Spot on.

I was party to a class-action lawsuit against a former employer. Long story short, I ended up with a check for over $500, and didn't have to lift a finger.

But yeah, class-action lawsuits are totally worthless, right?

All this is giving me serious schizophrenic affects.

You're my hero for today. Fight the good fight!

Actually, this constitutes gender discrimination, twice over. It's saying men are not allowed to do something women can do: marry a man. And women are not allowed to do something men can do: marry a woman.

Fertility rates are primary inversely dependent on the empowerment of women. If you want to avoid a Malthusian disaster, give women education, a voice in the public sphere, and the power to decide their own reproductive course.

This is why it makes me sad to see PBS sliding into being almost just-another-commercial-outlet. Remember when underwriting acknowledgments at the top of the show were a textual/voiceover mention of the company, and not a whole ad-like video segment? And when no PBS station would be caught dead airing show-length commercials and pretending they're shows?

I'd be interested to see how the "minutemen" and other anti-brown-people groups would react to knowing that their ability to have untrackable phones is owed to those same targets of their rage...

You may be describing behavior on the right, but I have yet to see, for example, a pro-choice group give Ben Nelson a pass because he has a (D) after his name.

I don't suppose there's any possibility that they might attempt to prevent the occurrence of gravely ill children by giving them some damn care before they reach nigh-irreversible crisis stage? Like they love to not do now?

Nah, you're right, caring for children is a losing proposition, so fuck 'em.

1. Voting against your party is not the same thing as voting against your party for cloture. They really are lockstep when it comes to that. Of course it doesn't help that we have the "lazy filibuster" rule now, where by you simply declare that you filibuster and everyone says "oh well" instead of making you read the phone book to an empty chamber 24/7 like they used to.

2. What "far-left" bills are you talking about? Health insurance, judging by your Ben Nelson link? Let me tell you something. All the polls shows Americans overwhelmingly favored the Public Option, and Single Payer was an even-money proposition. The only people for whom these things are "far-left" are in the pockets of the insurance industry. Furthermore, Ben Nelson is not a "moderate" anything. He may as well be a Republican -- same boat as Lieberman and all the other so-called "blue dog" Democrats. A better term for them might be "pretend" Democrats. An increasingly popular term for them is "conservaDems". You and the obstructionists in Congress might think having some sane programs to take care of us instead of ones to kill foreigners is a bad idea, but don't sit there and paint the rest of us as radical Marxists because we disagree.

Believing in evolution, on the other hand, would be to hold the position that the current plants and animals are the result of such a process, where the selection has been carried out by naturally occurring circumstances.

In other words, he could accept the mechanism, but not that it could be driven by anything but a someone. It's like an electrical engineer accepting that electricity exists, but insisting that lightning isn't really electricity because no one set up a generator floating in the clouds. Which is to say, extreme cognitive dissonance.