Azalin

"Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about government activity. He leaked many tens of thousands of personal communications of a type that, in government hands, are rightly subject to strict controls." So it wasn't an invasion of privacy until Snowden released the information. Right.

Yes. In this case, 'the market' is the job applicant. If they deem the wage to be fair compared with what other employers pay for the same work, they take the job.

According to Merriam-Webster: an amount of money you are paid for a job that is large enough to provide you with the basic things (such as food and shelter) needed to live an acceptable life.

Same thing with termites. Obviously, we need to plow over the forests and only build with brick or stone to save the planet.

Just my own opinion here, but the best way to 'bring the lower classes up' is to limit most peoples' access to welfare, adapting high schools to teach more trade skills, and making it easier for high school graduates to obtain student loans for community college and technical schools, to be paid back with the students' tax returns. Yes. Unions have always supported having and raising the minimum wage, because the minimum wage is used by unions as a baseline for their contract negotiations.

I can just imagine the reaction of people here in Lakeway when they learn about a new high rise section 8 apartment building going up by the golf course. http://thehill.com/regulation/administration/244699-hud-chief-grilled-over-housing-discrimination-rule "It’s not just about affordable housing, it’s about good transit; it’s about access to good schools; it’s about all that," Castro told the lawmakers." http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/11/obama-moving-to-force-diversity-on-rich-neighborhoods-with-increased-affordable-housing-plan/ "However, the plan will certainly have several problematic outcomes, critics note. For one, families employing federal subsides in section 8 housing won’t be paying the property taxes that others in such communities pay meaning that they will be sending their kids to schools they didn’t help pay for. This will increase the burden on local schools and on those actual taxpayers footing the bill." "Gosar warns that the main result will be that property values will naturally fall and that means property assessments will fall with them and that taxes will have to be raised to continue paying for local schools quite despite falling housing values."

The burrito won't go up in price, because if the market supported a more expensive burrito it would already have been priced higher. You can't just start raising the prices of goods and expect them to sell at the same rate as before. What happens is that people lose their jobs in order to accommodate a higher labor cost, and those that get to keep their jobs have to work even harder. Do you actually think that places like McDonald's just arbitrarily set their prices as their whims dictate? The more you raise the minimum wage, the more people get laid off.

Thanks to idiots like those, racism will always be kept alive and well in this country.

They certainly didn't seem to care about Rachel Dolezal pretending to be black.

They would be too suspicious of the water to drink it. I would be, too.

I have to disagree with you on this. The entire argument is based on whether it's man made or not. That would seem to me to be especially true if the bolded is accurate. If there is no doubt that that the Earth is growing warmer (and I'm not willing to agree that it is), then isn't the focus automatically on why? There are people out there with the desire to level all kinds of regulations, controls, and taxes on us based on something that hasn't been proven to exist, let alone whether humanity has anything to do with it.

The bolded is what I have a problem with. Is it real? Is it happening today? According to whom? Is it a natural occurrence or is it at least in part man-made? I don't think there's anyone on Earth who can say either way with any certainty. I do know this for certain - Gary is right when he points out that our last major climate shift was the end of the last ice age. Tom is right when he points out that consensus isn't science. We all know for a fact that once politics entered the picture, the well was poisoned. Nobody believes anyone else because now both sides of the argument have a vested interest in being correct in their claims. The Earth's climate does not change overnight - it takes a long time for any meaningful shift to be observed. I've often wondered (though I have a pretty good idea) how people would react if Washington stated that their new tactic for ridding the world of ISIS is to pour CO2 into the atmosphere, driving up the temperature around the globe, and roasting them out of existence. People would laugh at the very idea of such a thing, and I'd be willing to bet my last dollar that if it were a republican president in charge, the left would be screaming from the rooftops how such an idea is a complete impossibility.

Who's talking about feeling sympathy? Have you ever heard the saying that respect is a two-way street? Religious folks call it 'do unto others'. You could stand to study that philosophy.

Bob and Doug McKenzie, eh?

The next time you talk about acceptance or intolerance, I'll be here to remind you of this post.

I don't think that's fair. Of the Muslims I've known over the years, none have shown either intolerance or an inclination toward violence based on their faith. But should you be forced by law to accept and interact with those who offend you?

I can not name a single 'major religion' that promotes exclusion and violence towards those who are different. Can you?

Except that church is where most people in the western world learn about God as being something more than an abstract notion. We may not agree with how church portrays God, but church is where most in our society go to learn about or to find Him. Spirituality, like faith, is inspired - it doesn't exist on it's own within us. The desire to search for spirituality exists in all of us to one extent or another, but humanity has always needed to either discover or create that inspiration before spirituality can be attained. Although I'm not a very religious person, I was raised attending a protestant church most Sundays. While I never took the lessons taught in Sunday school literally, the morals learned there have been a positive influence in helping guide me through all the ups & downs in my life, and although church is certainly not the only place those values can be learned, it's been a source of spiritual inspiration for many people for many years.

Oh, hell yeah - that flag's gotta go.

It may as well - that's what I spend most of my money on.

I can tell you from personal experience (I'm a member of the Communications Workers of America, a telecom employee's union) that the unions are indeed involved in the fight to increase the minimum wage, since all union wages essentially use the minimum wage as a baseline to calculate union wage demands for the next contract. I'm not saying that's a smart thing to do, only that they indeed do it. A Sonic opened up a few years ago here in down town Austin in a building that had previously been an Arby's. It's the only Sonic I've ever seen that had no curbside service at all, being 100% walk-in and sit-down only.

It's not that they're 'stuck on stupid', it's because the dems offer them more perks via entitlements & acceptance (if they're illegal) in exchange for their vote, while telling them that the republicans want to take away the entitlements and toss them out of the country, which in the case of illegals, is largely true. What the republicans need to do is make a convincing case that people are better off making their own way than relying on supplemental programs and assistance for the rest of their lives.

I've only ever downloaded 5 songs in my life, and paid 99 cents for each one on iTunes. Otherwise, I do like Gugny and buy CDs.

I'm with you on principle, but it is sad that so many Americans are duped into thinking that way. The thing that I despise most about the people that propagate this nonsense is that they're taking advantage of what I consider to be noble character trait many people have - to preserve and protect the environment. They even have many Americans oblivious to how much we've done to clean up our rivers and air, how automobile emissions have been lowered drastically since the early 70's, and how much we've learned to conserve energy. If you listen to the modern-day environmentalists, they'll have you believing that the United States is the single greatest threat to the Earth, which is complete nonsense.