Or quite possibly the NSA had the needle of necessary information buried in a gigantic hay stack of useless dreck. In this case, if you know absolutely everything then you effectively know nothing.

But at the same time, your right to throw your fist ends where my nose begins. That's where legal technicalities get interesting.

But let's look at it from a different point of view, let's say that I own a large restaurant with attached back room that I will let out to various parties. As a private citizen, do I have the right to not let to the First Church of the Unredeemed? Am I really a private citizen at this point, or am I company doing business with the public? Am I allowed to discriminate against your religion? If not, why not? The constitution restricts what the government can do, not what I (or my business) can do.

The bottom line though is, people wanting to discriminate against gays doing normal things like hold weddings or lease an apartment are on the wrong side of history. In 50 years discriminating against gays will be as repugnant as discriminating against blacks today.

Will all anti-gay attitudes be wiped out? No. People are people. Just as there are open racists today, there will be open anti-gays in 50 years, but the majority will look down on the bigots.

Okay, I missed it. Other than her own ego, who wants her to run? I haven't heard anyone say that she was going to be their first choice, or second, or third. Maybe I'm too close to the tech industry, but I have no clue who her target market is. Other than her ego, she has no core constituency.

Nonsense. It has to do with what easily flows off the tongue. "Democrat party" just flows easier than "Democratic party." Only an overly sensitive, emotional cripple would make an issue of it.

Bullshit. It was only once the Democratic party got bunch of thin skinned people looking for insults so that they could recoil in horror at normal and innocuous comments that it became a slur.

Frankly, your whining about it now reminds me a lot of my mother who could find an insult where none was intended. Either grow a thicker skin or get the fuck off the playground.

Good question. I think there will be some interesting inflection points coming up.

Individual freedom and personal liberty have been under open assault for the last several decades. We rightly objected to Bush the Lesser's domestic spying, but there seems less outrage over Obama's domestic spying (and does anyone even remember or care about Clinton's Carnivore project?).

Roe v. Wade is founded on the principle of medical privacy. Something that we are now actively wiping out. IIRC, there were 17 federal agencies looking at tracking all our medical records.

That's just on the individual privacy front. The very structure of government, the roles and responsibilities, division of authority, the meaning of law is now under open assault. If your the president and don't like a law, pretend it doesn't exist either by a policy of non-enforcement or withholding funding.

And, no. I have little hope that constitutional government will survive in the US for much longer. Far too many people have the attitude that if it's their guy doing it, it's okay. They fail to see the principles involved. If the current crop of potential presidential candidates even pays lip service to such things, it's more along the lines of they want to be the one choosing the music as the band plays on and ship goes down.

But just because our ship is going down, doesn't mean that I want to rush out and hang onto the boat anchor of the other ship that's going down either.

I agree. How do you suggest we create peace with ISIL/ISIS?

Perhaps we should not have created ISIS in the first place. Blame Obama.

Or perhaps since the local area had already mostly found an equilibrium, we should not have toppled that evil-bastard Saddam Hussein. Yes, he was evil. Yes, I would not want him for my president. But he was reasonably well contained and provided a counter balance to the other powers in the region. Blame Bush II.

We can walk our way back in time and blame [nearly?] every U.S. president regardless of party back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. We can then start blaming the Europeans for carving up the Mid-East in such a way that it was a breeding ground for future wars.

But peace? Do you have any concrete mechanisms that would actually improve the situation?

And you can even buy it from Amazon.com

It means that in his world, "normal" is defined where everyone is much more left. He probably means Europe is "normal". Given that in 2 or 3 generations Europe will no longer exist in its current form, I'm not sure that it is the ideal to emulate.

This says far more about you than about anything else.

There were plenty of people at the time that were not fond of Kennedy. One quote I remember hearing about Johnson was He may be a crook, but at least he's an American crook. A not so subtle jab at Kennedy. There was pretty wide spread belief that Kennedy only became president through ballot stuffing efforts in Chicago. Rather than challenge the results like later losers, Nixon conceded. The best thing to happen to Kennedy's long term mystique was to die young.

If Kennedy hadn't died young, the bay-of-pigs, Cuban missile crises, and Viet Nam would have all dragged his legacy down.

The last time we were at war was World War II. Everything else has just been police actions. Technicalities aside, shutting down the government came with an exemption for the military.

serviscope_minor tried to show he has some form of brilliance by stating that the e-mail servers won't automatically back up data unless you configure them to. In the context of this conversation, that was an incredibly stupid statement. Almost as stupid as saying, "Well, without electricity it won't run and you never mentioned plugging the thing in."