Is it really so difficult for you to distinguish between subsidizing infrastructure and operating expenses?

Let's have a debate about public support of infrastructure. I have no issue with user fees to cover it and could rather easily be convinced to use general tax dollars to build and maintain infrastructure.

I have a huge issue with subsidizing operating expenses, especially when a 1997 law required Amtrak to be operationally profitable by 2002.

I focus on passenger rail as the problem because we're subsidizing a lot more than the rail-line infrastructure. We are subsidizing operating expenses for a bloated inefficient organization.

There's a legitimate debate regarding the role of taxpayers subsidizing infrastructure such as roads and rails.

Give me a legitimate argument why we should be subsidizing Amtrak's daily operating expenses. Because of Congressional interference and failure to follow the 1997 law we have a situation where taxpayers are paying up to half the cost of a ticket for those almost 1 million riders who ride the northeast corridor on a daily basis.

I don't care how many people per day or per anything else ride the rails - why should I subsidize their ticket prices?

Here's just one article that talks about the subsidies and where they lie. The northeast regional routes of Amtrak was making over $200 million in profit each year. Once Amtrak became a foster-child of the federal government the federal government started interfering. Most of the money-losing routes that Amtrak operates are there because of demands from local members of Congress in order to gain their support for more subsidies.

Here's another article highlighting that Amtrak's operating law required them to become profitable by 2002. That didn't happen.

Countries don't count homicides the same way. In England and Wales, as an example, deaths don't count as homicides unless, and until, there is a conviction for the death. Here is a report that highlights that difference: www.parliament.uk

Don't you think it's sad that extra guards are required because of the content of someone's speech?

I guess the heckler's veto is not only alive and well but growing bolder day-by-day.

"...then you may want to consider moving to a safer area."

I wish that were so easy. I'm licensed to carry a concealed weapon and carry my pistol pretty much wherever I go. The only time I had to defend myself I was in a very safe area. It just so happens that was the same are where someone decided he was going to start beating the woman who was with him. He took exception to me witnessing the beating and calling the police and decided I would be the next target of his rage. Fortunately, as with most defensive uses of a handgun, I didn't have to fire a shot.

If needing to defend oneself was restricted to specific geographic areas then I would, as you suggest, simply move to a safer area. The problem is you don't know where something will happen and the only question will be whether or not you're prepared.

Your guess is wrong. It was held at this venue because of a "Stand With The Prophet" event that was held at the same place after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The purpose of that event was to highlight that the media and American Islamaphobes are the reason that Islam has such a bad reputation in the west. More can be read here.

You can continue your canard that Bush lied if it makes you feel good. Robb-Silberman placed the issue squarely at the feet of the intelligence community, generally, and the CIA specifically. Under George Tenet, the CIA assigned a 90% probability that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The real issue was Hussein's insistence on maintaining the illusion of having WMD so that Iran would not see him as week. This is the reason he wouldn't allow the inspections.

Go ahead and keep claiming that Bush lied; perhaps one day you will actually learn what that word actually means.

Actually, there were a lot of people complaining about the deficit in Bush's last two years in office.

Let's look at all the numbers and not just your cherry-picked selection (these numbers are total - both on- and off-budget, source is the GPO):

2002 - 157 billion
2003 - 377 billion
2004 - 412 billion
2005 - 318 billion
2006 - 248 billion
2007 - 160 billion
2008 - 458 bilion
2009 - 1,412 billion

What, you might ask, happened in 2008? Oh yeah, that's the first fiscal year where the budget was passed by a Democratic controlled Congress. There were plenty of us begging that Bush veto those Congressional bills and he failed to do so in order to keep up the support he needed for the war.

The last year of the Bush presidency is very interesting as it relates to the budget. At the time there were a number of companies failing. Obama had been elected and Bush asked Obama what he wanted to have done. The incoming Obama administration had a lot of say in what was passed and Bush gave him full support. Even more interesting is that the TARP fund was fully funded in that budget and, hence, the huge number. However, the repayments of TARP were accounted for in the fiscal years in which they occurred. In essence, much of the budget deficits until TARP was repaid were artificially lower because they, in essence, borrowed from fiscal year 2009.

The President made that commitment with the full approval of Congress. In the House the vote was 297 for and 133 against, with 3 not voting. In the Senate the vote was 77 for and 23 against.

58% of Democratic senators voted for the resolution and 39% of Democratic representatives voted for the resolution. That's the resolution that was passed before any troops were committed.

There's a nice re-write of facts. Clinton was no moderate until a Republican controlled Congress was elected forcing him to either compromise or achieve nothing.

Speaking of the "come hither" look, here's Golda with a similar pose: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/1914_Golda_in_Milwaukee.jpg.

Los Angeles gets enough water to be self-sufficient. The problem is that Los Angeles spent their money building infrastructure based on getting too much water in the form of rain and they very efficiently send their fresh water directly into the Pacific. California has spent more money in the past few decades on flood control projects that send fresh water directly into the ocean rather than in new water treatment plants.

Perhaps, instead of robots, they should look at fixing their leaky pipes (Bay Area loses billions of gallons to leaky pipes) or sending, so efficiently, most of their rainwater back into the ocean (How to fix California's drought problem) before they spend billions building desalination plants (Drinking the Pacific).

Now we've gone from the low-information voter to the ignore-information voter.

This isn't a minimum wage study, it's an analysis of the minimum wage studies that were published. They list the studies they analyzed at the end of the paper.

The first 12 studies listed are federal and state.

Most of the studies appear to implicate state studies and there are some that are city-level studies.

The second-to-last listed was for Oregon and Washington. They studied want-ads for eating and drinking workers and hotel and lodging workers. They found that the change in want-ads were negative and significant for all restaurant jobs except cooks (an arguably skilled work set) and for hotel housekeepers. I'm guessing that looking at want-ads is similar to counting help wanted signs.