Yeah, it's called "checks and balances."

He's had the Senate all that time, until he lost it. And he used THAT friendly house of congress to make sure that anything he didn't like, but didn't want to be seen vetoing, died on Harry Reid's desk. It goes both ways. The GOP had one house of congress, and Obama had the other house of congress and his own veto power to kill anything he didn't like that came out of that lower house. We don't elect a president to make laws, we elect him to EXECUTE the laws after the legislature has created them. That's why we have a legislative branch, and an executive branch. And a good thing, too.

Your right to bring your concerns to your elected representatives and executives is preserved, very carefully and deliberately, in the constitution. Likewise is your right to assemble in a group to get things done.

So, you think that a visit to your congressional representative's office to explain your position on (pick a topic ... net neutrality? gun control? immigration? whatever) should be illegal? Why do you think that? "Lobbying" is the act (historically) of waiting in the lobby of a building to for a moment to bend the ear of a passing legislator on his or her way between other engagements. Hence the term. You're thinking that should be illegal?

Or are you just not happy when you and ten of your friends who share a common interest designate one of you to make the trip to that same office to speak on behalf of the other nine of you, as a group? Is that the part you think should be illegal? How about when you and your ten friends realize that there's actually a million of you that have a common interest, and you decide to pool some resources and hire someone who lives and works in the state or federal capital, and who knows who and where everything is and how it all works, to explain your collective position and priorities to that same congressman? Is that the part that should be illegal? Why? Which part is the illegal part - where a million of you act in concert, or where you finally realize that having a professional pull your agenda together into a coherent, easily conveyed whole means that you hire someone for that role? Please be specific about which thing you'd make illegal:

1) Gathering in groups?
2) Pooling resources?
3) Hiring someone?
4) Talking to congressional representatives or regulators?

At which point is someone bribing somebody else? Do you mean that the congress person is actually taking cash under the table? Do you have evidence of that happening, and it not resulting in prosecution? If you do, why are you keeping it from the FEC and the other agencies that investigate such crimes?

Or is it that you just don't like the fact that people who run businesses decide to take some of their money and hire professionals to reduce the overall noise level and represent their interests in a more focused way? Do you not like that because you can't be bothered to identify a suitably large group of people who share your own interests, and who do exactly the same thing? Millions of other people do - do you think that the NAACP, or the AARP, or the Sierra Club, or the NRA, or labor unions or other groups should be barred from taking their concerns to their elected representatives in a unified way, instead of expecting all of their thousands or millions of members to descend on the same congressional office individually, all day every day, to say the same things?

Most complaints about change in language aren't about the introduction of some new meme-ish neologism or term that's sprung into use. The real (and justified) complaints are about changes that reflect a reduction in clarity, or which make expression surrounding critical thinking or subtlety less fashionable or in real terms more difficult. Changes in language that dumb communication down should indeed be fought against, and loudly. Giving in to the habits of the incurious, the poor communicators, and the lazy is just a way to make more of them.

How have you been functioning in daily life without a form of ID? Do you never write a check, never receive any sort of government service, deposit no checks because you have no checking account, etc? Is getting a photo ID once really that much of a hardship? How much time are you REALLY wasting, every day, if you can't have been bothered anywhere along the line in your entire life to have arranged to get something like a debit card connected to the money you spend? Someone who doesn't participate in any way in the banking system is going to be going inefficiently through life at every turn, traveling everywhere to use cash and have cashier's checks made for every bill paid through the mail ... and you're considering it "voter suppression" for them to take the time involved once to get a photo ID?

And if your local municipality is such a hotbed of active voting but can't raise enough taxes to have more than one voting machine or more than a couple of poll workers on election day (to make the process more efficient), and all of those anxious, busy voters are much too busy for any of them to actually volunteer to help at the polling place, who exactly are you blaming? Is everything about every aspect of the costs and effort involved in running local election logistics always someone else's problem? People who bitch about that and yet do nothing to (with years of opportunity in advance) to actually make their local system work better are the ones making their own lives inconvenient - because they'd rather whine about it than step up, in the absence of paying more taxes (like everyone else) to fund more equipment and staff. You vote for a president once ever four years. A senator once every six. Is turnout for the generally sleepier local elections (school board, etc) really resulting in six hour waits, year in, year out, at your local library or school? I call BS. And if it happens once in several years, and that's just too much for you to stand, run for local office yourself, on the platform of spending more of your fellow local citizens' money on running more well-oiled local election machinery. Local election places are generally staffed by volunteers - and your complaint is there aren't enough people showing up to help. And you're calling that "voter suppression," presumably by some evil rich white guy somewhere else? What a joke.

