Does anyone here have any objection to that? Seems to me it accommodates the "advise and consent" mandate without taking it to the point where courts and regulatory agencies lose their ability to function. What's the problem with it?

Somebody paid Vernon Wells $126M and it didn't make me rethink my opinion of him as a baseball player.

Re: Palin.... Someone calculated that Fox paid Palin $15.67 per word... you guys might want to rethink your opinions on her intelligence

At this point the only thing I can see working is for the states to call a constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the constitution to impose functional procedural rules on the Senate-

I don't really have much of a collection, though I do have a large number of books. I'm really not that concerned with the resale value. Rather, I hope to maintain a home with plenty of books for my children to read as they grow older.

Despite my general cynicism, I also think we're in a period--perhaps toward the end of it--where politics was made unruly by a combination of factors but especially the 3-year events of impeachment, Bush/Gore, 9/11. Those are all historically disruptive events, they all happened within 3 years, and they happened as parties were ideologically sorting as the Southern Democrats and Northeastern Republicans faded.

Sarah Palin is the Jeff Franceour of politicians. Somebody paid a lot of time and money and thought she would be a superstar in the political field, when in reality she didn't have the drive or ambition to improve on what she was.

Sarah Palin is the Jeff Franceour of politicians. Somebody paid a lot of time and money and thought she would be a superstar in the political field, when in reality she didn't have the drive or ambition to improve on what she was.

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s army chief warned Tuesday that the state could collapse if the latest political crisis roiling the nation drags on but also defended the right of people to protest.

Troops deployed in the two riot-torn Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez stood by and watched Monday night as thousands took to the streets in direct defiance of a night curfew and a state of emergency declared by the president a day earlier. Residents of those two cities and Ismailiya, a third city also the emergency, marched through the streets just as the curfew came into force at 9 p.m.

The display of contempt for the president’s decision was tantamount to an outright rebellion that many worried could spread to other parts of the country. Already, protesters across much of Egypt are battling police, cutting off roads and railway lines, and besieging government offices and police stations as part of a growing revolt against the rule of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood group.

At least 60 people have been killed since Friday.

Egypt’s army chief warned Tuesday that the state could collapse if the latest political crisis roiling the nation drags on but also defended the right of people to protest.

Is that a thinly-disguised threat of military coup?

Sounds like the other way around - the Army is going to sit this one out, so the state needs to figure out how to settle with the protestors non-militarily.

And while we're at it, didn't Leona Helmsley leave $12,000,000 to her dog?

Would the dog have to pay income taxes on the income from the money? Does that mean the dog gets a social security number?

(Reuters) - The burning of a library housing thousands of ancient manuscripts in Mali's desert city of Timbuktu is just the latest act of destruction by Islamist fighters who have spent months smashing graves and holy shrines in the World Heritage site.

The United Nations cultural body UNESCO said it was trying to find out the precise damage done to the Ahmed Baba Institute, a modern building that contains priceless documents dating back to the 13th century.

The manuscripts are "uniquely valuable and testify to a long tradition of learning and cultural exchange," said UNESCO spokesman Roni Amelan. "So we are horrified."

But if they are horrified, historians and religious scholars are unlikely to have been surprised by this gesture of defiance by Islamist rebels fleeing the ancient trading post on the threshold of the Sahara as French and Malian troops moved in.

"It was one of the greatest libraries of Islamic manuscripts in the world," said Marie Rodet, an African history lecturer at London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

...

Written in ornate calligraphy, these manuscripts form a compendium of learning on everything from law, sciences, astrology and medicine to history and politics, which academics say prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the European Renaissance.

...

But soon after the Tuareg invasion, the city of the 333 Saints fell under the sway of Islamist radicals. Bars and hotels closed and the tourists, already spooked by earlier incidents of abduction and murder by al Qaeda linked militants, stayed away.

CAMPAIGN OF DESTRUCTION

It was not long before the Islamists imposed severe Sharia law and set about a campaign of destruction of centuries-old Sufi sites that prompted international outrage.

Shrines, graves and mausoleums were attacked with pick-axes, shovels and even bulldozers. The bones of Sufi saints were dug up, and the hard-liners tore down a mosque door that locals believed had to stay shut until the end of the world.

