Puterbac News Network and Political Discussion Thread

[Jungle Rat]

World Series pics please. At least we will have something to watch in November that will be competitive.

[Professor Tiger]

My problem is first and foremost, the federal government forcing the Catholic Church to violate their religious beliefs. That strikes me as the kind of tyranny that the US was specifically founded to oppose.

Secondarily, I think it is ridiculous that anybody should be forced to pay for the cost of somebody else's freely chosen behavior. If I must pay for Sandra Fluck's recreation, then she should pay for mine. She can start with my shotgun shells and Jack Daniels bills. They add up.

[hedge]

"If you want see liberalism's tendency to use government power to brutally hasten their version of the Millenium, see Josef Stalin or Chairman Mao. They were both liberals on steroids."

Well thankfully, everybody can pick their examples to "illustrate tendencies" (as you put it) and I can therefor just as easily make the case that Stalin and Mao were both conservatives on steroids. Hell, I can make the case that "conservatives" in America over the past 40 years are borderline Stalinists, to wit: You choose to focus on soft drinks and birth control as examples of liberal tyranny (as is your right, which I fully support), but far more salient and important to me are issues of personal liberty in other realms.

I am pro porn and pro drug, but far more important to me is that anyone should be able to be pro choice in both of those areas. Ostensibly and ideally, conservatives would agree with me there (and true conservatives do), but what passes for "conservatism" these days (your basic republican idiot who really believes himself to be a conservative) are generally against these things. Look no further than the Meese Commission that took Playboy (Playboy!) off the shelves in convenience stores (and you're whining about a nanny state because of a soft drink ban in Manhattan?) and the idiotic and disastrous "war on drugs" (which has always been unmitigated and unapologetic totalitarianism of the worst order) that were launched under that "conservative" god Ronald Reagan and still supported by most so-called conservatives today.

But in both cases (certainly moreso in the case of drugs), the so-called conservative element in government has set itself up as the nanny (or rather, Terminator) who can and does send men with guns into the homes of citizens and literally lock them away (if they don't just murder them on site) for years and years, simply for being in possession of marijuana. And yet you would rather focus on annoyances like soft drinks that nobody is getting arrested for rather than what should be considered issues of personal liberty to anyone who gives a shit about personal liberty (oh wait, I thought those people were supposed to be "conservatives", whoops...) for which thousands of citizens every day are having their rights and liberties being systematically wiped out by the State.

I mean let's be serious here. I know you are hard core religious and probably don't think porn and drugs are important and perhaps even think they should be suppressed (in which case, please don't ever mention anything about a "liberal" nanny state ever again), but they are both orders of magnitude more important to me than whether somebody can buy a gallon of Pepsi in Tribeca or not. I just find it odd that you can't see the "conservative" focus on eradicating porn and drugs (or, since they can't and never will be able to eradicate it, then their focus on punishing consumption of both of them as much as possible) as a far more egregious abuse of State power than some silly ban on buying a gallon of Pepsi in a plastic cup or ensuring that women can get birth control if they want it from a tacitly State supported entity (via tax exempt status, amongst many other state benefits) such as any entity connected to the catholic church or any other church.

But again, please, as long as you're fine with men with guns under the full blessing (blessing? What am I saying? Fucking MANDATE) of the government breaking into the houses of citizens and wiping out their Constitutional civil rights, stealing their property and throwing them in jail (or saving themselves the inconvenience of all that an just outright murdering them in their own homes with guns and bullets paid for by our fucking taxes and therefor implicating all of us in those state supported murders) simply because they suspect them of having some marijuana in their house, then please STFU with the mewling and whining about some "liberal" nanny state or liberal "tyranny" because you can't buy a gallon of Pepsi in Manhattan in a plastic cup. If want to talk to me about tyranny, I'm glad to do it, but only if you're serious. And claiming state tyranny b/c of some specific size limit set by a local government on the size of soft drinks available for purchase is NOT a fucking serious claim. It's ridiculous and it's below you. But even if it's not below you, it is goddamn well below me...

[hedge]

"My problem is first and foremost, the federal government forcing the Catholic Church to violate their religious beliefs. That strikes me as the kind of tyranny that the US was specifically founded to oppose."

I agree that the state should stay out of the idiotic business of churches of any sort (the less association with that sort of stupidity the better), but I do find it kinda funny in an ironic way that you seem so keen on painting any sort of state influence in this area as "tyranny" while simultaneously slobbing the knob of the most brutal and tyrannical edifice ever inflicted upon the face of humankind, i.e., the catholic church, and yes, that includes any relatively temporary ( a few decades, a few centuries, whatever) flourishing of some tin-pot dictatorship or doctrine, like Hitler or communism. None of them (anywhere, ever) has been able to hold a candle to the millennial systematic depravity and soul-poisoning rot that has been inflicted upon mankind by the catholic church...

