about as logical as saying "fire can burn firemen too so we better ban firefighting".

You're right of course, but the jury is still out on warp drives. NASA has an entire team researching them now. Ever since Alcubierre showed it was theoretically possible (and later physicists significantly refined the theory) it moved from pure science fiction into bona-fide science. Whether or when it can move to ENGINEERING is uncertain -but clearly at least some good scientists and engineers are willing to bet quite a significant budget on sooner over later.

And there is no doubt it was Star Trek that inspired the actual science here. Alcubierre wrote William Shatner an e-mail to thank him for Star Trek and openly stated that he it was seeing the idea in Star Trek that inspired him to do the research and work out if it could be done for real.

And for the record - I never even claimed Obama WAS somebody who wished to build a brand rather than appease a donor - the GP claimed that, I never did.

>You've stated opinion as fact
I did absolutely nothing of the kind. I stated only a generic probability. That somebody who wishes to build a brand will likely not fuck you over as badly as somebody who wishes to appease a donor.
I stated no facts nor even an opinion - I merely told you which outcome is more likely. Even if you DO prove that Obama didn't follow that pattern it wouldn't prove me wrong even a little because I never said "that is what happens" - I said "that is what is more likely to happen".
On holed dice it is more likely to roll a 6 than any other number because the 6-side has the most holes and is thus slightly lighter than the other sides, but people throw other sides all the time - even on dice with holes.
An increased probability is not a guarantee, showing an instance where it didn't happen doesn't disprove the probability.

I'm not the one who claimed Obama was only interested in Hollywood branding, I merely responded generically to the guy who did.
Now as for what you're saying - I don't actually think you're right. Personally I'm not a huge fan of the ACA - single-payer universal healthcare is the one I would have wanted but you have to be a completely ignorant head-in-a-bucket fox-news-only viewer to not realize it's still orders of magnitude better than the craphole the US healthcare system was before this.

That however is not the really interesting part of your post. You're suggesting that Obama went with that plan to appease insurance companies and expects payback. You may be right, time will tell - but I strongly suspect you're very wrong. We know Obama also favoured single-payer, it was during the healthcare reform negotiation period that the plan changed to Romneycare... why ? Well the official story is that it was an attempt be non-partisan, to push healthcare reform in a way the republicans would actually go for, a solid compromise between hell and single-payer, which was actually conceived BY a republican (and the very same republican who ran against him in the next election).

Now it's perfectly possible that you're right and the official account is wrong - that even the very minutes of sessions in congress are nothing but elaborate fakery designed to maintain the ruse (though it seems odd if that was the case that teh republicans were so extremely partisan to this day about something THEY invented !) but I wouldn't hold my breath about it.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's likely.

It's worth noting, for how it may impact those hypothetical historians that Obama even now in the position of lame-duck president has the highest approval rating of any president in the second half of his second term for a hundred years - more than twice what Bush 2 had at the same time.

Yes, anything the USSR did is evil by default no matter who else does it, or how else it is done.
Typical American rightwing stupid.

A mandatory voting system with only one party you can vote for is not exactly the same as how it is done in all the free world countries that have it. It's not, in fact, even similar, as the election is entirely pre-determined and purely for show.

That had nothing to do with it being mandatory, only with it being one-party.

The USSR also had a space program before you - clearly Kennedy was a communist for starting the moon-landing plan !

That isn't the biggest problem with money, not by a long shot.

Bernie Sanders sums it up very nicely what the real problem is.
The problem is that to get noticed at all you need a massive budget. To get that budget you have to pander to wealthy donors, big corporations, superpacs, special interests and lobby groups.
To get them to pay you, you have to make promises - most notably about the things you will NOT talk about and NOT address.

Yes sometimes the best funded candidates still lose, but in most cases the lobbyists paid BOTH the major candidates a fortune. They don't care who WINS - they bought the results they wanted. They bet on BOTH outcomes and they win no matter what and the population at large loses.

This is why normal welfare gets cut but corporate welfare never does - even when it is ten times the normal welfare. This is why Detroit is basically stealing the pension plans government workers paid into all those years even though their corporate welfare expenses in just ONE MONTH could eradicate their debts and that same welfare over a year could pay those expenses a hundred times over ! It's not like they can say "we need incentives to keep businesses in our state" - clearly those incentives are not working, the businesses are just using detroit as a money-making machine and still employing from elsewhere.
The same pattern happens all over.

Climate change is an interesting case as it appears that the two parties genuinely diverge there - but clearly not enough for anything meaningful to happen, in fact just enough to make me think that the only reason democrats speak in support of, you know, evidence-based science is because that way they can get lobby money from the greens, environmentalists and renewable energy companies while STILL taking lobby money from the oil companies to never actually DO anything about it and blame the republicans for it.

So in the end US elections end up being decided by things like "pro-life or pro-choice" even though there is no way the pro-life people can actually get a pro-life law passed as it's been ruled unconstitutional. So it's an utterly meaningless debate and the only nasty side effect is a crapload of laws at the state level to make abortions harder to get (which just annoys women and goes flat out against the supposed republican credo of staying out of your personal life). They get decided on things like "do you support gay marriage" - which should be a non-discussion point of "duh it's the 21st century, who you marry is none of our business - marry the same sex, marry 5 different people - as long as it's all done with proper consenting adults we don't care".
While real issues like the NSA spying barely get mentioned in the debates and the biggest issues of all never get mentioned at all. Nobody debates cuts to corporate welfare (Which even libertarians claim to oppose - although all the wealthy lobbyists who claim to be libertarians are massive recipients of this thing they claim to oppose).

A million tiny things determine the elections - things that are truly and utterly unimportant while things that actually matter never get discussed.

In my country voting isn't mandatory. I don't vote however but not because of apathy - I am extremely politically active in many other ways, I don't vote because I have a genuine "none of the above" believe about all the current parties (we don't vote for individuals - we vote for parties who then appoint candidates based on their number of votes - one of the things I don't approve off).
Along with a few other things like floor-crossing I have serious problems with the voting system, so I don't vote.

Now I would PREFER to do spoilt ballots and thus voice my displeasure clearly but we don't COUNT spoilt ballots. If they were counted and the number publicised I would do that, but since they aren't, it would be a meaningless waste of my time.

Only if the fraudster shows up before the legitimate person - and since he knows upfront what would happen if he tried, the odds are the fraudster wouldn't show up at all.

>It just so happens that that party is the one with the most to gain from voter fraud, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Just like it's mere coincidence that the party with the most to gain from making voting harder is the party that keeps saying there *is* widespread voter fraud of course.
Then again, only one of these parties have a long and proud history of ridiculous degrees of gerrymandering to ensure they keep their seats no matter what by making sure everybody who is likely to vote for the other party's candidates are somehow magically not in their districts.