It all comes down to the fact that criminals don't care about gun control laws. The only people who are bothered by high capacity magazine bans, pistol grip bans, flash hider and bayonet bans, are honest people who have to do handstands to understand the poorly worded ill-defined laws. The guy carting around kilos of dope or bent on a massacre doesn't care.

I wonder how many students would NOT have died if even 10% of the faculty had been carrying guns, concealed or not. Maybe the shooter wouldn't even have tried. I have yet to see any anti-gunner admit such a possibility, let alone discuss it.

If you could remove all present and future guns by rubbing a genie lamp three times, you could certainly eliminate gun violence. Gun control laws can't eliminate more than a fraction of guns, and that fraction comes mostly from the good guys who obey laws, thus worsening the good-guy / bad guy ration.

Gun control laws increase gun violence.

I believe this is about Julie directly, not John. She's the one who collects 15% of every contribution. Nice pay for doing nothing but signing your name!

As for the timing, heck, there is so much slime being uncovered daily that ANY day would been coincident with one of them. Take your pick, John, you'll always have a timing excuse as long as your party remains in power.

I wonder how many people actually believe the nonsense about frank discussions with the troops without their commanding officers around. (I don't remember the exact phrasing in the article.) No way I would ever have been any franker with the V.P. and without officers than with officers alone, when I was in. The only people who would have spoken up would be those who came to kiss his butt and those who had been hand picked to deliver scripted pats on the back and easy questions.

What a hoot!

I am always suspicious of friends trying to do things like this after big events ... the paranoid cynic in me wonders if she is pushy about this because she wants to (a) show off her new husband, a seemingly unusual character who can put up with her, or (b) she thinks she can push her new husband into becoming more social and thus "cure" him.

I am just speculating. I don't know the the people or the circumstances. This is my brainstorming contribution which may be wildly off the mark.

The oil companies are doing their part to boost Bush's image by making him appear to be their enemy. They know darned well nothing will come of his ethanol plan. It's just (oil) business as usual, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

Fanfic certainly started before Star Trek. The Baker Street Irregulars wrote tons of pastiches of the canon going back to the 1930s, I believe. I wonder if fanfic existed before Sherlock Holmes. Maybe not; it requires a canon and lots of fans, and I can't think of any offhand anywhere near the popularity of Sherlock Holmes.

The AK-47 has to be made in a factory with stamping presses and mass production. This may lead to economies of scale and to little innovation; all AK-47s are the same.

The M-16, on the other hand, was designed to be built by CNC machines and won't get the mass production discounts, but it does mean that just about anybody can make them, and can make modified versions. Plus its modularity (the upper with barrel and sights and bolt carrier and firing pin is separate from the lower with trigger and hammer) makes it easy to mix and match interesting combinations and variants, so there are quite a lot of different kinds of M-16s in both caliber and barrel length and accessories. These do not lend themselves to cheapness.

I was a supply clerk on a carrier 1973-76, and one of my earliest memories is walking under the tail of an F-4 for the first time, being amazed at all the screws, how dirty it could get, how massive that tail hook looked ... yes, I think my all time favorite plane, because it is so bent out of shape, the nose droop, the tails bent down, the outer wings bent up and just generally looking much more like a movie boxer with broken nose and mashed ears ... so much meaner looking than modern fighters, F-14-15-16-18 etc, all clean and purty. No doubt they are better fighters, being more modern, but also no doubt the F-4 looks meaner and nastier. I also prefer the WW II F4U Corsair against the purty P-51.

Never got tired of watching flight ops. Never.

Ha! I betcha these folks also are opposed to gay marriage because marriage is between a man and a woman for the purpose of raising a family. Since they want to rule out any but "natural" conception, do they also think she should not be allowed to marry, since she can't conceive?

It says 39 pounds for one person, 3600 for all, which is equivalent to 10,000 miles in a Prius.

A Prius can hold 5 passengers and not a lot of luggage. The airplane holds 92.

It's a very misleading comparison. It makes me wonder about the rest of the article, where else does it mislead?

It surely doesn't hurt the rider's bargaining powers come contract renewal time. That kind of marketing has been going on since the beginning of time. Wearing ads is a relative new fashioned idea.

What's with this quote: "I think 'Free Bird' is what did it. When 'Free Bird' can play to the voters up north, you know you have a winning combination."

Is there something I don't know? Is Freebird supposed to be something that only southerners like? What world have I been living in all these years?