The militants from the Malian Ansar Dine militant group that occupied Timbuktu (the name means Defenders of the Faith in Arabic) espouse an uncompromising version of Islam that rejects what it sees as idolatry and aims to destroy all traces of it.

In Timbuktu, their targets have been sites revered by Sufis, a mystical school of popular Islam which honours its saints with ornate shrines. At least half of 16 listed mausoleums in the city have been destroyed, along with a substantial part of the history of Islam in Africa.

A spokesman for Ansar Dine, asked to comment last year on the smashing of Sufi mausoleums in Timbuktu, said their actions were ordained by faith. "We are subject to religion and not to international opinion," the spokesman said.

Well I guess I can stop loathing the Boy Scouts quite as much as I did. Though I am not sure they are doing the right thing so much as trying to duck the issue. At least before they stood for something - something I disagreed with, but it was something.

Is that a thinly-disguised threat of military coup?

Depends - if the troops are loyal to the generals, it's awful tough to fire the guys with the tanks.

he's going to make replacing you with someone who will one of his top priorities

Here it seems to me is the core problem: the big winners under the American fiscal system are the elderly, the rural, and the affluent—Republican constituencies. It’s not easy to balance the budget or shrink government spending to any significant degree in ways that don’t pinch Republican voters much harder than they pinch Democratic voters.

To escape that reality, some conservative thought leaders have constructed an alternative reality. In this alternative reality, “welfare” not Medicare is the number one social spending cost.

In this alternative reality, government employment has not fallen by more than 500,000 since 2008.

In this alternative reality, half the country is deemed not to pay any tax—because this alternative reality refuses to count payroll taxes, excise taxes, and state and local taxes as taxes.

In this alternative reality, Medicare is counted as a program that is “paid for” by its beneficiaries contributions while unemployment insurance is not—even though the latter statement would be much closer to true.

In this alternative reality, we are in imminent danger of losing our freedom—even though, as a matter of daily experience, more Americans of all races and both sexes face fewer legal constraints upon their ability to live as they please than ever before in the nation’s history.

Inside this alternative reality, conservative thought leaders have substituted culture war for normal politics. They have succeeded only in isolating themselves from the country in which they live. Conservative politics and the Republican Party are on the wrong track. The particular traditions so learnedly detailed by Geoffrey Kabaservice are dead for good. But the spirit of empiricism, prudence, and inclusion that animated them is the only spirit that can revive limited-government politics for the 21st century.

(Reuters) - The burning of a library housing thousands of ancient manuscripts in Mali's desert city of Timbuktu is just the latest act of destruction by Islamist fighters who have spent months smashing graves and holy shrines in the World Heritage site.

So, here's a complete list of the assault weapons Diane Feinstein wants to ban.

So, here's a complete list of the assault weapons Diane Feinstein wants to ban.

So, here's a complete list of the assault weapons Diane Feinstein wants to ban.



And just after I had unlocked all those on Battlefield 3.

And just after I had unlocked all those on Battlefield 3.

2737. The Chronicles of Reddick Posted: January 30, 2013 at 12:37 PM (#4358207)

Herbalife isnt a pyramid scheme.


Sorry I missed the on-air shouting match between Akman and Icahn. Sounds like great theater.

And on queue.....

Would the dog have to pay income taxes on the income from the money? Does that mean the dog gets a social security number?

At least 3 shot at Phoenix business park

I'd have thought it would be "on cue". Though I suppose "add it to the queue" would work.

On the other hand if we're being honest I have no clue which is right.

One of the stupidest arguments I ever got into was when I was playing Scrabble with my girlfriend and I played "Queue", which she challenged. I said, "you know, like a line". Which, I admit, was ambiguous as she took that to mean an actor's line ("cue") and was unconvinced.

However, upon looking it up in the dictionary and seeing that a queue is a line as well, she was adamant that I hadn't meant that kind of "line". I suppose she thought I had spelled a word wrong and not only lucked out that my incorrect spelling was itself a word, but also lucked out that it had a definition which matched my claim. Which would be some pretty awesome serendipity.

I forget sometimes that most Americans are not familiar with the word ...

And on queue.....


I'd have thought it would be "on cue". Though I suppose "add it to the queue" would work.

The phrase "on cue" is a reference to acting, so it's "cue." You hit your mark on cue. You're never on queue; you're in a queue.

