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Comment Re:Stop using Facebook (Score 1, Interesting) 261

Dick Cheney brought us the current mess. He set the bar. W was just his sock-puppet.

Oh yeah, that makes sense. The son of a former President, former CIA Director, grandson of a U.S. Senator, and great-grandson of one of the 19th centuries rail barons was merely a sock puppet serving the interests of the son of a minor bureaucrat with the Department of Agriculture. You know, people should look at the nature of history before they start building conspiracy theories.

Comment Re:Asking to end Child Support payments (Score 1) 185

I did not suggest that the father cut the payment on his own accord. I suggested that the court order the payments suspended pending identification of an account belonging to the mother (based on being able to serve court papers to the mother at the address listed on the account). Of course, before doing that, the court should have ordered the bank which handled the account the payments were being made to give the address on the account to the person attempting to serve the papers.

Comment Re:Please describe exactly (Score 1) 392

Republicans forced onto it rendering it into the watered down ridiculous mess that it is.

Let me see if I got this straight. It is the Republicans fault that the Democrats used their majorities in both Houses of Congress to pass a bad law, which the American people overwhelmingly opposed (to the point where Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator in an attempt to stop the law from passing), because the Republicans would not vote for that bad law.

Comment Re:Please describe exactly (Score 1) 392

You mean you blame the Republicans for not trying to help someone who, when they suggested changes to the very first major bill he pushed through Congress, responded by saying, "I won" and walking away?
In other words, they should have helped him pass a law which would not contain any of their ideas, because he told them that he had won and did not need to listen to them. Oh yeah, a law which contained provisions he explicitly campaigned against.

Comment Re:Please describe exactly (Score 1) 392

He did not say he had the silver plan. If you go to the link you provided and follow it to "Out of Pocket Costs" you discover the following: "The maximum out-of-pocket costs for any Marketplace plan for 2014 are $6,350 for an individual plan and $12,700 for a family plan." He clearly states that his plan is for he and his wife, which makes it a family plan. Elsewhere, he says that he could get a lower deductible, but the premiums would go up even more.

Comment Re:Asking to end Child Support payments (Score 3, Insightful) 185

It is not really extra effort. He stops paying until he is informed of her current address, at which point he serves her the papers. If he never receives her address, he never makes another payment and no further court action occurs. Of course, with the ruling I suggested in hand, he might also have a basis for requesting a court order to freeze the account in question, since the address on the account is not that of the registered account holder. Even if he cannot obtain a court order, he can possibly make the bank uncomfortable enough about the account that they report it to the appropriate government agency for investigation as a "suspicious account" under various anti-money laundering laws.

Comment Re:This is supposed to be the *WAY* they do their (Score 1) 392

There's a whole amendment to the Constitution devoted to protecting it.

Actually, that is not true. The piece that has been misconstrued as protecting journalism** is only part of the First Amendment and is does not protect the "press" as we use the term today (to refer to the news media). When the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,..." it very intentionally links the right to say what you want to the right to publish what you want. The "freedom of the press" is not a right for journalists, but a right for every citizen to publish, if they have the means, whatever they wish (with the edge cases of slander and libel, although even there the original understanding was that the person slandered or libeled could not prevent you from publishing, they could merely receive punitive recompense if they could prove that it was slander or libel). **the misconstrued part is that it is ABOUT journalism, not that it protects it. It does protect journalism, but only as a side-effect of protecting everyone's right to publish.

Comment Re:This is supposed to be the *WAY* they do their (Score 1) 392

The forces that move the nation are far bigger than the president.

So, let's make them even bigger and more powerful so that they are even less responsive to the will of the people? That seems to be the approach the current Administration is taking, "The government is too large and powerful for the President to hold it accountable (or for the President to be held accountable) for its misdeeds, therefore we should make it larger and more powerful."

Comment Asking to end Child Support payments (Score 3, Insightful) 185

The gentleman in question was going to court to end the court order requiring him to pay child support payments for his now 21 year old son. It seems to me that a better solution would have been for the judge to issue an order to the provide the address for the account where the child support payments were being deposited. Followed up by an order suspending the payments if the ex-wife was not at that address until such a time as an actual address was found (the logic being that if the address the account was registered at was not at that address, then there was reason to believe that the account was actually being used by someone else). Confirmation of the correct account being found would come in the form of the court papers being served. Further the court could have ruled that the suspended child support payments would only be due if the court found in the ex-wife's favor on the petition which the man had made.

Comment Re:why does the CRTC need this list? (Score 1) 324

I wouldn't know about "hits" as I rarely hear or see them (if a radio station plays "hits", I don't listen to it). I listen to the music I like and watch the movies I like, I have not liked a hit song in longer than I can remember. The last hit movie I liked was LOTR, and I was a fan of the books long before they were popular. I could go on, but the point is, if you want to have an independent culture you need to be willing to not be part of "pop" culture. If Canadians want to be part of "pop" culture, why should their government prevent them from doing so?
Apparently, you fail to understand that if the USA can buy and sell Canada, then this law is an exercise in futility because it has been bought by the USA. I could go on, but I will conclude by saying that government subsidies of culture fail to actually preserve said culture. If Canadians are not interested enough in preserving their own culture without a law forcing them to do so, that culture is doomed anyway.

Comment Re:Jews (Score 1) 85

Well, the thing is that this study did not compare the genetic makeup of Ashkenazi Jews to that of Germans and Poles. It looked at how much of it came from three ancestral groups which Germans and Poles also descended from. I am going to assume that you would have expected Ashkenazi Jews to have the same proportion of those three groups as Germans and Poles. In order to know if that is a reasonable expectation one would need to know if the Germans and Poles have the same, or close to the same, distribution of genes from those three groups. However, even if they do, I would expect Ashkenazi Jews to have at least twice the percentage of DNA from the Near East group as either the Germans or the Poles.
Having written the above, I just realized that in order to get a decent idea what percentage of the DNA from the Near East group one would expect in the Ashkenazi, one would really need to know what percentage of the DNA of modern Arabs comes from that group. I would expect Ashkenazi Jews to be somewhere between Arabs and Germans or Poles (whichever of the latter is higher), with it being closer to the Arabs than the European(not more than 50% of the distance and not less than 15% of the difference).

Comment Re:Just great (Score 1) 326

Umm, exactly where did you get that 250 million number from? It LOOKS like it might be the number killed by the various totalitarian regimes of the the 20th Century, but that cannot be correct because those regimes were allied with the Democrats (until political exigencies forced the Democrats to turn on them), not with the Republicans.

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