It really depends on the dealer.

The local Nissan dealer was very nice, showed us a few vehicles, no pressure whatsoever. She even gave us buying advice for how to make the best deal (later confirmed online). They also give free oil changes and add onto the manufacturer's warranty.

The local Honda dealer was all that you say, high pressure tactics (including tag team hand-offs, "I have to talk to my manger", etc.), pushing unneeded services, pressuring into what they wanted to sell, etc.

Some dealers are added-value, some just suck.

The Kellerman study has been thoroughly discredited from many angles, including the fact that it used neighborhoods with high criminal populations, and counted rival gangs as someone you know. It even counted, for example, if you had a gun in the house, never used, and a rival gang-banger of your son's came in and shot somebody. Your gun had nothing to do with the violence, but it's counted towards Kellerman's total. On the other hand, if you pointed a gun at the bad guy and he fled, that was not counted as defensive gun use. There are many other problems with the study. It would take a whole article to detail them all.

Kellerman's study was also not formally peer-reviewed, and he still refuses to provide the raw data for outside analysis.

Other studies show between 100,000 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, far outnumbering gun deaths even counting suicide.

Japan has far more suicides, yet no guns. Explain. And, in a free society, who are we to legislate that someone can't kill himself by his desired means as long as he doesn't injure another in the process?

If you have the cash. Walk on the lot around the time the next model year is coming out, point to a previous-year (current calendar year) car sitting on the lot, and offer a below-invoice amount of money, cash (you did look that up, right?). For almost no work they get rid of it that morning to make space for the next year's cars. You will get way below the list price.

Also, do this on the last day of the month when they're desperate to add another car to their sales number. That can be worth a few more grand.

You don't get those advantages of pressure working for you when you order online.

So you want me to buy from the local Nissan dealer, which survives pretty much only on good reputation and good customer service, and not directly from the Nissan Motor Company, which could care less about me and was the entity that tried to steal nissan.com from its rightful owner.

I understand the general idea of those workers. If there seem to be a lot of groups with politically-oriented names popping up, it might be a good idea to pay extra attention to make sure some scam isn't going on. The problem is they restricted it to conservative groups. The first real management who discovered this put a stop to it, and broadened the category to both left and right politically-oriented groups.

Workers get stupid, management puts a stop to it and orders an IG investigation. Things are working like they're supposed to. I don't see a real problem here deserving of ongoing investigations. The only real issue is that the lower management didn't tell the upper management what was going on, so upper management didn't tell the truth to Congress.

Or, marrying a woman who probably told him "you're a dick, fix it." Won't be the first time a guy was whipped into shape by a good woman.

You want to keep, and even strengthen, the safe harbor provision.

Back in reality, a public healthcare system would be a government program. A government program operates on the incentive to make the program big and important. To do that, it will build as big and redundant a bureaucracy as possible.

You'll be called racist because that would eliminate the gerrymandering done according to the law in order to ensure minority-majority districts.

Define "corporation." Unions are corporations. Non-profits tend to be corporations.

You don't have to ban homosexuality, just enact reasonable measures to ensure only "appropriate" sex acts are committed. It does sound reasonable to people who like health, education and safety over some liberal fascination with gay sex.

Don't understand your second sentence anyway. Value health? As a health issue, guns are WAY down on the list. Education? No relation, except that liberals tend to not be educated on the subject. Safety? You'd avocate taking away the means for people to be safe against criminals?

I'm for food labeling too, as long as it's not takent to ridiculous extremes, such as having to write "WARNING: Contains Peanuts" on a bag of peanuts, or putting dietary information (calories, protein, etc.) on a bottle of pure water.

You're right about bombing. The deadliest mass murder at a school was in Bath, 38 dead from dynamite back in the 20s. There's really nothing stopping someone from filling his pickup with an ANFO bomb and doing another OK City with hundreds dead. Sure, we trace the chemicals now, but that's only to identify the perp -- who's planning to die anyway.

Ballblazer, still one of my favorite games ever. Rescue on Fractalis was great for the day too.

There will always be someone to step in to fill the power vacuum. The point is that after a while self-preservation will ensure that those who do fill it will be extremely averse to initiating violence against another country.

The problem is of course finding and killing these people. Israel has a hard enough time tracking down the Palestinians who make the bombs and order the attacks.