There is a "liberal/Rockefeller Republican" vs. "conservative/Tea Party Republican split," but you're putting Ronald Reagan on the wrong side of it. Reagan was against the EPA (by the way, founded under a liberal Republican) and the Department of Education, and Tea Party types are not as pro-military spending cuts as you seem to think.

The Bushes are among those in the more liberal wing of the party; George H.W. Bush opposed Reagan all three times he ran for the nomination. The Tea Party was formed in part from conservatives who were frustrated by the bailouts at the tail end of George W. Bush's administration; and the Bushes and their allies oppose Tea Party candidates today.

You have a $150k/yr job in NJ with no college education? What are you, a state legislator?

Seriously, though, I graduated from a public high school in Morris County. (This is Slashdot, so I'm guessing at what TFA says rather than reading it, but I bet Morris County, NJ is on this list.) The public schools were set up to defend the New Jersey Education Association. You give 90% of the teachers I had in high school half a chance, and they'd shoehorn pro-teachers' union propaganda into whatever they were supposed to be teaching us.

On issues of politics (civics and history classes, but also tangentially related classes like English, which was taught by the head of the union), expressing any opinion other than the approved doctrinal opinion of the teacher would get you shouted down.

A few years ago, I was going to donate money to a candidate who wanted to take a harder line in the upcoming negotiations with the NJEA

I live and work in Morris County today, but my wife and I are going to move before we have kids, because there's no way I would send my kids through that.

I've never heard this critique before. Conservatives believe that the owners of a company (the shareholders or the sole proprietor) should be the ones to decide on the amount of a product to produce. (Obviously, opportunity cost, cost of labor and materials, and demand for the product weigh on this decision.) The government doesn't have anything to do with it.

Your critique can't be that simple though. I guess I don't understand what you're saying. Can you give an example of when you think Conservatives would be demanding, via the government, for more or less of a product?

I have no idea what the American Nazi Party believes today. However, among the beliefs of the original National Socialist Party were that the government should own the means of production through a command economy. That view is to the left of the base of modern American liberals, who are, of course, the left wing of American politics. Their eugenics policies towards the physically and mentally handicapped (note: in the 1930s, this included gays) were mirrored by the leftists of their day. (Stalin killed the "unfit" in death camps too, after all.)

Democrat or Republican, the base of American politics is WELL to the right of where the Nazis were. Which is good, because the Nazis were evil and neither of the American political parties were complicit in anything even 1/10th as bad as the Nazis. 11 million people didn't die so you could make retarded comparisons to politicians you dislike, asshole.

Fun fact: 12 of the 120 members of the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) are Arabs. One of them is a former Deputy Speaker of the body. (I'm pretty sure in the US House of Representatives, there's 1 Muslim among the 435 members, although a smaller percentage of our population is Muslim.)

If your ethnic group can make up 10% of the legislature and hold leadership positions in it, your ethnic group is probably on fair footing with the others in the country.

If you look at the demographics of post-Civil Rights Act elections, you'll see you are wrong about this. Southerners who were voting for Democrats in 1963 (when they were still supporting Jim Crow laws, racism, etc.) largely continued voting for Democrats for the rest of their lives. Younger Southerners (who, even if they were racist, didn't have a Jim Crow supporting party to vote for) began breaking for Republicans in the 70s once they came of age and once it became clear that Johnson's Great Society programs were moving the Democrats towards supporting the concerns of the extremely rich and extremely poor (but not the middle class) of the big cities, which, of course, were predominantly in the North.

It's no coincidence that every Democrat President since Johnson* has been from south of the Mason Dixon line.

Nixon's Southern Strategy, then, was just an appeal to the middle class, and it didn't really pan out outside the top of the ticket until Reagan's wave elections, where you had a strong influence from culture war politics. (Culture war politics is another example of Democrats picking policies that are more popular in the urban North than the rural South.) Johnson may have SAID that the Civil Rights Act lost him the South, and Democrats peddle that line because it helps them cast aspersions on the Republicans today, but history shows that it isn't true. Johnson probably knew it was false when he said it.

