not religiously affiliated - The religious right may get all the press, but that isn't all there is to being right-wing.

I did read your post about why you picked Gmail - what I'm saying is that your example is not only politically charged, it isn't even an example of the topic at hand. Google did not need to lobby in order to offer Gmail, Google only needed to lobby in order to read peoples' email. This was new at the time, now everyone does it and few of those have privacy policies that are even as good as Google's.

Merely referencing a bad example wouldn't upset me like this one, but you're using the invasion of privacy as a justification for lobbying. "Oh no," you're saying, "if we didn't have this corrupting influence then no one but us would be reading our personal correspondence. We can't have that, what a horrible person that Liz Figueroa was."

What, seriously? It was founded by Charles Koch, it was originally called "The Charles Koch Foundation." The Koch brothers still own it (mostly, it's a partnership) and fund it. They've been one of the primary sources of climate change denying rhetoric, their president used to be a board member of the Ayn Rand institute... how much further right can you get? They're not religiously affiliated, but they are definitely, unquestionably, right-wing.

I can't watch the Youtube video, I'm on dial-up... ::sigh:: However, I can read the title and I know what Night Trap is, and I know that it has nothing to do with Gmail. My issue with your Gmail example is that Figueroa did not "want to ban it." She wanted to pass legislation that would prohibit Google from collecting marketing data by going through their customers' email. Cato turned that into "democratic senator attempting to prohibit innovative new business strategy" (I paraphrase) but at no point did Figueroa try to prevent Google from offering an email service, only from violating peoples' privacy.

As the AC points out, your example is bullshit. You could have picked network neutrality, the recent Netflix / Comcast deal makes it very low-hanging fruit, but no - you have to go with a right-wing smear campaign by the Cato institute on a Democratic senator. Brilliant.

It's not about releasing an underpowered console, it's about focusing on performance as a selling point. The Wii U can't do what either of them can graphically, but it's the only one I actually want. No DRM bullshit, no ads, no camera in my living room, the games are actually fun, off screen play... I'm getting a little sick of people treating this like it's a two horse race.

These things are not mutually exclusive. Most of the proponents of nuclear power recognize it as an interim step - something a lot less dirty than fossil fuels, but still not the goal. We would need to be doing the fusion research regardless.

You make three completely independent statements here. The first is a statement of fact: homicides are disproportionately common among young African American males. The second is an unsupported opinion: gun control isn't going to help reduce those murder rates. The third is another opinion, though I believe this one has a certain amount of support: Nor can those murder rates be explained through racism or bias in the justice system. - It's my understanding that a disproportionate level of poverty has been shown to play a significant role in the disproportionate level of violence among African American males.

Your claim about the insincerity of politicians and especially about our current president is way off base on this. Some politicians sure, there are some that have been very resistant to anything that might alleviate poverty, decrying handouts and claiming that the poor should be dependent on the largesse of the rich. The president has been extremely consistent though about resisting cuts that would impact the poorest Americans.

These are related statistics. They both stem from the idea that criminals, all criminals regardless of crime, are somehow different from regular folks and not deserving of compassion. It's not something that you'll ever hear explicitly stated, but implicitly when people talk about the need to be "tough on crime" and the unshakable faith that ever harsher sentences are the right approach to addressing the problem.

Actually scratch that, with slightly more careful reading I can answer my own question:

According to this link, given by sribe earlier in the comments, the actual number of newly insured people is 9.3 million. The 7.1 million number is people who did it through the website only.

I'd like to see where you're getting your figure of 5 million canceled policies.

You seem to have interpreted the summary as another "our attention spans are shrinking!" article, that isn't how I read it. This is talking about how people approach lengthier bodies of text, it has nothing to do with Twitter or Vine on the surface, and I don't see it as necessarily a bad thing. What the article is saying is that we are adapting to adsorb information quickly rather than thoroughly. My claim: both things are valuable.

There are certainly problems with that plan, but the idea that you deserve some kind of compensation for basic changes to trading or how the market works is staggeringly egocentric.

Yes, you can be publicly christian in China, they ostensibly have "freedom of religion," but you have to join a state-run church. It's joining an underground church, with allegiance outside of their influence, that will get you in trouble.

Having a lot of fingers isn't monopolistic, having one giant finger that takes up the whole pie is.

Besides, this isn't a new finger: Google already did this with the Nexus Q.

You last point isn't really an obstacle, they can still call themselves married.

I'd like to take it further really, "civil union" is still a little too close to marriage and we want to get away from any semblance of government participation in a religious practice. What we're really talking about here are the legal benefits bestowed by that status, and they don't have to come as a lump - break them off into separate contracts. A couple can sign a contract for property sharing, another contract for hospital visitation rights, etc. The added abstraction of using contracts means that there's no excuse to put any limits on who can sign them: why limit property sharing to just couples? Why can't your whole hippie commune sign a contract together?

Doing it this way means that you are free to be married or unmarried according to your own religious beliefs: if you are part of a gay couple and you want to get married your church can perform the service and that's that, you're married. If someone else comes along and says that according to their religion you aren't really married then that's fine too. You can just disagree, as you doubtless do with other aspects of your beliefs.

Being conservative doesn't mean that you never move, always demanding more and more data without ever actually doing anything.

You understand that Al Gore didn't make up Global Warming in the early 2000s, right? This research has been going on since the seventies at least, I remember learning about it in elementary school. The question has been answered at this point.