You're not a "Christian conservative" if you're Catholic. Catholics aren't even Christians. (Don't believe me? Go find some Southern Baptists or some fundamentalists and ask them if you're a Christian; they'll say no.)

Here's some litmus tests for you:
1) Do you believe the Rapture is going to happen soon?
2) Do you watch Christian movies starring Kirk Cameron?
3) Are you a fan of the "Left Behind" books?
4) Do you believe there's a "gay agenda"?
5) Do you believe President Obama is literally the anti-Christ?

If your answer to these is "no", then you are not a "Christian conservative".

so the rich and corporations do not use their money to change the laws to get even more money, for no extra effort?

you're ignorant and delusional

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

If you don't understand the concept of software monoculture, then you're an idiot.

Here's a clue, moron: Adobe Reader isn't the only way to view PDFs.

I was eight years old when Neil Armstrong stepped off the LEM onto the Moon. It was an overcast day but the thing I remember vividly was how quiet the city was; aside from a few trucks in the distance and the wind blowing between the buildings there was simply nothing to be heard. The street was utterly deserted, more deserted than it would have been in the middle of the night. I'd gone out to find someone to play with, but gave it up for a bad job. I came in just in time to watch Armstrong step off the LEM. Cronkite couldn't make out what Armstrong said -- later it turned out Armstrong had bungled his line.

The only thing since then that has come close for shared amazement was 9/11.

The thing is there will never be another moment like that, not for manned space exploration. For those of us too young to remember WW2, the Apollo program was the biggest, most exciting thing that had happened in our lifetime. Older people had grown up with the Moon as the very symbol of something that was impossible to obtain. Every human being who'd ever lived and who wasn't blind had looked up in the sky and seen that big fat Moon hanging up there looking so close you could touch it.

Mars isn't like that. For most people it's just a name. More people have seen fake Mars in movies than have seen the real thing. So I'm guessing that few people will interrupt their lives to watch the first step on Mars. Maybe some of us will, but there won't be the same amazement, that sense of witnessing a once-in-a-species event.

Speaking of movies, one of the things that happened after 1970 is that production values on sci-fi movies went way, way up. Most people today have grown up watching representations of humans traveling to the stars; that's the new milestone for the human imagination. So I don't think there will ever be the kind of adulation for real astronauts that we had in the 60s. Actors are more photogenic than real astronauts and they don't spend their time doing tedious and inexplicable things.

But I don't think it's impossible to get people interested in space exploration; only that it's folly to put men up there and expect the public to automatically get excited. Henceforth space exploration is only going to matter to people who've been educated enough to find science interesting. That in itself is a worthwhile goal.

I've been a Democrat since 1979. I'd vote for Bernie Sanders if he weren't an abrasive, self-righteous prig who'd inevitably do more damage to his allies than to his enemies. But despite that I'm almost 100% in agreement with the man. And I haven't seen any rampant Republican agenda here. More like rampant laziness, if there were such a thing.

If the editors spent a whole minute between the moment they opened the story and the moment they hit "post" I'd be flabbergasted.

When hardline socialist parties gain power they tend to become more pragmatic. Such parties usually still consider themselves socialist and think of themselves as working toward eventual socialism.

The Socialist Party in France is a good illustration of this. Go back and look at the history of the Mitterrand presidency. In 1984 he abandoned nationalization of industry so that France would qualify for the European Monetary System. The subsequent collapse of the leftist coalition forced him to "cohabit" with Chirac's conservative RPR. Since then it'd be fair to characterize PS as a center-left party.

Technically a "socialist" is anyone who believes in "social ownership" of the means of production. A "communist" is someone who believes in the common ownership of the means of production. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but "social ownership" is a broader concept than common ownership. Common ownership is just one form of "social ownership". Worker cooperatives are another form of social ownership.

Logically then, all communists are socialists, and not all socialists are communists. Some communists see non-communist socialism as a desirable intermediate step toward communism, others do not. Some communist and socialist ideologies fit within the umbrella of "social democracy", others do not.

Socialists and especially communists tend to be idea-fetishists, and so often display a peculiar mania for mutual ideological excommunication.

Most "democratic socialist" parties are socialist (like the DSP in the US), or have at some point in their history been socialist, or at least see socialism as a desirable long-term goal. But I'm sure there are exceptions. What you really have to do is ask what someone *believes*, not what they call themselves.

Sanders has never run away from the word "socialist", but what he seems to believe in is a strong welfare safety net, labor unions operating in a market economy which allows private profit but with regulatory restrictions on the ability of private entities to externalize costs like pollution. There are plenty of people who would call that "socialist", but most people who just plain call themselves "socialist" wouldn't. What he wants is for the US to be more like "Nordic model" country such as Sweden or Denmark. Maybe that's not your personal idea of political paradise, but it's a hell of a long way from North Korea.

As to why Sanders would call himself a socialist, it may be that's what he calls "socialism", but I think it's because he's a contrarian and gadfly who likes to rile people up but excels at retail politics in a tiny, tiny state. I'm all for his preferred policies, but personally I think he'd be terrible president because he's a self-righteous political prig who'd alienate and undermine any of his allies that didn't toe the line.

plenty of those wealthy only get their wealth by warping the laws of the land to bring more wealth in their direction. we're not talking about hard working small business owners here, we're talking about parasites

additionally, i am not sure why we should worry about these "patriotic americans" fleeing the country being that doing so would give us more leverage to seize the means of their ill gotten gains, which is the real problem

so good fucking riddance should they flee

I'm subscribed to a bunch of Democrat newsletters and politicians' email lists. I know perfectly well what liberals want and what Democrats are pushing. I also don't even have a TV and strictly avoid Faux News.

If you think the Democrat party doesn't have immigration as one of its top issues, then you are clueless.

there's a certain kind of american who thinks "socialist" means "communist totalitarianism"

it's a kneejerk pavlovian response from cold war era propaganda without any thought education or historical awareness

i'm not a socialist and i can think of problems with socialism. but at least i can talk about the concept on its merits and lack thereof, rather than being a blind moron as to what the word really means and substituting ignorance from an expired era, the cold war, when considering the word emptily, rather than the real ideology the word actually represents

Yes, they are temporary, but the liberals are on an anti-anti-immigration bandwagon (largely because a bunch of tech companies like Facebook want the H1B cap lifted) and will conflate the issue.