*Hawaii, birthplace of Barack Obama, is in fact south of the Mason Dixon line. Obviously it wasn't actually part of the Confederacy.

Done and done. Check out Emily Gets Her Gun, which is a book about the topic. Asshole.

Emily Gets Her Gun is a book on the topic. The author tried to get a handgun permit in DC and detailed the obstruction she was given by the city government, who is acting as though the handgun ban was never overturned.

Wait, how is that not relevant? The Founders intended for the United States to be a nation of free people, so they listed some of the rights people had under natural law, along with instructions that the government must respect (or, in your parlance, "is restrained from using its power to infringe upon") those rights.

Also, you took take half of the quote to pick an argument, while leaving the out the relevant context. (I italicized the part I added back in.) Next time, rather than doing so, exercise your fifth amendment right and shut the hell up.

Good thing that's not the assertion then. Instead, the Founders asserted that "Free people have a bunch of rights, and a government that tries to deny the people these rights does not govern over a free people. Since the American people are to be free, Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech. And the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. And so on."

The Bill of Rights is a definition, intended to define governments into two categories based on how free their people are. The category that the Founders intended the US to fall into was "A government that governs free people." Other governments, ones that don't recognize the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are "Tyrannical governments that lord over their citizens." Because the Founders gave us a definition, the statement "The US is a Free country" is falsifiable.

The Catholic Church's stated explanation is evolution. Scientists employed by Catholic universities all over the world are doing the same kind of biology research into the specifics of how evolution works that the rest of the scientific community is.

Criminal defendants in the US aren't just guaranteed the right to an attorney. They are guaranteed the services of an attorney, at government expense if necessary. Two of the Miranda rights are "You have the right to an attorney" and "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."

As a sex offender, this guy has an attorney, which means if the guy wrote it himself, it wasn't a legal pleading or anything like that. If it's not a legal pleading with a defined format, there's no reason for whoever reading it to get upset because he used a sans serif font.

The positive assertion you are making is "Republicans support Voter ID laws because they unfairly disenfranchise people who would be voting for Democrats." You still haven't provided any evidence.
I asserted a bunch of things, most prominently "There is a problem where dead people are being allowed to cast votes for Democrats," for which I posted evidence that you still haven't apparently read.
The original post was, though, was my assertion that "People of Hispanic descent are not as incapable of gaining the proper credentials to vote as the Democrats claim, and thus it is wrong for Democrats to claim that." My evidence was that Mexico, which according to Wikipedia is 80% Hispanic, requires Voter ID to vote.
As evidence to refute this, you claimed that America has a checkered history when it comes to voting, and have posted a list of unethical things that Democrats have done to ensure their candidates win. Politicians claiming something that isn't true is unethical (as big a problem on your side of the isle as mine). Responding with a list of unethical things done by Democrats in the past doesn't counter the assertion that "The Democrats are doing something unethical now," no matter how much you wish it to be true.
Listen, you're very clearly just trying to string me along here. Remember how you claimed not to be trolling before? You can drop that facade now. If you want to provide any evidence as to what you've been saying (which I've been asking for since your first post here), I'd love to see it. The only thing I will respond to at this point is evidence that a specific voter ID law is disenfranchising people. Otherwise, I'm done with your damn games.

OK, you're right here. Technically, they are violating federal regulations, not necessarily the law. I conflated the two concepts by using the label "illegal" to describe "violating federal regulations." I assure you, however, that the IRS punishes taxpayers for violating regulations passed by the executive branch in addition to laws passed by the judicial branch.

I'm genuinely curious. If you're against giving people incentives to do the things you want, and against punishing people for doing the things you don't want, how do you propose getting people to follow rules?

It's real simple. I need to give the IRS documentation that they can use to find out how much tax I owe under the law. Since unscrupulous types can use some of that information to hurt me, the IRS has to make sure that nobody else gets access to that documentation. How do I know I can trust the IRS safeguard the information?
Right now the official answer is, "Well, depending on how they do it, revealing that information is a violation of federal laws and regulations. An IRS employee who is careless or malicious with the data is subject to termination, fines, and possibly imprisonment." (It's not true, but that's the official answer.)