Hilarious copypasta from comedy web site.

I also like their satire about chem trails.

Who said anything about defending their honor? We already defended them by delivering food, water, and medicine, and by running off and/or killing the ISIS guys on the ground that were preventing them (the Yazidis) from escaping the spot in which they were being starved to death. You know, bombing for peace. If a Yazidi family had a peaceful breakfast this morning, it was because of US air power.

Says the governor. Intelligence people on our side apparently think it's anywhere from at least "millions" to close to what the local Nineveh officials estimated. Regardless, whatever they've been extracting from the central banks they've taken apparently pales compared to the revenue they get from kidnapping, extortion, and good old fashioned robbery. And, again, millions a day in oil proceeds. I know, you're still hoping you can just have their checking account locked, right?

You're right. We'll use a time machine to undo the hundreds of millions in cash they stole when they knocked over a bank (you have been paying attention, right?), and then we'll take steps to make oil no longer a commodity that places like Russia and China buy, so that we can dry up the millions a week that they're earning on the black market. Then we'll force Europeans and others to stop sending them millions of dollars in ransom money for the hostages they keep taking.

Let me guess, you were thinking about calling their bank and putting a hold on their Visa card, right? Yeah.

Who said anything about non-violent? They're violent. Just like local street thugs are violent. It's a law enforcement, not a military issue. They're not on the move with tanks and missiles. They're not taking over dams, or now running oil fields. If they were, that would rise to the level of a military issue. Do you really think that if some neo-Nazi movement in the US rose to the level of them occupying large portions of US states in the north, bordering Canada, and started killing off people with French heritage by the thousands, and the US government couldn't or wouldn't do anything to stop them as they spilled across borders, that Canada wouldn't take steps to prevent that cancer from spreading? Your example of such a huge militarized operation involving tens of thousands of neo-Nazis filling mass graves in the while the US military runs away from them leaving them to expand their territory as they promise they're coming next for other countries and territories ... is a total fantasy. Because that's not happening and won't. They'd never make it past the skirmish-at-the-compound (a la Waco, TX) level, let alone occupy whole swaths of the upper midwest, slaughtering thousands of people.

On the other hand, that's exactly what IS happening with ISIS. One you can deal with as a law enforcement problem. The other is a military problem.

Which Saddam never did. You get that, right? He kept building/importing long range missiles. Kept shooting at the aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones that were set up to keep him from continuing his ethnic slaughter in the north and south, kept starving people as he skimmed aid money to rebuild his guard and more palaces, continued to play cat and mouse with UN inspectors, never disclosed what he did with all of the VX that the UN inspectors originally saw, and so on.

He never did any of what he agreed to do when he was pushed back out of Kuwait - that conflict in effect never ended, because Saddam chose not to actually live up to the agreement that kept him alive and in limited power. Intelligence agencies from multiple countries had strong reasons to think that he was still in possession of at least some of his huge pile of chemical weapons (he was), making missiles (he was), shooting at aircraft (he was), killing rivals (he was) ... and every attempt to find and catalog his chemical weapons was rebuffed by his people on the scene. It's quite possible that he himself was being lied to about how much he still had, by people who didn't want to lose their lives (and those of their families) by telling him the truth about how much had been trucked to Syria or otherwise abandoned. Doesn't matter: complete lack of his cooperation, ongoing targeting of allied aircraft, and the continuing deaths of Kurds and other minorities at his hands were line-by-line violations of the agreement that kept the Gulf 1 invasion from rolling the rest of the way into Baghdad. Eventually that operation did happen, because he (Saddam) effectively insisted on it by never changing his Kuwait invasion period posture.

What a stupid, empty, non-sequitor of a hippy aphorism. If someone has a camp full of heavy weapons, out of which they are launching daily slaughter and earnest attempts at genocide (a la the Yazidis, just as an example ISIS victim group), and you use an airstrike to stop that slaughter ... the resulting end of the campaign to kill that group of people isn't good, from where you sit? You'd rather, instead of "bombing" to stop them, that we line up a huge logistical support operation and send in ground troops to get in protracted firefights to the same? And take weeks or months to set it up, by which time of course all of the Yazidis would be very thoroughly dead at the hands of ISIS?

If you really think your quoted platitude makes sense, then you'd also be against anyone using force to stop a rape in progress, right? Because that would like "Violence For Safety," right? Right?

You're right! So when Syria launches missiles and artillery at our NATO ally, Turkey, and creates a huge and dangerous refugee problem that extends across multiple borders, it's something to worry about, isn't it? I doubt that Syria had "explicit permission" to strike Turkey. Worrying about the sovereignty of Syria (as it pours money and weapons into the hands of groups that call for the total destruction of another country, Israel, and has camped out in its territory a large and heavily armed and financed group - ISIS - that is attacking other countries and promises to do more) is hilarious.

Do find a lot of examples of neo-Nazi idiots with hundreds of millions of stolen dollars and heavy weapons rounding up thousands of people and promising to slaughter them because of their religion, or marching cops and soldiers into trenches and machine gunning them down? Are you finding lots of examples of Scandinavian socialists wagging their fingers at the camera and then lopping heads of of hundreds of people, including journalists? No? Do you see either group promising to tear down embassies and kill everyone in them, and then heading that general direction in stolen armored vehicles carrying RPGs and worse? No?

