The argument is somewhat circular, because death-penalty opponents have made it so expensive. I'm not against all of the additional costs, mind you, in this day and age we ought to be damn sure we're executing the right person.

I don't understand how one can have any knowledge of the history of science, and think that Genesis would be a literal record. Accepting divine relevation of the Pentateuch, the record spans 4,000 to 1600 BC. Our understanding of Natural Law (Newton, Galileo, etc) has only really started to explode in the last 600 years or so- meaning that Moses-Era people lacked the knowledge necessary to understand the specific mechanisms of pretty much any aspect of how the current conditions came to be.

A lecture on natural law would have been out of place and unhelpful to the faithful for the following 5,000 years; the message was simply "I, God, made you and this world."

The fact that this short message was stretched out to a seven-day process in no way makes it literal. The specifics of creation were not the point, and would have been lost on those folks; so it was omitted. Those same young earth creationists must believe that the God of Abraham has a bit of Loki the Norse Trickster god in him, given that there is so much physical evidence contradicting a 6,000 year old earth. Either that, or they must believe that there's a massive satanic conspiracy to invent evidence for an earth billions of years old, an equally preposterous claim.

Religion gives us the 'Why' of life; science is the 'How.' They cannot serve each other's purposes.

3. The stone (abbreviation st) is a unit of measure equal to 14 pounds avoirdupois (about 6.35 kg [nb 1]) used in Great Britain and Ireland for measuring human body weight.

Explain 'Stones"

Now rank them by body count.

I'm not.

The projected capacity is 830,000 barrels per day. This is equivalant to a continous chain of 30,000 gallon rail cars, with one completing an offload every 1 minute 14 seconds. Even if they run it initially at a quarter capacity, that's still a railcar every five minutes, or 288 rail cars kept off the tracks each day.That's a three mile long train.

Given the massive capital cost of this project, I'm imagine TransCanada will make good use of the line.

I am curious why you have a problem taking a 3-12 mile long train of crude oil off the tracks each day.

The only explanation I can come up with is that you believe:

1) that the relevant oil production is limited by rail transportation constraints, and

2) that the creation of a pipeline would allow a large increase of oil production, and

3) the same amount of oil would travel by rail, with an additional amount traveling via pipeline.

That explanation alone is also insufficient to explain opposition to the project.

Oh, one more thing:

Given that we can use infrastructure like this for a good 100 years if not longer, this no reason to stop the project either. A 'reasonable timeframe' isn't limited to our vanishingly brief lives.

Are you saying we shouldn't build any pipelines, because we can't completely eliminate rail shipment of crude oil? It would seem to me that if you build just a few pipelines from the sources of crude oil to the refineries, you would greatly reduce the crude oil being shipped on rails.

That's the idea behind the Keystone XL pipeline.

Warren Buffet, Obama's buddy, owns BNSF railway, incidentally. Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline from being built directly enriches a major Obama campaign donor.

During the Eisenhower administration the tax rate on the uppermost bracket of incomes was 91%. Ninety one friggin' precent. Yet, there were still obscenely wealthy people. It's time to define new upper income brackets. I don't have a problem with someone's five-million-and-oneth dollar being taxed at 90%.

While there technically was a 91% Tax bracket, that single fact in no way communicates the reality of the situation. There were loopholes big enough to drive a Maybach through, and everyone did so. The fact is that wealthier Americans pay a higher share of the tax burden today than in 1958, and lower income Americans pay much less in taxes. More here

At some point slamming the Koch brothers will become passé for even the most loyal Lefties. Tell me, do you have another boogeyman lined up already? And do you think this next boogeyman will be a better distraction from Reid and Obama's continued incompetence?

Three resignations so far aren't enough for you to suspect something is up?

Er, I thought everyone knew by now that story was a bs fabrication of the right-wing media?

No, but I can understand why folks would want to spread that line. Here's an excerpt of the latest news on the subject:

The Oversight Committee .... is expressing gross dissatisfaction with Wilkins’s testimony and, in a letter sent to him on Wednesday, offering him the opportunity to amend it. “In your testimony, you stated ‘I don’t recall’ a staggering 80 times in full or partial response to the Committee’s questions,” committee chairman Darrell Issa and Ohio representative Jim Jordan wrote. “Your failure to recollect important aspects of the Committee’s investigation suggests either a deliberate attempt to obfuscate your involvement in this matter or gross incompetence on your part.” The most pertinent subject on which Wilkins’s memory failed him was the nature of his communications with Treasury Department officials: in particular, whether he discussed the applications of tea-party groups with anybody at the Treasury Department, whether he discussed with Treasury Department officials regulatory guidance for 501(c)(4) entities engaged in political activities, and whether he discussed with them the inspector general’s report that blew the lid off of the targeting scandal in mid May.

"I don't recall" is how you prevent later perjury charges when you're on the wrong side of an investigation and you're doing your best to cover your ass while not advancing the investigation. But you probably knew that.

When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted. Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it. Morale is a thing of the past.

It'll get worse for the IRS, now that it is enmeshed in partisan politics. President* Obama should be noted with an asterisk from here on out.

*Obama was re-elected in 2012 while the IRS was actively suppressing opposing groups, while rubber stamping liberal political action committees.

Most alternative reactor designs have some major flaw. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Pebble-bed reactors have pebble jams. (An experimental one in Germany is such a mess there's no way to fully decommission it.) Helium gas-cooled reactors leak helium. (Fort St. Vrain was converted from nuclear to natural gas because of that.) One of the painful lessons of long-life nuclear power plants is that what goes on inside the reactor vessel has to be really, really simple. Anything complex in there will break. It's being shot full of holes at the atomic level, after all. (See "hydrogen embrittlement"). Pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors at least have only water to deal with. The fuel rods are solid rods. The thing is basically simple,

Came here to say this. Everything at a nuclear power plant is periodically taken apart to fix and clean on routine basis. Maintaining any of these exotic reactors always sounds like a nightmare.

I don't have to 'know the true dogma' to call out a probable liar. If you're not a liar, the line you used has been widely employed by liars, making it a self-defeating thing to say. See Seminar Caller.

I'm a lifelong democrat, but then i realized the more democrats win elections, the more they ruin the country.