There is plenty of fundraising coming about on both sides with this. The point though is as much as the GOP loves to distort reality on a regular basis and has no qualms about lying to the public, this is an exceptionally blatant case of the latter. There is a long list of republicans who have been shouting for impeachment in DC for some time (some almost as long as you!) and now the orders passed down to them from above are to lie about ever demanding it, and to make that lie everywhere they possibly can.

This isn't like denying that they have made dozens of attempts in the house to repeal the Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 - at least with that they can cowardly hide behind the fact that some of their repeal attempts were partial rather than full - this is just an outright party-wide lie. It just happens to work for them because they have legions of donors who are dumb enough to either believe it or not mind it.

Of course, they aren't really trying to push through impeachment under the guise of improving "credibility"...

You're rolling the dice regardless. It matters not whether your plan is a phone, a bat, a gun, or something else entirely. Guns are not 100% effective; even if you regularly practice with your gun it can still jam or misfire. You just have to decide which level of risk is acceptable to you. I personally find a bat to be an acceptable trade off as the likelihood of it accidentally killing an innocent person in my home is quite nearly zero. You might apply a different calculus to the matter.

There have been bands of criminals working together in the past as well. Even in the city closest to my home they are even more exceedingly rare than armed individuals breaking into homes - and the town where I live hasn't even had an unarmed robbery in a very very long time.

That is a possibility. I happen to be several inches above average in height myself; while I don't have enough mass to scare people just by size if I am holding something that could hurt I expect people will take notice (unless I'm being robbed by an exceptionally tall person*).

Might be worth a try, as long as they don't think it's some kind of cosplay or BDSM toy.

*I don't have an explanation for why, but exceptionally tall people don't seem to partake in much criminal activity - at least according to the crime reports I read. The vast overwhelming majority of crime reports I see report suspects in the 5'7" - 6' range in height. Granted, that is where most of the population is height-wise in this area, but if criminal activity was distributed proportionally by height I should have seen some dwarves and some giants commit some acts by now but I haven't seen any yet. I don't know if it is that people outside the mid quartile in height distribution are aware that they are easier to pick out of a line-up, or if witnesses just aren't particularly good at describing height, or something else is at play here.

Either way I do see my height as being advantageous if I should need to attempt to defend myself or my family with a bat at home. If I were short I would likely consider a different approach.

If instead you meant Dean-omize as in "turn them into Howard Dean", then in this crowd that would have the exact same effect as demonization.

The first time I saw the headline I thought it said

Then I thought it was perhaps

Before I figured out they meant

I'm quite sure you could find other peoples' analyses of the Manifesto if you want. You have made a habit of not reading what I write here anyways so I see no purpose in making a series of JEs on the text.

I cannot force you to take in information. You are free to celebrate your ignorance if you so wish.

The insurance industry - who received the greatest corporate handout in the form of the "health care bill" in 2010 in the history of the world - has an exceptional racket here. They have the ability to not only delay payments in "processing" for so long that they automatically go to collections by the time they decide not to pay, they can also undo payments after the fact for any reason.

Don't believe me? I had exactly that happen to me when I was a college student. The insurance I had (through my parents) decided over a month after paying my doctor's office that they wanted to un-pay it, so they did. By the time they took their money back the debt was considered overdue (relative to the date of service). I knew nothing of this until I started getting debt collections calls from various bad actors at 3am under assumed celebrity names. They threatened to garnish everything imaginable and impound my measly car (which was not worth anywhere near the debt) to seek payment.

I eventually got through to the insurance company directly and got them to go back and re-pay the un-paid bills. They never apologized for their little experiment or gave a reason why they chose me. Even better I had to promise to never, ever, use that insurance policy again in exchange.

Thanks a lot blue cross-blue shield. I hope your CEOs enjoyed the additional cruise amenities that they got in reward for destroying my credit.

I did, because you want to discard the fundamental principle of innocent until proven guilty - as well as protection from double jeopardy and other basic rights extended to the accused in the criminal justice system in this country - when the accused is someone who has the dreaded letter D after their name. I figured your bit about "people are evil" was rooted in the mythology that you like to arbitrarily substitute in place of the law here in the US.

... and there comes your mythology, substituting in for reason.

Your political spectrum actually is better represented as a monopole, really. You only have people who you see as "good" (republicans) and those who you see as evil (everyone else). You don't even bother looking at what they actually believe in, only who they associate with. The obsolete one-dimensional political spectrum at least sorts on some sort of continuum, yours is binary.

i would like to say that suggests that you actually went back and read the comments (which would be the first time you did so in their entirety) and found that indeed I did not accuse you of directly calling for the assassination of President Lawnchair. However your history of behavior gives me reason to expect that you would not be willing to lower yourself to such an act, as learning is below you when it involves facts that do not support your world view.

So says the person bursting at the seams with pride over his selective illiteracy... But no, you have not hurt my "pride".

Well you could start by actually reading The Communist Manifesto, which spells out exactly what Marx wanted to accomplish with communism, and how.

I'm not sure how, or why, you come to that conclusion. Just because you like to repeat it doesn't mean it is somehow connected to reality, though.

More importantly neither were communism or socialism.

You really don't have enough data to support that hypothesis.

I have been consistently asking you to read just one piece of literature. It isn't even a long document, and it is available free from a large number of sources. You have repeatedly not only refused to read it but bragged about refusing to read it - while simultaneously claiming to be knowledgeable on it.

It would certainly be terrible if you were to actually be knowledgeable on the topics you are trying to lecture me on.

If you mean in regards to the actual effects that their spoon-fed ideals would have on >>99% of the country's population (including most of the people who have been duped into supporting the Tea Party) then I would agree with you.

I love that the article says it won't say how long the code was. If it is still as it was back when I worked retail, then it is a 6 digit code. Whoop-de-freaking-doo. Not like people couldn't have figured that out by trial and error.

Because they were doing their jobs as described? They didn't know they were entering bogus numbers. The procedure should have had the cashier - not the customer - calling the bank, but that didn't happen. It's unclear at this point why it went this way.

I believe it said that the culprit was making the call himself (likely from his own cell phone) and then giving the "code" to the cashier. Whether or not he was talking to anyone at all is not clear, he might have been calling some unanswered number and just talking into air to make the con look legit.