More than this, they were originally private airport security guards that the government nationalized at the insistence of (mostly democrats in) congress.

Well, maybe 'tanks' is a bit strong of a word for some, but just because they didn't have cannons doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of armor on hand.

Unfortunately, so are many public officials

In many states you do not have the right to record a conversation unless every party to the conversation consents. I have never understood this rationale. If I can be a party to a conversation, I can tell anyone else about that conversation legally. I can immediately write down everything said to the best of my ability, also legally. I could even hire a set of actors to reenact the scene and record that legally. All of which are less accurate and reliable than a tape recorder.

From what I can tell, two party consent laws simply provide legal cover for the ability to lie about a conversation.

According to Wikipedia, the Department of Homeland Security has a quarter million employees. Given judicious application of intelligent software design, that's more than enough to keep tabs on everyone in the US. (assuming that in addition to the aforementioned intelligent software design, all quarter-million employees are fairly high-caliber. Given that 55k of those employees are from the TSA, well....)

Yes. Yes it does matter, on all those fronts. You might as well ask "does it matter if you can't leave your apartment because you've got agoraphobia or because you are Jaycee Lee Dugard and some twisted bastard is keeping you in the shed out back." Either way, you can't leave, so what difference does it make?

And you are much more likely to be in the "can't afford it" category living under communism, so it isn't like that's an either/or situation anyway.

I do agree with your punchline though... freedoms have to be protected continuously, or you lose them.

That's an excellent point.

Although the punishment for murder ranges from nothing to death, while the punishment for offending a corporation ranges from a few years in jail (here) to a lifetime to many lifetimes in wages to getting lauded as a hero and receiving millions of dollars (pick your favorite trumped-up corporate scandal).

Too bad prosecutors often fail to live up to the vast responsibility they've been given via prosecutorial discretion. (my favorite of late is a Georgia woman who was convicted of vehicular homicide when her 5 year old kid was hit and killed by a drunk driver as she and her family crossed the street from the bus stop - not only was she not driving, she doesn't even own a car. Nice work, Ms. Prosecutor... more irony - She gets 6 times the prison time of the drunk driver who plowed into her and her family. Double-good nice work, Ms. Prosecutor)

Well, by this logic there should be no laws against computer intrusion. If you didn't secure your computer against that port 73 buffer overrun bug, well, that's your fault for getting p0wnd. Or if there is a bug in the java beans backend of your server that crashes all authentication to root when presented with malformed unicode? Well, tough... patch your servers, moron. Some hacker finds a vulnerability in Apache that allows him to get root using get/post commands and uses that to get control of your server - nothing wrong with that?

I mean, really - did you really, really mean to say that attacks using get or post should be perfectly legal? There's lots of malicious activity that can be undertaken using http connections. There's laws against hacking computers for the same reason that there are laws against breaking and entering in the realm of real estate. We don't say "well, you shoulda bought a better lock" when a burglar breaks in through the back door. We say the burglar is a criminal and prosecute him.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't get a better lock, or do a better job of computer security - but I still don't think we should just say "if you didn't secure your server well enough, that's your own fault".

It is euphemistically called the Disposition Matrix by the Obama administration. This president has decreed for himself the power to order the execution of anyone, including American citizens, anywhere, including within the United States, for reasons known only to him and at his sole discretion, without oversight or appeal.

Yeah, it's worse than having a gun walking operation go south on you.

I didn't say any of that. Didn't even imply it. I just pointed out the fundamental flaw in your logic - the stated foundation was "But do you honestly think somebody THAT bigoted won't drag that bigotry into the comic?" In other words, because he's outspokenly opposed to state recognition of gay marriage, he'll contaminate the story he's paid to write with anti-gay propaganda. It also includes a "wow, he's way out on the fringe, all nutty on the issue" stinger. Which is contradicted by the notion that he's in lockstep with most major religions on the issue.

I don't think anybody ought to be forced to do anything. If this guy is your white whale, have at it. Doesn't mean I won't point out silly hyperbole when I see it. Like I said, I think he's on the wrong side of this issue. Doesn't mean every criticism is legitimate.

Really? Which civil rights are those? Where is the left on self-defense? Or freedom of speech? What about property rights? Where are lefties or righties on victimless crimes? Seems there are more rabble-rousers on the left against some of those victimless crimes. Heck, the left is even in favor of criminalizing certain thoughts for crying out loud.

So no, I reject your self-satisfied notion that there is any pro-civil rights support on the left or the right. There's support of some rights for some people that we deem to be on our team. That's not the same thing as being pro-civil-rights in general.

DoMA is up for challenge in the Supreme Court this term. Should be interesting to see whether fealty to government power wins out over fealty to politics on the left, and if limits on government imposed by the constitution move the right to overcome their love of the social conservatives.

I'd be surprised if it was anything other than a party line vote, but it should be a no brainer to declare this an unconstitutional overreach in a 9-0 vote. Of course one could have said that about Wickard or Raich as well.

That's just plain stupid. Superman dates back to the first half of the 20th century. For most of the entire history of Superman the number of people in support of gay marriage was negligible. I dare say there was likely not a single outspoken proponent of gay marriage involved in the writing of Superman for the first several decades. In fact, for most of the history of Superman you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a public pro-gay stance at all. And virulently anti-gay commentary was commonplace.

And how many story lines dealt with anti-gay marriage propaganda? Or anti-gay anything?

The guy is a devout Mormon, which is a variant of Christianity. Most Christian sects reject homosexuality, at least officially. Toeing that party line hardly makes him an extremist. That puts him in line with a large majority of adherents to the largest religion in the country.

And this is coming from someone who is far, far to the left of any national political figure on the issue of gay rights.

but as of today, I hope that if I ever become a hateful bigot, society will spurn me.

So.... what makes you so sure you aren't a hateful bigot? By who's yardstick to you measure your hatefulness? Yeah, you may hate "all the right people" according to the crowd you run with, but that's hardly a solid moral foundation.

How's this for an idea? We the people stop allowing our leaders to go to war unless we are willing to accept massive death and destruction, including lots of what they euphemistically call collateral damage. If it isn't important enough to justify killing large numbers of people, including women and children, let's just not do it. Somehow I think if we held ourselves to that standard finding some "appropriate compromise" wouldn't be necessary, and war would be a much less frequent occurrence. As a side benefit, the military's job would become much more straightforward: destroy the enemy. No more half-war, half-nationbuilding. Just kill people and break things.

In fact, if that were the standard, perhaps war would quickly become a relic of the past. We'd be extremely reluctant to go to war, and any potential enemies would have to weigh the possible consequence of complete and utter annihilation.