I'm really glad to see folks pushing back against the junk history that's being used to beat Catholics over the head. Kudos!

Spontaneous miscarriage is not the result of a willed choice on the part of the woman. It's just the way the human body naturally works. When you engage your free will to actively end a life, however, that's when you're on the wrong side of the line.

In a way, you're absolutely right. In others, not so much.

Adding my support to P/GP. The Catholic Church is much more concerned for and supportive of the poor and disadvantaged than she gets credit for. But somehow we get lumped in with the worst that the Protestants have on offer after doing 2000+ years of philosophical inquiry into what it means to be a human being.

The main thing is that Catholics who are faithful to the teachings of the church do not fit anywhere in the narrowly-defined left/right spectrum that people use to try to understand politics in the US. Speaking for myself, I can't throw my support behind any party currently on stage. I tend to agree with the Libertarians because that direction gives the best chance for dismantling the centralized power structures and implementing something more in line with the principle of Subsidiarity. I'd encourage anyone who's tired of the choices we've been presented with over the last few decades to have a look at Distributism.

Couldn't agree with you more on that one. One of the reasons I'm such a big fan of Distributism.

Living in Alabama, I have to wonder if some states have the maturity to be responsible for their own governance... I'm convinced that the only reason we have Interstates is that the Feds paid for all of it. And I say that as a believer in States' Rights... I just don't know how to let states have completely free rein and still have a decently uniform standard of living across the nation. Heck, we don't even have a uniform standard of living now...

When they actually pay that rate without using dodges and loopholes... Let's be honest here. The middle class doesn't have the same access to accountants and lawyers, so appealing to the rate is meaningless if you're trying to argue that the plutocrats are paying just as much as the average worker.

Crap. Bad moderation. Sorry...

One thing I've wondered, though... If the market predicts that the project will fail and then the project is cancelled based on the market prediction... Do the payouts for the people who bet on failure still go through?

Lately it seems to me that the real cops are behaving much more like the GTA ones than "legally and sanely".

For whataever reason it's being done, my impression is that this administration no longer feels legally bound to much of anything if it's not in the interests of those in charge.

So basically exactly the same argument for creating a monopoly across the wireless spectrum that was used to create monopolies across wired infrastructure. Look at the history of electrical and wired telephone rollout... Everything went fine until--

The monopolies lobbied for and got deregulation. Now there is no accountability and we get to either accept it or not have electricity and telephone communication.

Look, I get the economic benefits of centralizing. But to pretend that the monopoly formed will stay regulated in perpetuity flies in the face of history. In fact, given the way change has accelerated, I wouldn't give you a decade before a scheme became corrupted.

Common sense needs a common perception of reality in order to be effective. Relativism has pretty well destroyed that common base, and so the sense went with it.

That's why the National Guard would be used instead of the Active Duty personnel.

Good idea... But who's going to go first?