Taro T

It'll take a lot of 'em off the street, but you'll still have a few stragglers. Heck, car washes are everywhere - high end hand wash, cheapy gas station ones, and do it yourselfers; basically one for every budget. But the squeegy guys still come to the curb each day to wash the windows.

Which is probably where he wants it to look like he's going with it. Not only that, he's being proactive and doing SOMETHING. Unfortunately, all I see this proposal does is allow the government to have a national biometric database of the citizens and again ignore illegal imigration.

Makes perfect sense. We don't enforce the existing laws. Let's create new laws that are burdonsome to the law abiding populace, will be ignored by the unscrupulous, and also will most likely be not enforced.

The ignorance in DC isn't what's astounding. It's the ignorance of the general population to not see what's going on. Most of the politicians are willfully ignorant (there's only a handful of Pelosi's that are truly mind-numbingly dumb); in order to look like they're doing something, they have to come up w/ new laws/regulations. If they do what you suggest - make the regulatory agencies actually do their job and enforce the existing regs - then not only don't they get to stand before the cameras and say "I've created and passed this law that will solve all the problems" but someone might ask them why the existing laws / regs weren't enforced up front. Not my fault - it's the executive's fault. True, the executive enforces the laws and makes the regs, but the Congresscritters still write the checks. I still am more amazed by the "yeah, you're right, the existing regs aren't enforced, but we still need new ones because the old ones aren't enforced" than I am by politicians playing the system.

Defending Champs 3 years running.

Sorry to read about your brother. I agree w/ you on the bolded portion. Thus why I'd go with legalizing most drugs (definitely the "soft" ones) and make the penalties for committing crimes while high much more severe. I'd also have a "zero tolerance" (man, do I hate that phrase) for minors with severe penalties for those distributing to minors and penalties (loss of license perhaps) for minors committing crimes / violations with (what would be) formerly illegal substances in their system. I'd have some sort of an exception that would allow parents to supervise "experimentation" w/ alcohol or pot. I'm sure that there's no way it will ever happen, so I haven't been real worried about the details of it.

Absolutely. Gold Jerry. This is gold.

Bristol's looking for media attention seems to me to be more of a "the horse is out of the barn, no sense in locking the door now" thing. She had been slammed from every direction as soon as the pregnancy became public knowledge. So, if she's going to get/ is getting slammed, I can see where she'd try to jujitsu it into something positive. I would agree that she is squarely in the public and has taken steps to keep herself there. I was merely pointing out that simply having been on stage with her mother is not what, nor should have been what, opened her up to the late night jokes. If being on stage is all it takes to make the kids fair game, then every politician's kids are fair game as every one of them brings them out at the big events.

The media dragged the Obama kids onto the stage at the DNC? I guess those 2 girls are fair game now as well?

If term limits are enacted, what sort of restrictions would you put (if any) on staffers? If the 2nd year Senator is relying on a 30 year insider running his office, I'm not too certain that the staffer is working for the Senator and not the other way round.

Not necessarily, 2 wrongs making a right and all.

Absolutely, anything brought about in court is a waste of time. But that alone won't necessarily make this a short court battle. This is afterall NYS where factions war over issues long after all reasonable people would have packed it in and called it a day. The thing I am hoping is that this clogs up stuff on the Senate side and nothing comes out of Albany, at least until after the next election cycle is complete. (Who knows, maybe they can find a way to drag it out beyond that one as well.) If they aren't in session, they can't raise taxes and they can't increase spending.

Wellllllllll, he does own the Sabres for whatever that's worth ...

Interesting. Looks like NY is in for a long court battle. Linky

How well they do running Hummer will depend on what exactly it is they bought. The article stated that GM will still make the cars which implies that the Chinese won't get the machinery and tooling to make the cars. The article further stated that the Chinese can make the autos in other locations which implies that they WILL get the machinery and tooling necessary to make the cars. Given China's track record w/ intellectual property protection, providing a Chinese company with improved methods of production will improve the quality of Chinese autos in general. Possessing the tools to make a higher quality car gives them much more of an ability to make a higher quality car than simply buying a separate car and reverse engineering it. "We have the car all pulled apart, now all we have to do is stamp this sheet out to these tolerances. No problem, right?" "Well, except for the fact that our stampers have a tolerance 1 order of magnitude greater than that." (Repeat same general discussion for the few thousand other parts that make up a car.) We won't even bring GM's legacy costs and Tengzhong's lack thereof into the discussion. And it isn't terribly surprising that you view this as giving an engineer the tools of a heart surgeon when this is actually the case of giving an engineer the tools of an engineer.

I've never been to prison, but it's my understanding that there is a bit of a "dating scene" there and I don't mean just the Thursday conjugal visits.

Going back a ways, but Jerry Glanville's teams used to have significantly more tackles than defensive plays run.

Whether he was going to try to increase govt's role in health care and the other issues you mention was never up for debate. (The merits of increasing govt's role are debatable, but that's for another thread.) I don't think he ever expected to be able to nationalize the auto or financial industries (or, for that matter any other industries, with the possible exception of airlines). To suggest otherwise is getting into OM territory. But he could significantly increase the government's role in how they are run w/out being in charge outright. I think that is something that he would have been pushing for even if the economy was running smoothly. (Had it been running smoothly, he would have had a much more difficult time to pursue "change" and would have come away with far fewer "reforms" but he would have been looking for change none the less.) You and I disagree about the credit card companies. I think he would have been pushing for "reforms" to help the "struggling" borrowers which would have severe unintended consequences much like the bill he just signed.

Do I think that he thought he'd get the chance to totally remake the auto companies and the banking system when he announced his candidacy? Absolutely not. Do I think that when he announced his candidacy he would like to steer our system to a more socialistic version and one where government plays a more predominant role in our everyday lives? Absolutely. Do I think he's following Emanuel's mantra of "never let a crisis go to waste?" Absolutely. His mantra was "change." The fact that it looks like he'll get to change more than he expected the day he cast his hat into the ring is not likely to temper the mantra. It appears that we're in that once per generation period when all the cards are lined up to steer the country quite a bit to the left. Don't know if he'll pull it off, and I hope he doesn't because I expect it will set us up for far greater problems down the road than if we were to follow a more fiscally responsible path, but he does seem to be going for it.

That is true. I also expect the Israelis would find and kill the B word.

If Ahmadinejad directly attacks Israel w/ a nuke, he might as well be a suicide bomber, because he personally is dead along w/ most of the rest of the citizens of Tehran. No doubt he wants the Grand Caliphate. But he wants to be there to see it / run it. Upon further review of your earlier discussion, I see you weren't the person stating that Iran would go nuclear in a 1st strike. That Ahmadinejad wants a war to destroy Israel is no secret.

No, it is not thinking in Western terms. Show me which top dogs led suicide missions of their own. It's a pretty short list. They may have little regard for OTHER human life and "their own people", but they do seem to have regard for themselves.

Tis true that the suicide bomber gets glorified. It's also true that VERY few of the leaders over there end up suicide bombers. I'd be very surprised if Ahmadinejad intentionally put in motion a plan that would nearly guarantee his inclusion in the millions lost as collateral damage.

Didn't feed it any froggies?

Ahh, yes. Who could ever forget the classic: SAAAAAAN-Ta-Rem where the pirahna come nipping in the rain. Keep your livestock dry, or you will cry and neeeeeever see them once again.