Don't worry, people get to keep their SS uniforms, they can display them on the nice straw man you built.

Nobody is saying that museums wouldn't be able to display Confederate items, or that private collectors wouldn't be able to keep, own, display, wear, etc. them. Nobody's saying that bigots won't be able to wrap themselves in the "glory" of the Confederate Battle Flag. It's just private companies deciding they don't want to sell those flags to them.

All Apple, eBay, Amazon, etc. are saying is that, as private businesses, they don't want to be selling products that are considered to glorify the viciousness of the Confederacy, and that have been used historically as symbols by violent bigots.

FTFY.

1. "If the original purchaser sold the gun but didn't keep a record of who they sold it to their in hot water too." No, they're not, since they're not required (in most states) to do a background check or keep any records of a private party sale.

2. While the 4473 records in theory allow for tracing, the way the system is set up makes it both incredibly manual (looking at scanned paper records, in many cases), and is explicitly prohibited from being used to actually track the sources of more than one gun at a time. So, while there's no technical barrier to doing this, ATF is prohibited by law from being able to say "1% of guns sold last year were recovered at crime scenes, but 38% of the guns sold by Joe's Guns were recovered at crime scenes, we need to take a close look at Joe's Guns, since there's something going on there."

The first problem could be easily solved by removing the private sale loophole for background checks, or at least require submission of a scan of the buyer's ID, along with a photo of the buyer. Could be done in an app, would take all of two minutes to do. Zero inconvenience for legit gun owners.

The second problem could also be easily solved, by ending the practice of forcing the ATF to delete the 4473 data, allowing for it to be obtained instantly, and allowing law enforcement to use the data to determine patterns that will allow law enforcement to target the small percentage of dealers who present the biggest problem.

Agreed. So how about we crack down on NON-law abiding gun owners, i.e. those owners and dealers who funnel guns to criminals? Require firearm registration, and we could easily trace back weapons used in crimes to the people who supplied them. I understand why the gun industry (and their mouthpiece, the NRA) objects to this, since from their perspective a sale is a sale, and guns that are funneled to criminals increase sales both directly and indirectly (by creating concerns about violence and driving law-abiding people to purchase guns). It makes no sense that the rest of us have to accept it, though.

He went on to say "I'm very skeptical, since the background in a lot of those moon photos looks just like the set we used to film those attacks on defenseless Russians by Ukrainian thugs...uh...um...I mean...nevermind."

The gov't guarantees the loan? You mean the loan the gov't issues? Kind of hard to guarantee a loan that you yourself issue.

As to the "going after the person," you can't get blood from a stone. Default rates for federal student loans are high, and a lot of those $ never get paid back. Further, "going after" someone costs money, plus you've got the time value of money factor.

Except that:
(a) the Federal Gov't is the one issuing the loans in the vast majority of the cases
(b) the default rates are 10-15% (compares to 3-4% rate for auto loans, where, again, you can repo the car)

"That's the problem. Interest rates on student loans are usury. Higher than most mortgages and auto loans"

Of course they're higher! Student loans are:

(a) unsecured (you can foreclose on a house or repossess a car, you can't take back a diploma and resell it)
(b) not based on creditworthiness/ability to pay (it's not like the Feds say "we'll lend to people getting CompSci degrees at Stanford, but not to people getting French literature degrees at second-tier state schools")

For another example, open a lunch counter and try to refuse to provide food to African-Americans. See how the courts view that.

It does happen, but it's not common. They end up on opposite sides of the judgment about 5% of the time. If you exclude unanimous cases, it's about 16% of the time.

http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/...

The quick data I could find on this is a couple of years old, but as of 2011, 93% of people who made less than $16k/year paid zero federal income tax. Heck, 60% of people making $17-33k pay zero income tax. So it's definitely not true that "everyone" making over $14k pays federal income tax.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes....

Advertising isn't big $ for cable companies. For every $10 in video subscription revenue they generate, they get about another $1 in advertising revenue, of which they keep around 75 cents.

On their conference call, they said that, since they were essentially tied at the end of 1Q, it's reasonable to assume that, by now, they have more Internet than TV customers.

2-10Mb/s download? You're kidding, right? Average Comcast customer is getting 44Mbps down (actual output). http://www.speedtest.net/isp/c...