The sequester was the result of the budget supercommittee failing to reach a deal, which then would have gone to a straight up/down vote in the congress. The committee was 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans. The blame for not coming to an agreement rests equally on both sides. (And keep in mind that any argument you make that D's were saints and R's just wanted to sink it would would be just as arbitrary if you exchange 'D' and 'R'.)

Also, Obamacare isn't part of the sequester because its full funding is provided for in the PPACA.

On top of all of that, Obamacare doesn't even pretend address the entire lack of a responsible mental health system in this country; that's not what it's about. It would only address insurance coverage for it if we even had something approaching a mental health system.

So not only does Obamacare have nothing to do with the lack of mental health treatment in the US, but Obamacare wasn't even part of the sequester cuts, and the cuts themselves weren't some vast right wing conspiracy. You're 0/3.

So back to my original questions:

1. Can you sight a case of right-wingers cutting social services, causing mentally ill people to be loose on the streets?

2. And do you have any comment or refutation of the ACLU's decades of lawsuits against the mental health system we used to have being the prime reason it no longer exists?

Huh?

http://connecticut.cbslocal.com/2012/12/17/connecticut-mental-health-bill-defeated-months-before-deadly-school-shooting/

The ACLU has been at the forefront of gutting the mental health system in the US, attacking Assisted Outpatient Treatment laws. Their privacy concerns are valid, but all they've accomplished is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Can you sight a case of right-wingers cutting social services, causing mentally ill people to be loose on the streets?

Substitute "handgun" with "car," "bicycle," "power tools," "alcohol," "house pets," or anything else.

Also, you have to watch out for the CDC studies; they count rival drug dealers killing each other as homicide by acquaintance using a gun kept in the home. o.O

If all guns ceased to exist this instant, it would last only an instant. American manufacturers have been producing better than 15,000,000 guns/year for a while now. That's a new gun every 2.1 seconds.

Not to mention that myself and millions like me would just go out to our garages and in about 20 minutes fashion a simple 12ga. zip gun for basic home defense until we could get our hands on one of the new guns being produced every two seconds.

The fantasy of gun control doesn't just require fantasy. It requires fantasy on top of fantasy on top of fantasy....

"All guns disappear.... and you can't make new ones... and people don't substitute other weapons.... and people stop wanting to be violent... and flying unicorns start farting rainbows into our utopia.... !!!"

You have to realize that there is a difference between being an "environmentalist" and being a "conservationist."

The conservationist says, "Let's do things responsibly so we can live well, and so that our children will still have the same opportunities to live well with what we leave behind."

The environmentalist says, "If humans alter anything at all, we've failed."

The results is that the environmentalists push policies that actively hurt people in their attempts to prevent anyone from changing the environment at all. The EPA is currently the most destructive organization in all of America because of all the harm they do in the name of pseudo-environmental causes.

Conservationism is the reason we still have a logging industry that responsibly replants trees for the future and doesn't clear-cut and destroy the land. Environmentalists still protest having access to toilet paper.

Conservationists are the reason that game animal populations in North America are healthy and that people have the opportunity to enjoy hunting. Environmentalists still want wolves to be protected even while they're destroying the livelihoods of poor rural ranchers.

Like many leftist causes environmentalism has the lofty goals of making the world a better place and helping people, but the unintended consequences of trying to achieve those goals does immeasurable harm to people.

It was in their shotgun import study they did maybe 3 years ago. They were arguing that they should ban a whole bunch of models of shotguns from import because 3-gun (a sport with over 250,000 competitors, nationally sponsored "pros", and its own TV channel) and plinking were not sports by the ATF's headache inducing butchering of the English language. During said mental gymnastics, they made the claim that plinking was instead a "past-time, and not a sport." I'm sure Major League Baseball, as America's National Past-Time, would be saddened to hear that the ATF thinks it is not a sport.

; )

The problem for the ATF and the president is that they can't just ask that the current law be renewed in its previous form. They don't have the self control to just do that.

The replacement law they've proposed would not just ban "undetectable" firearms, but would also ban all of the most popular handguns (which contain LARGE amounts of metal), hugely popular magazines containing plastic and metal, and large swathes of the scary looking cosmetic features that Feinstein wets herself over (since they're made of plastic).

We literally have a government so infantile, underhanded, immature and naive, that they'll pass on renewing a law they like just because they instead want to try and cram a lot of other garbage through with it.

Some other famous ATF rulings:

Shoestrings are machine guns.
ChoreBoy pot scrubbing pads are silencers.
If the ATF can swap out 7 internal parts of your gun with machine gun parts, and make it fire full auto, then you were in possession of a machine gun.
If you possess a combination of parts that could be used to make an illegal gun, you're guilty of having made it.
If, in 8 hours of work in a modern machine shop, you could convert a semi-auto gun to a machine gun, then it is "readily convertible" and illegal.
Baseball is not a sport. (Yes, that really is an argument the BATFE has made.)

I wont even begin on their rulings concerning the NFA, armor piercing ammunition, or import regulations, where their idea of logical comes completely unglued from reality.

I wonder if the ATF used the same kind of doctored up guns and ammo that they do for criminal trials.

Did you read the amendments too? The senate stopped representing the states in 1913.

No inflation by who's measure? The government refuses to count housing, energy, and food in their inflation numbers because "they're too volatile." Really the reason they don't count them is that those are the three things you use the most, and upon which there is the most demand in the market, and which have been subject to the highest inflation.

Food inflation in just the last three years has been nuts. My wife and I cook all out meals at home, and we watch the price of our groceries very carefully. Since this time in 2010 the price of a can of vegetables has gone from ~$0.60 to ~$1.00. Meat has crept up similarly, packages have gotten smaller, and quality has gone down. It's done slowly so the average consumer wont notice and get angry.

Saying that there is no inflation because the government's COLA numbers are nearly flat is to bury your head in the sand.

I think my answer would be that all the wayward programs you mention are only symptoms. The sickness that causes them all is the desire to have the government manage everything for you. So in that sense, getting rid of any one, or even all, of those programs wouldn't stop the NSA's illegal activities, and neither did any of those programs somehow spawn the NSA in its current out-of-control state. You would instead have to change the culture of people who think the government can manage their lives better than they themselves can.

And make no mistake, this isn't purely an R vs D issue. There are more than enough R's who love them some fascist control of the populace. The only difference is that it's enshrined in the Democrat party platform, and there are at least a few Republicans who fight to shrink the government's power over our lives. No one would ever argue that Bush was for limited government or expanding civil liberties.

This doesn't solve any problem, and instead only gives the TSA more power. Do you really want ARMED TSA agents there to intimidate people more than the run-of-the-mill TSA goons do now?

The majority of Californians sympathize with the Democrat platform.
The Democrat platform is all about more government control of (almost) everything: healthcare, education, regulation, business... everything.
When you've been elected to go to Washington and gain control over everything, it shouldn't surprise those who elected you that you run a giant spying apparatus to watch the same citizens who elected you to control them.
The only thing that should surprise any honest person is that the people who elected Feinstein over and over are angry that she went to Washington and did exactly what they elected her to do: grow the government, give it more power, and let it control everything it touches.

I'd say she is representing the views of the majority of Californians quite well. They're just suffering mass cognitive dissonance over the fact that they're being forced to reap what they've sown.

You can get a copy of the Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook with free 2-day shipping from Amazon Prime. I have a copy on my bookshelf, and yeah, it's pretty much every common explosive, producible in the home, with ingredients and equipment you're passing in the store aisles every day already.