I agree with Cornyn on both counts - it is an indictment of Congress' oversight failures, and asking for it to be "non-partisan" when his party will defend it's own regardless of the merits of the case is a fairy tale expectation.

Am I missing something here?

Repeated round off errors, for one.

How honest are you with yourself?

Are you really there to witness? Are you sure? Is it the best way, the best place, the best time?

Or are you there for same reason everyone else is - to have fun, to see, to vacation? To experience, even vicariously, the thrill of the sin?

The Bible is pretty clear that the lord is just as willing to condemn you for the sins on your mind as the sins you might literally commit.

Repent!

The first solution proposed - can you disagree with this? Do you really think humanizing sexuality, making it a more meaningful, if not a spiritual experience, is a bad thing?

I absolutely can and do, and here's why: those words may sound pretty to you, but what they actually mean is the denial of proven life-saving disease prevention programs. People will die from those sweet nothings.

I'm always startled by people's willingness to accept awful statements if they're couched properly. Here's some translations for those who haven't clued in yet:

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" = torture

"unlawful enemy combatant" = innocent children

"humanizing sexuality, making it a more meaningful...experience" = death by AIDS

We could get into a discussion of proportionality of the response and the degree of the actual or perceived threat (which are important but not the issue at hand)...

Nonsense. Those issues you dismiss are exactly the issue at hand. A rude but non-damaging slap is wrong and illegal. Beating the stuffing out of said slapper long past any reasonable point of self-defense, however, is wrong and felonious.

So, any time an embryo fails to implant - usually do to fertilization occurring too long after ovulation - you just killed someone! Most people have done this several times before a successful pregnancy.

Madness.

lets face facts: "people" without brains are their natural constituency.

So true.

All the sob stories are profoundly unconvincing for one important reason: the beneficiaries are still left as multi-millionaires over and above whatever they had before the untimely death. Cry me a river about your >7 million dollar inheritance. Oh, no, you "had" to sell, so now it's cash at a loss - still >7 million dollars if you're paying a dime of tax.

And how totally worthless was your work on that land, anyway, really, given that you have fourteen years to pay off the estate tax? All these people talking about a "sudden" need to pay all this cash are talking total nonsense.

Where did all this hate against Texas come from?

They'll never forgive y'all for Bush.

There is a smallish, finite set of specialty license plates. While there is some, small individual expression in selecting one, at that scale it is still mostly a government speech, and as such cannot be forced to be open as a function of free speech.

Why are our license plates so silly, anyway?

Why can't we have European-style license plates? No messages or graphics of any kind, just the license number big and legible. Elegant, functional, and minimalist despite the larger size. -- Magic_Al

Here in America we expect our government to be beholden to money. The idea that for some extra cash the government should bend over backwards to conform to our needs rather than vice-versa is considered corruption elsewhere, and business as usual in the U.S.A..

What gives the DMV the right to promote political positions?

The situation under discussion is a private party attempting to force the DMV to provide a specialty plate for their particular political position. As the DMV in question, as a matter of policy, is not providing such, I see no particular reason to question them on such grounds.

There are two issues that will always give the Republicans a huge advantage in elections, lower taxes and lower spending.

That worked better before they actually got enough reins of power to demonstrate that they're at least as spendthrift as the Democrats. I'm not convinced the electorate will so quickly forget the massive spending sprees of '01-'06, or the doubling of the debt under Bush. Fiscal conservatism may always be popular, but who really associates it with Republicans any more? They simply don't walk the walk. The only part of it they can handle is opposing the Democrats.

I seem to remember that they opted to deliberately attempt to win elections not by courting the shrinking pool of independents, but instead by rousing the "base" as much as possible to maximize turnout. A viable short-term tactic, for sure, but in the long run, I think that very idea is exactly what is shrinking their base.

Good ol' "Christian Right". For a movement supposedly devoted to morality, they sure have absolutely no hesitation about misrepresenting themselves and generally outright lying to get their way. Briefly. Before people catch on and toss 'em out yet again.

The increasing use of the word "rape" in slang is not a symptom of devaluation of the term at all, but rather an elevation of the crime's status as a horror. Such slang usage is all about selecting the most extreme analogy which springs to mind. If rape were "devalued" or considered unimportant or inconsequential, then it wouldn't get slangified, because it would have lost its power.

The use of "rape" where "murder" might have once been used suggests that "rape" has indeed taken its place alongside other extreme crimes in the popular conception.