Hey I just got change out of the soda machine and received a dollar coin with Millard Fillmore on the cover. I thought it was a joke till I tried it again and got John Q Adams. So 2 questions: #1 when did they change the dollar coins and #2 who thought these 2 guys would be ideal for coins unless they are using presidents that are not on other money?

n the northeast, they say "On line" rather than "in line".

From 2007 to 2011, Presidential $1 Coins were minted for circulation in large numbers, resulting in a large stockpile of unused $1 coins. Since 2012, new Presidential coins are only being minted for collectors, in order to reduce the stockpile.

In the northeast, they say "On line" rather than "in line"

No, the other one.

Cue or Queue?

There are ancient precedents for this sort of thing. According to Thucydides, when the Athenians captured the rebellious city of Melos, they “slew all the men of military age.” And according to the biblical book of Deuteronomy, when the Israelites besieged a city and “God delivers it into your hands…you shall put all its males to the sword.” Since the Deuteronomist goes on to exclude children, the two policies are identical. The new American doctrine isn’t the same. We are not aiming to kill all the men of military age, but we have made them all liable to be killed. We have turned them into combatants, without knowing anything more about them than their (approximate) age. That wasn’t right in ancient Greece or Israel, and it isn‘t right today.

This last point can be driven home very simply: imagine a world, which we will soon be living in, where everybody has drones.

When these particular chickens come home to roost, it's gonna be uuuuuuuugly.

I wish Hagel had given him his direct answer - it was a dangerous foreign policy blunder. It did not meaningfully change the arc of our involvement, did not change the ethnic cleansing, did not alter our eventual departure without achieving much of anything other than Saddam's ouster, and delaying our attention to the real problem, Afghanistan, and at significant cost and risk. Whether that was worth the whole mess or not, I'll leave to others, but the "surge" did little or nothing to change the calculus.

kabuki theater

I've read this phrase more times in the past two months (usually in reference to political affairs) than I had in my whole life up to that point. Is there a reason for its sudden popularity?

What would be the point of that? I'm going to make sure my drone is one of th handsomest models available.

Mine will have decals of flames. Either that, or a paint job of Competition Orange

You don't pay income taxes on inherited money. The estate may have have to pay taxes on the value of the estate. But if your parent dies and you inherit money, that's not treated as income for tax purposes. Note that gifts are also not considered income. If someone receives a gift in amount large enough to trigger the gift tax, it's person who gives the gift that owes the taxes on that gift, not the recipient.

so east asia is looking at a currency war, a space race, and multiple border dispute for all parties, oh and a crazy kid with nukes, woopy!

John McCain is a bad impersonation of a Dana Carvey skit.

Speaking of which, why did the GOP not bluster and threaten wholesale bombing when NK was close to the bomb? Surely they make the Iranians look perfectly sane by comparison.

Just Jen Rubin, who hardly has a track record of successful prognostication. Chambers-esque, in fact.

Senate confirmation hearings are often about the performances. Chuck Hagel delivered a particularly mediocre one.

The former Nebraska senator struggled through answers, changed responses and seemed at points at a loss to describe why he wanted the job — or why President Barack Obama wanted him for it.
. . .
Given the weeks of acrimonious back-and-forth over his nomination as secretary of defense, former Sen. Chuck Hagel couldn’t — or shouldn’t — have been taken by surprise by the fusillade of questions he faced Thursday about Israel, Iran and other national security issues. Yet, again and again, Hagel found himself on his heels, offering awkward retractions of his prior statements and repeatedly using garbled phrases that underscored pre-existing doubts about his positions. He seemed like a politician more suited for the revise-and-extend tradition of the Senate than for the YouTube age.
. . .
At times, despite his dozen years in the Senate, Hagel seemed bewildered with the way his quotes were being picked apart. “I’ve had more attention paid to my words in the last eight weeks than I ever thought possible,” he said.

Seems like a lot of folk, from both aides of the aisle, are suggesting Hagel isn't all that bright, based on today's performance.

That was my takeaway as well. The votes are pretty much set, why give these bums the satisfaction of an argument?

My impression was that he knew he was going to be lambasted by the hawkish Republicans, but also knew that lashing back at them wouldn't win him any votes, so he just took a "whatever" attitude and waited until the inquisitors time ran out.

That was my takeaway as well. The votes are pretty much set, why give these bums the satisfaction of an argument?