What lead to a change in the Iraqi government was that Maliki refused to allow US troops to stay permanently. Word is the successor comes pre-agreed on that issue.

Meanwhile IS is the enemy in Iraq but somehow we're not supposed to notice that they are our allies in Syria. Who would have thought that they might use the same weapons we gave them in A suddenly in B?

And since they are additionally quite heavily funded mostly from Saudi Arabia, which is basically the most brutal theocratic dictatorship on the planet, not to mention our favorite client state in the region, killing IS supply lines really should just be a matter of saying the word.

Crap, hit submit prematurely by accident. I wanted to point out that the "first world" qualifier is not even necessary.

I think you will find most Muslims are not actually preoccupied with world domination. It is kind if like how the average American probably doesn't really support their government's foreign policy aimed at global hegemony, by any means, at any cost.

I assume you mean the 2013 cuts -- those have been matched, basically dollar for dollar, by increasing the "temporary" budget for Afghanistan. US military spending remains outrageous, at about the level of the rest of the world put together.

Fundamentalism is a part of it, yes, but would never amount to anything like what we've seen were it not for widespread anti-US sentiments stemming from more pragmatic reasons, such as US foreign policy for the last, oh, seven decades. 911 was a scandalous crime, no doubt about it, but to state that it is completely unrelated to your own actions is patently false.

Coming from someone who apparently still believes the Iraq war had anything to do with 911 other than rhetoric, and somehow still manages to delude himself that anti-American sentiment somehow thrives in complete isolation of its international posturing -- yeah, baffling is what that is.

I think the point is that when the police are shooting people in great numbers -- I don't think the US has a peer in that dept -- then it might not be a great idea to give them even more destructive weaponry. Sure it would be "contingency" equipment when anyone asks, but sooner or later it'll be standard issue.

Remember those billions (!) of rounds of ammo that DHS bought?

In combination with the, shall we say, questionable record of accountability of police actions, tooling up to this extent seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

Are you seriously surprised that Justice is not blind? She hasn't been for quite some time, as best I can tell, not to mention that someone rigged her scales.

"Two-tier justice", I think that's what they call it. The common practice of threatening outrageous sentences to pressure people into a plea bargain, which is to say be found guilty without a day in court -- but of course they only even attempt that when they estimate the cost of mounting a defense would prove problematic.

Actually it seems to me that now we ought to distinguish three- or even four-tier justice, accounting for cases such as this one where political considerations come into play and recently there have even been cases of corporations being found guilty of very serious offenses but deemed " to big to jail".

Presumably they are choosing not to get screwed by NSA, through proxies such as Apple and MS. But otherwise I agree entirely.

I wish headlines such as

Would more often be accompanied by its root cause, something along the lines of

Ok, so who IS fighting racism? Because just looking at some of the posts in this thread, it needs fighting.

This is +5 Insightful?

I get that some people feel that affirmative action has been taken too far. I also get that some feel that it actually has a detrimental effect on the supposed beneficiaries. I don't claim to know either way.

But it looks to me as if racism, the bad old ugly kind, is very much alive in the USA (and many other places). So it seems unhelpful, to say the least, to ridicule people who are attempting to fight it -- whether you agree with their particular approach or not, we need more of those people.

Seems to me what you need is a political party that opposes this shit. Whenever Ds and Rs agree on anything, it is a pretty safe bet that the public at large do not.

So be it, huh? Serves those civvies right for having been born in the wrong country? That is an argument which betrays complete moral bankruptcy. And completely overlooks that the war in Iraq was not justifiable to begin with. Certainly it had nothing to do with protecting US citizens.

  The Nuremberg Tribunal ...

I think that the answer, in your hypothetical example, as well as the current Gaza conflict (and the previous three, actually), is both.

The tragedy is nothing will come of it. A UN report will determine that both sides committed war crimes. Israel will condemn this as anti-semitic, and Hamas will condemn it as depriving them of the only way they have left to resist Israeli military and economic warfare.

Even looking at root causes is futile, for a conflict this old. So an apparently simple question such as "who broke the ceasefire / truce?". For example, one might argue that it was Hamas, because they fired rockets from Gaza, before the first Israeli airstrike hit. But another might argue Israel, because it never even started implementing the conditions upon which the truce was achieved (settlement freeze, lifting the blockade, ...)

In any other case, the UN would send in peackeepers. But of course that is not possible here, because of the US' reflexive support for Israel (which, according to some, amounts to US legislators' mortal fear of AIPAC).

Well, I don't think anyone is likely to rebel against the US government -- not by force anyway, given that the latter is armed to the teeth. 1.6 billion bullets for DHS, was it?

But not everybody is claiming that the possibility of armed rebellion (preposterous though it may be) makes for a valid argument in support of the second amendment.

Actually I haven't said anything about left- or right-wing, though I suppose that generally speaking the need for the second amendment is felt more strongly by the right-wing. And the need to rid society of all those firearms is perhaps more strongly felt by the left. But, correct me if I am wrong, isn't the Tea Party a minority amongst right-wingers? And by extension, among pro-gun activists?

From the outside, the Ds and Rs don't actually seem all that different, and it would appear that they somehow agree on precisely those issues that are unpopular with both of their supporters. E.g., PATRIOT, domestic NSA transgressions, copyright and patent legislation, and the better part of the US foreign policy come to mind.