Both parties' establishments are totally authoritarian. Read all the pro-arbitrary-execution arguments here to see how. They are happy to trust the government to kill only people who "deserve it".

How exactly is one supposed to surrender to a drone?

These are murder/execution machines. There is no due process, no chance of being arressted and brought before a court for your crimes, you are simply executed with no chance to defend yourself. It is the most tyrannical of powers, and of you support it, you truly are unamerican.

Regular and ongoing military operations are generally what is considered being "at war". Certainly by the people who are subject to the regular attacks that, incidentally, kill 50 innocents for every terrorist. Obama has started wars in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. We didn't have any regular and ongoing operations in any of those countries before he came in to office. Maybe Pakistan, I could be wrong about that one.

But I'm sure it'll get 100% and A+ reviews on Game Informer and all the paid review sites so it all evens out, right?

the question is idiotic. sounds more like "asking a question just to ask it"

As are many articles on the Internet. They are manufacturing controversy, however stupid, for page views. They are trolling, and as we all know the only proper response to a troll is to ignore them.

"Additionally, it is easy to forget now, but when the iPad first came out it was widely criticized as being too similar to an iPod Touch."

The reason for all that disparagement was because it ended up in the locked-down ecosystem model of the iDevices rather than the open, general-purpose computer model of the Macs. We wouldn't be allowed to install our own software on it. Android tablets aren't much better than iPads in this regard. So yes, Apple-hate, along with a vain, irrational belief that Android was more open and therefore better, not that it made much of a difference in users' habits.

Pomposity? How dare you!

"provided, of course, that you live in a city where you don't spend the majority of your time driving"

I have often wondered why audiobooks don't take off. What do all those people do with all that time when they are stuck in traffic? Just listen to whatever is on the radio?

It's crippling to the economy. Government spending is what is keeping the economy from taking an even worse nosedive. In case you haven't noticed, we've been a recession with high unemployment since the banks crashed the economy in 2008. In my state there are 5 people looking for work for every job that's available. Spending equals jobs. Government is one of the biggest spenders. Cut government spending, you kill jobs. These things have a multiplicative effect. You kill jobs, those people who lost their jobs can't spend as much, more people lose their jobs. 2% is a lot of jobs. An analysis put that at 2 million jobs lost.

The problem isn't rising entitlements. Social Security, for one, is not responsible for a single cent of debt, and never has been. The reason SS is in any kind of trouble at all is because the government has been raiding SS funds for other purposes and owes it money. The problem is reduced revenues. That happens in a depression.

To step in to a dangerous metaphor, you weren't living beyond your means when you made 60k/yr, but say you just took a pay cut and now you're making 50k/yr (just like the government when the economy crashed and tax reciepts went down.) Where do you make the cuts? Do you stop buying guns or stop buying your prescriptions? I know which I'd cut, but insanely, we're talking about cutting the prescriptions.

Just like Republicans that refused to identify what they would cut. They wanted this across-the-board cut all along, this was their provision in the last temporary budget compromise.

Ask Boehner. He's the one refusing to allow any Democratic compromise from getting anywhere. There's only one party that's willing to negotiate in good faith. And if you can't see that then you aren't doing your civic duty of at least paying attention.

Republicans. Seriously, are we this short-sighted? When Clinton was president the budget deficit was a big deal too. Then what did Clinton do? He fucking balanced the budget. We could have started paying down the debt then and there. Gore ran on a platform of doing just that. Bush ran on a platform of trillion-dollar tax cuts, increased spending, and wars in the middle east. Guess who people voted for, and guess who ran up the bill? And why was this never an issue when Bush was in office, running up the debt? Because as Cheney said, "Deficits don't matter." At least not when Republicans are running the place and they get to set their own agenda. But if a Democrat gets in office, they will do everything they can to derail their mandate by screaming about deficits, even though it's the least important issue and completely counterproductive.

Don't blame Democrats, this is 100% a Republican-created crisis. Republicans are as fiscally-irresponsible as they come.

He isn't saying it's okay for Obama to do stupid things, he's saying Obama didn't do the stupid things he's being accused of doing. Obama passed a temporary tax cut. That tax cut expired. Failing to permanently extend a temporary tax cut is not the same thing as raising taxes. That's the argument. And fuck the guy who tried to smear Obama with that brush.

GP is casting blame at the people he thinks truly deserve to be blamed, ie Grover Norquist.

And the blame should fall squarely on the GOP's shoulders. This is a crisis of their making, this is their sequester. Obama agreed to it because he's been willing to compromise, as he has endlessly showed us, it's the GOP that has refused to budge. They constantly refused to even write a bill or identify what they wanted to be cut. They didn't even put a bill up for a vote in the GOP-controlled House. This is entirely of the GOP's making, and they like it that way, because they have no interest in bipartisanship, only reducing taxes and forcing the Democrats to take the blame for the inevitably necessary spending cuts.

Courts won't take on such "advisory" cases. You need to prove that your rights have been violated in order to have standing to bring such a case. You can't just bring a case to a court and get a law struck down without such injury. I think it's a pretty terrible principle, especially since courts almost always defer to the government when it comes to the secrecy of evidence, and therefore its inadmissibility, making it impossible to prove any sort of injury in a court.