Stop it. Not dragging someone to the pole isn't voter suppression. Voter suppression is when someone goes to the poll to vote, but their vote is nullified by someone else who also casts a vote, but isn't eligible to do so. Or when your vote for candidate X is suppressed by someone else's TWO votes for candidate Y. Or when you're overseas in the military, and the administration in charge of doing things like getting your tallied votes communicated/transported in time to count in the election drops the ball, thus suppressing your vote. Voter suppression is when an organization seeks out college students to make sure that they're voting in both their own home district, and by absentee ballot in another district, thus suppressing other people's votes.

You know what's NOT suppression? Asking you to prove who you are when, once every couple or four years, you walk up to play a part in influencing the legislature, the executive, various referenda, and maybe even local judges under which other people also have to live. A thousand more routine and mundane things are more demanding when it comes to simply showing some ID. The notion that it's "suppressing" the vote to do LESS when you act to empower your preferred government is completely disingenuous crap, and everyone involved knows it.

You're being obtuse, here. "Inciting" hatred is exactly something like "All Jews/Muslims/Christians/Musicians/Whatever ought to be killed." That's what's so awful about what they're doing, here. It's not about planning a killing. It's about, say, using your Mosque's web site to say that you think heretics should be done away with. That's inciting hatred among that web site's audience, right? It's not a plan, not a specific call to a specific action. And indeed it appears that in certain demographics, that sort of talk fits right in with a widely held urge to go out and kill people. But the problem is there are other demographics that don't seem to have that cultural problem, and won't react to an identically worded (other than swapping out "Jew" for, say, "Atheist" or "Catholic" or "Cartoonist") phrase the same way. And these governments are looking to set up a structure in which such speech is illegal.

Just because way too many Muslims can't restrain themselves from being violent doesn't mean that we need to make it illegal for another group to express their opinions. So we should err on the side of allowing even dimwitted, medieval-minded backwards Imams to say what they will (unless they are calling for a specific violent act), and just shout them down. Right now, they're being coddled in their police-are-afraid-to-go-there enclaves in places like France, and THAT is the problem. Not freedom of speech.

Fank you for having more of a clue than a few other folks, apparently!

Some people seek office in order to reign in those who've been doing the over-reaching. Not everybody wants to be the Nanny in the Nanny State, but some people sure do. That wouldn't matter, of course, if so many people didn't want a Nanny in the first place.

In practical terms, kids who are marinated in hate while being kept deliberately free of useful information and critical thinking skills turn out to be adults who are permanently different - in the way they process new information, in the way they react, in their motivations, and in how they perpetuate that culture - from others. And the difference manifests itself in the sorts of real-life behavior that we're watching play out, right now. Yes, it's a cultural problem. But it might as well be genetic for as entrenched as it is, and the impact is has on the behavior of millions of people.

You're still trying too hard. The root cause of this problem is a desire on the part of millions of people to see the world run according to their oppressively misogynistic, apocolyptically theocratic, thug-centric vision. You don't need to be a thorough student of history to know that people like that, who are willing to machine gun rooms full of students to make their point, aren't ever talked out of their world view. It's too late for that. They have to be shut down.

Except that's pronounced "Nawftees." Just doesn't work.

It doesn't matter what they're a product of. What matters is their vision for the future and the actual actions they take. THEY are the ones talking about Caliphates and Sharia, and they're the ones happy to slaughter innocents in order to establish what they want. It isn't, and doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

It doesn't matter if a culture that considers it better to burn a teacher alive than to let her instruct girls in reading and writing is wanting things to be like they were centuries ago, or if they simply want illiterate girls for the sake of keeping them illiterate. It doesn't matter. What matters is that they're acting to make it so.

Not during the raid to free the rest. That's the whole point.

No, it's not.

Government funding that's in keeping with the constitutionally defined role of the government is appropriate. Taking tax money and spending it on one artist's political statements so that the administration choosing to spend that money can use your money (if you actually pay taxes) and the power of government to amplify that artist's politics is not appropriate, and certainly not "the same."