You may be describing behavior on the right, but I have yet to see, for example, a pro-choice group give Ben Nelson a pass because he has a (D) after his name.

I don't suppose there's any possibility that they might attempt to prevent the occurrence of gravely ill children by giving them some damn care before they reach nigh-irreversible crisis stage? Like they love to not do now?

Nah, you're right, caring for children is a losing proposition, so fuck 'em.

1. Voting against your party is not the same thing as voting against your party for cloture. They really are lockstep when it comes to that. Of course it doesn't help that we have the "lazy filibuster" rule now, where by you simply declare that you filibuster and everyone says "oh well" instead of making you read the phone book to an empty chamber 24/7 like they used to.

2. What "far-left" bills are you talking about? Health insurance, judging by your Ben Nelson link? Let me tell you something. All the polls shows Americans overwhelmingly favored the Public Option, and Single Payer was an even-money proposition. The only people for whom these things are "far-left" are in the pockets of the insurance industry. Furthermore, Ben Nelson is not a "moderate" anything. He may as well be a Republican -- same boat as Lieberman and all the other so-called "blue dog" Democrats. A better term for them might be "pretend" Democrats. An increasingly popular term for them is "conservaDems". You and the obstructionists in Congress might think having some sane programs to take care of us instead of ones to kill foreigners is a bad idea, but don't sit there and paint the rest of us as radical Marxists because we disagree.

Believing in evolution, on the other hand, would be to hold the position that the current plants and animals are the result of such a process, where the selection has been carried out by naturally occurring circumstances.

In other words, he could accept the mechanism, but not that it could be driven by anything but a someone. It's like an electrical engineer accepting that electricity exists, but insisting that lightning isn't really electricity because no one set up a generator floating in the clouds. Which is to say, extreme cognitive dissonance.

So is your dick. Do you avoid that too?

Exactly. Maybe next time Kucinich runs for President, people won't chuckle to themselves, and will instead vote for him.

The issue is you beat someone half to death without one of the few good reasons we have listed. Why you specifically did it does not matter, it was wrong and equally so no matter weather it was because you hate gays or the guys dog defecated in your yard. It is an in excuseable crime. I don't think as a society we should go down the path deciding when its more or less ok to hurt someone. Its ok because you had not other legitimate choice or its not ok. Its unforgivable and you should be kept away from society forever if it was premeditated, and if it was a crime of passion well made some reform and you can rejoin the rest of us at some point.

Did you hear what you just said? In one breath you say a crime is a crime and motivation shouldn't enter into the discussion, and in the next, you say premeditation implies this and crime of passion implies that.

Motivation differentiates levels of crime all the time. Manslaughter vs. murder, for example. Beating the hell of someone because he took your wallet and beating the hell out of someone to show all those uppity fill-in-the-blanks they should stay in their place are two vastly different crimes, and should be treated as such.

https://www.google.com/

The extra "S" is for extra Sinning!

You were doing all right till you implied liberals defend fundamentalist Muslim outrage. I thought we were the Godless Atheist Commies -- suddenly we're supposed to defend not only religious stupidity, but extremist religious stupidity?

Note to conservatives: just because you hate two different groups doesn't put them on a team together.

Yes, they can block (commandeer, actually) phones. Also planes. Also trains. This last one was the first such common carrier to be given emergency control by the president -- Lincoln, in 1862.

Everyone here seems to think these things are simply taken over on a daily basis because the Big Bad Ol' Gubbmint is a dictatorship crushing us all. Funny how we can all sit here talking about these things unhindered, then...

Yes, but I do wish manufacturers also made monitors that are natively portrait-mode -- which is to say, the subpixels are left-to-right when in portrait mode. Alternately, but not as good, would be support for the option of vertically-oriented ClearType in Windows.

Guess what else. Having passengers in the car and conversing with them is the exact equivalent of talking hands-free. Are we going to ban talking with one's passengers next?

Before the inevitable response comes of "but the people in the car with you see what's happening and stop talking when you need to pay attention to driving": Apparently, your passengers are way more attentive (and considerate) than mine.

Yahoo! Mail actually does this one better. You choose a username portion different from your real one, and specify an additional tag. E.g.: real address is joeblow@yahoo.com; disposable addresses might look like thingie-sometag@yahoo.com and thingie-someothertag@yahoo.com. This way, stripping the second part results in an invalid address, and there's no way to get back to your real one.

Nobody's forcing you to put up with the "extortionate" taxes here. There are plenty of other countries with little-to-no taxes. Little-to-no government too. I hear Sudan and Somalia are nice this time of year.