Neo-Nazis talk a lot. But they're just noisy idiots. ISIS actually do what they say, and now control large swaths of land in which they are actually in real life murdering thousands of people, and bragging about it.

If all ISIS did was post angry rants online, you'd be right. But they're an army of 30,000+ people who have completely taken over large territories, only recently held a dam that, if damaged, could seriously threaten US and European (among others) people in large numbers on the ground in key cities. Defanging these guys isn't merely an ideological exercise, it's necessary in very simple, practical terms. Something you're pretending you don't understand so you can make hollow points with people who also don't want to think it through. We have a fellow NATO member that is being swamped with refugees, and which has had air strikes and artillery lobbed at it from the the nice peaceful Syrian government that you think shouldn't have its feathers ruffled.

This doesn't mean I approve of Obama's specific strategy and tactics. This (a large air campaign involving lots of locals, too) didn't have to happen. But his utter bumbling in the wake of Syria's use of chemical

IS/ISIS/ISIL is the aggressor, slaughtering thousands of people for being insufficiently Islamic, etc.

Hitting their command/control and training operations, from which tens of thousands of them are directed and supplied, is DEFENSIVE, not aggressive. That they happen to be running their little shop of horrors out of towns they've captured in Syria simply means that that's where some of the defensive action has to take place.

Like this is any mystery to anybody, right? Right?

Exactly. If you don't qualify for subsidies, then there IS NO CHEAPER MAGIC SOLUTION than those that the regulated insurance companies in the state advertise. They don't have the option of having secret cheaper-than-the-exchange plans. So if you call a hotline and complain that your new insurance plan is too expensive, their ONLY OPTION is to try to find a way to qualify you for a plan that somebody else is forced to help you buy. Otherwise, the price is what the price is.

For which they had no choice. They are required by law to suddenly provide a range of coverage that was not previously built into their pricing. If you were suddenly told that you had to provide a bunch of new services or else, would you just eat the loss, or raise your prices in order to maintain your business? Insurance companies work on smaller margins than companies in many, many other industries. Remove that margin, and they are out of business. Now, that may be what the ACA backers secretly want, but in the meantime, you raise your prices to deal with the fact that your government has just substantially raised your costs.

They've always been government controlled. Every state in the union has an insurance regulating body to which those companies must turn for approval in order to change rates. And each of those scenarios plays out in something of a vacuum, because laws prevent insurance companies from providing services across state lines. The government has been entirely in control of this stuff for decades (as if you didn't know that!).

No, it's known as state regulation. The companies who have a very innovative way to deliver the same (government approved) class of services with less overhead MAY be able to offer a lower price if they can survive doing so. But there's generally very, very little latitude in the cost/price recipe before the insurer is on intolerably thin ice.

No, my state's governor is a major liberal Democrat, and was a serious cheerleader for ACA. He promised that our state would be a shining example of the law's implementation, and swore that he would use our local tax dollars to make a better web-facing exchange experience than the federal site could ever be. Then he made his deputy governor more or less a full-time ACA guy. He then spent over $200 million to completely botch the whole thing, and it had to be scrapped.

No, these issues were discussed loudly and often BEFORE the law was completed. The Republicans pointed out these and many more baked-in flaws, but were of course ignored. The president keeps saying this is now all a matter of "settled law," and has said he will not accept changes to it. Same thing that Pelosi and Reid say, obviously.

Right. Because their input was refused, they were not allowed in the writing of the law, and they DID NOT VOTE FOR IT. This resulting mess was created and rammed through entirely by the Democrats. It's theirs and their mess. They are why I'm out thousands of dollars more this year than last for inferior results.

A lot more people willing and often eager to die for the [insert crazy, often religion-based or partisan cause here] movement.

Regardless, you're making it sound like this is a recent development. This has been the case going back well over a hundred years.

And I pointed out that nobody on the hotline is going to be able to point out an insurance plan that doesn't exist. The state regulators don't allow for magic hidden policies that are cheaper than what's been priced for the exchanges. In other words, it was a BS, fantasy suggestion.

Who says I have meager skills or don't make a good living? I said that I make more than the amount under which the subsides kick in, and so I am in the group that has had their rates jacked up hugely in order to collect the money that is being given to the people who get the subsidies. Many many more millions of people would also be in that boat right now, but Obama unilaterally chose to break the law and push back the date at which the ACA's changes would also impact the rates paid by people who are on employer-provided insurance. He's waiting until after the upcoming election, to help struggling Democrats trying to retain legislative seats. As soon as that's past, and the illegally delayed employer program changes kick in, you'll find (at least) tens of millions more people describing exactly the scenario I have.

It's simple math: if they want to give billions of dollars of new federally mandated entitlements to one group, they have to take it from somebody else. It's the people like me who DO make a good living that are being handed that bill. Rather in contrast to Obama's promises that no such thing would happen, remember? Remember the assurance that rates would go down, and that having health insurance would be about like paying for a mobile phone account every month? Yeah. If your mobile phone costs you several hundred dollars a month, and never mind the huge new deductibles.