What can I say, I'm a product of my time and upbringing.

Hey, we're all right with making a distinct discrimination between two near identical problems, demonizing one while accepting the other. From various diseases (just think about the insane difference made between swine flu and common flu, despite not really being THAT different in impact... ok, actually your chance to die of the former was by some margin lower than the latter despite the general panic).

We're great at making mountains out of molehills that we don't really know that well while we're quite ok with volcanos in our garden as long as they grew slowly enough that we could watch them get large.

What is happening here is that a bunch of politicians are interfering in the legitimate business of a private enterprise.

Yes. And it's nice to know they have the balls to. This motion may or may not be a good idea, but simply bringing it up serves to remind everyone who is in charge here: voters rather than shareholders.

No, the problem is that the congress has passed clear laws on the issue of immigration, but Obama doesn't like them. So he makes his own law through creative (lack of) enforcement.

âoeThere are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply, through executive order, to ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.â - Candidate Obama

""the biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. That is what I intend to reverse when I'm president of the United States of America." - Candidate Obama

"Sanborn also confirmed that should he die before the entire sculpture becomes deciphered, there will be someone able to confirm the solution."

Actually, 33%. They're by far the biggest single player, but aren't anywhere close to 98%. Google's share of mobile ads is larger, at 56%.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/06/13/in-online-ads-theres-google-and-then-everybody-else/ (that's 2013, but things haven't changed much in 2014, and I couldn't find a 2014 link that included both all digital and mobile ads).

How much of that is your Gmail?

Why are you hitting yourself France? Why do you keep hitting yourself?

It's a widely accepted corollary to Godwin's law that the person who compares his opponent to Hitler or the Nazis has thereby lost the argument, as he clearly has run out of rational objections and moved on to argumentum ad Nazium.

Nah, Tom's been this way from the beginning.

Nah; it was Venus.

Probably not. Consider the thoroughly-documented example of the evolutionary process at work in the modern world. This doesn't affect the belief systems of the religious folks, who still insist that evolution is bogus, and has nothing to do with our modern world. One of the major cases is with the over-use of antibiotics, especially in agriculture. This is forcing the evolution of resistance in most of our disease organisms, destroying the value of many of our medicines. The evidence of all this has no effect at all on the religious believers. They also put pressure on the school systems (especially here in the US) to eliminate evolution from the textbooks, so the people responsible for this evolutionary pressure (mostly in agriculture, but also in medicine) don't understand the issues, and continue to make frivolous or incorrect use of the antibiotics.

Historians have documented many such cases in which our ancestors had knowledge that their actions were leading to disasters, but they continued anyway. These are typically cases where short-term actions were profitable to the people doing them, but bad for society in the long run. History says that we humans don't respond logically to such situations. We continue to act for short-term profit, and ignore the long-term results. Our "leaders" also tend to take actions that encourage this, by hiding the information or denying the validity of knowledge that can't be hidden.

There's no reason to expect that we can organize on a global scale to fix such problems. Our political systems tend to be controlled by the wealthier people, who are the ones ultimately profiting from the short-term results of the problems. About all we can do is prepare for the predictable long-term results, when possible.

Open declaration? Surely you have a link to the speech about "just for spite"? You're not just making that up, right?

Even so, the congress has that power under the Constitution. The Congress is in charge of America, per the Constitution. The President, as leader of the executive has the job of executing the laws created by Congress, you know, the legislative branch, the lawmakers.

It's his job to "get done" those laws that the Congress passes. Simply choosing not to enforce those laws because he doesn't like them is rather the opposite of his job. As the leader of the Democratic party, OTOH, he had a different path for many years to "get stuff done", a constitutional one! The American voters deliberately took that power away in the recent election, if you believe that democracy is important.

If there's no strong consensus as to the best way to improve the country, better to do nothing that try something that "seemed good at the time". But in any case inaction is better than ignoring the Constitution.

Has there ever, ever been an unconstitutional tyrant who seized control for the betterment of the governed? I can think of a couple of cases where someone seized power militarily, then went on to create a constitution and parliament, rare as that is, but "El Presidente for Life"? Not so much.

I'm sure you'll have no regrets if a hyper-religious-conservative ends up with tyrannical control? Because you really think the problem is democracy, rather than getting your way, right?

Method matters. Obama's actions are appaling and well on the way to destroying the country for reason that have nothing to do with immigration. Immigration is a distraction at this point.

It's the constitutional issues that matter - it's been 800 years of wars to establish in Western culture that parliaments, not kings, are ultimately in charge. Ignoring the will of Congress and just making proclamations is a serious structural problem. Now we'll see if congress will do anything about this, or simply give up their position as a co-equal branch of government.

The House has the power to stop anything the government does, but they would have to actually take a stand for once. I'm not holding my breath for that: the idea that a majority of congresscritters would actually care more about governing than fundraising --- well, it's hard to take seriously.