Yeah, that ship has sailed. Now it's Federal Government uber alles and the states can, um, I guess they can still vote whether or not they use Daylight Saving Time.

What 10th Amendment?

I think the moderators have adjusted your score because it's plus 5 informative now.

Also, a lot of those "last minute concessions" were nothing but naked bribes. Those "conservative" Democrats who voted for ACA were bought and sold.

What is worse, a million people with a 12k debt they cannot pay or a thousand with a 300k debt they cannot pay?

And Romney wasn't just some RINO rebel GOP governor in a backwater state that the GOP could write off as being a product of a liberal constituent... he was who the GOP chose to be the shining star and face of their party to combat the derivative of the very plan Romney pushed for in his home state.

You really don't understand the Republican Party if you think those things are mutually exclusive. Nominations are as much a smoke-filled back-room process as they ever were and the leadership of the GOP neither respects, nor is respected by, the majority of people who consider themselves Republican.

Saying, "if you don't like it, move" is just naive.

I don't think anyone thinks this is socialized healthcare, but it is closer to socialized healthcare than it was before. The most important point is that it is not a free market. Not even close. So anyone expecting any of the benefits of a free market aren't going to find it. All that's happening is that the government is distorting the market in order to fix problems that were largely caused by the government distorting the free market. It's a vicious cycle of trying to fix the broken fixes with more broken fixes, with the same results.

Also, enacting ACA has just replaced, "If you don't like it, move to another state." with "If you don't like it, move to another country." I've moved between states (for job reasons, not policy reasons) and it wasn't any more effort than getting a new driver's license and figuring out a new state income tax form. People move all the time. It's really not a big deal.

However, I don't think leaving the U.S. is quite that simple. Plus it's the U.S. It's the country everyone in the world goes to to escape the crapholes they currently live in. I'd prefer we not ruin it.

So your argument is, if I my be so bold, just a little flawed.

> In theory that works great, in practice it does not work at all.

Actually, it works just fine. The problem is that the people adversely affected by bad policies don't realize the bad policies are to blame and keep voting for them.

See Detroit.

As, yes, you can thank the "Getting Some" amendment that was slipped in the night before it was passed.

You sound like you think you are a free and sovereign citizen of a republic founded on the inherent rights of the individual as bestowed upon by his Creator.

You have no place in the United States.

so (for example) insurance companies aren't allowed to waste more than 20% of what you pay them, resulting in $billions in refunds being sent to customers who were previously being really ripped off.

I'm sure this is a consolation to those folks who lost their policies. Or those folks whose premiums doubled and deductibles quadrupled.

Fortunately, no one seems to mind the President arbitrarily, and unconstitutionally pushing the employer mandate back past successive elections, because once that kicks in, it will really hit the fan.

Must be nice, passing a big boondoggle like ACA, taking all the credit and making sure all the bad stuff happens when you're out of office, or almost out of office, and are regardless, wholly unaccountable.

Well, there were some Popes named Eugene, so you might be on to something...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

The question was ignorant, as two minutes of Googling would show. However, to respond in such a brusque way without offering an explanation is just lazy and rude:

The Pope's proclamations are only considered infallible when speaking "ex cathedra", in other words from the Chair of St. Peter, in his role as the apostolic leader of the whole Church, in communion and in agreement with the bishops of the world, on matters of faith and morals.

Papal infallibility as described here has been invoked exactly twice in all of Church history, in both cases to officially declare doctrine that had already been universally agreed and believed by Catholics for centuries: The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and the Doctrine of the Assumption of Mary.

Other than in his official capacity as the Vicar of Christ, the Pope's pronouncements are no more "infallible" than anyone else's, although one should expect that when he's talking about Catholic Doctrine, he would (or at least should) know what he's talking about.

This declaration is not news to anyone who knows anything about Catholic teaching. Pope John-Paul II said much the same thing, and the idea of evolution of life was hypothesized as far back as St. Augustine (and probably earlier... I bet the Greeks considered it). The nature of a logical and objective universe being the creation of God has always been consistent with Catholic teaching. Just read Thomas Aquinas. However, given how poorly Catholic teaching is understood, even among Catholics, and how much the Bible literalists and other fundamentalists have distorted the "common wisdom" of what Christians actually believe (especially in the U.S.), it is useful for His Holiness to point this out.

"eugenics"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I think the important point here is that the Pope is making clear that the theory of evolution and of the Big Bang as currently understood do not contradict Catholic teaching. In fact, LeMaitre was considering Einstein's equations with an eye towards the idea of how they jibe with the idea of God creating the universe when he figured out the new interpretation of what the equations could be saying about the origins of the universe. Einstein himself had always considered the Universe to be in a steady-state.

I agree that this is a non-story, but given the general ignorance of people about Catholic teaching, including most Catholics, and the way the debate has been grotesquely skewed because of the objectively anti-science Protestants (e.g., the Bible literalists and other fundamentalists), especially in the United States, while it is not news for the knowledgeable among us, it is likely to be news for the average person.

The Galileo story was as much about politics and people being thick-headed and stubborn all around as anything else. Name another one. Hint: Bruno doesn't count.

That happens to me when fixing bugs in a particularly old piece of code (usually the stuff done by overseas consultants... friends don't let friends outsource programming)... once getting the thing fixed, I often fail to understand how it could have ever worked in the first place.