[Owlman]

Religious freedom stops at the point in time they go into the commercial arena. If you can get enough of the federal and/or state to pay for your ammunition, then more power to you. Doubt you can, but try it anyway.

[Toemeesleather]

Liberals themselves do the best job defining who/what they are:


[youtube]Jg-jzlWcc0E[/youtube]

[Toemeesleather]

Red neck, knuckle dragging teabaggers take to union busting in Camden, NJ.


The police acknowledge that they have all but ceded these streets to crime, with murders on track to break records this year. And now, in a desperate move to regain control, city officials are planning to disband the Police Department.

The reason, officials say, is that generous union contracts have made it financially impossible to keep enough officers on the street. So in November, Camden, which has already had substantial police layoffs, will begin terminating the remaining 273 officers and give control to a new county force. The move, officials say, will free up millions to hire a larger, nonunionized force of 400 officers to safeguard the city, which is also the nation’s poorest.

Hardly a political battle of the last several years has been fiercer than the one over the fate of public sector unions. But Camden’s decision to remake perhaps the most essential public service for a city riven by crime underscores how communities are taking previously unimaginable steps to get out from under union obligations that built up over generations.

Though the city is solidly Democratic, the plan to put the Police Department out of business has not prompted the wide public outcry seen in the union battles in Chicago, Ohio or Wisconsin, in part because many residents have come to resent a police force they see as incompetent, corrupt and doing little to make their streets safe.

[Professor Tiger]

Hedge, FYI, I personally oppose porn and drugs, but I am enough of a libertarian to believe that states have the right to decide whether they are legal or not, with the BIG exception of kiddie porn. FWIW, I am not aware of anyplace in the US where porn is ilegal. I am currently in one of the most conservative states in the US - Alabama. Porn is for sale here. Unless your pro-porn zeal extends to kiddie porn. Please tell me you are not a cho-mo/chicken hawk.

[Professor Tiger]

Religious freedom stops at the point in time they go into the commercial arena. If you can get enough of the federal and/or state to pay for your ammunition, then more power to you. Doubt you can, but try it anyway.

NOW is very active in the marketplace. So is the NAACP and other liberal organizations. They have thousands of employees, own lots of property and have plenty of money in banks. They are every bit as much part of the marketplace as the Catholic Church. So therefore you would be okay if some future conservative president forced them to pay for free ammunition for NRA members, free pipes for the coal and oil industries, scholarships for programs that claim to change gay people straight, etc.?

[billy bob bocephus]

sounds fair and reasonable to me ... except for that part where the Catholic Church has to buy birth control for all the Flucks in the world, of course

[Professor Tiger]

Hedge, I visited a Catholic convent today. The two sisters there (both appearing to be in their 60's) were very busy giving out free canned goods and clothing to the many poor people of rural Alabama. They remind me of all the Catholic schools that offer a decent education to poor kids, the countless Catholic hospitals that provide health care to those who can't afford it. Then there are the innumerable Catholic orphanages around thr world that have provide care and adoption for orphans.

I have never in my life seen a single atheist organization that gave free food or free health care or free education or free adoption services to the poor the way the Catholic Church does. They don't seem to fit your description of them at all.

[Johnette's Daddy]

http://news.yahoo.com/secret-cold-war-t ... 08828.html

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer.

After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame.

In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis.

Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked.

But in 1994, the government said the tests were part of a biological weapons program and St. Louis was chosen because it bore some resemblance to Russian cities that the U.S. might attack. The material being sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine fluorescent powder.

Now, new research is raising greater concern about the implications of those tests. St. Louis Community College-Meramec sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor's research has raised the possibility that the Army performed radiation testing by mixing radioactive particles with the zinc cadmium sulfide, though she concedes there is no direct proof.

But her report, released late last month, was troubling enough that both U.S. senators from Missouri wrote to Army Secretary John McHugh demanding answers.

Aides to Sens. Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt said they have received no response. Army spokesman Dave Foster declined an interview request from The Associated Press, saying the Army would first respond to the senators.

The area of the secret testing is described by the Army in documents obtained by Martino-Taylor through a Freedom of Information Act request as "a densely populated slum district." About three-quarters of the residents were black.

Spates, now 57 and retired, was born in 1955, delivered inside her family's apartment on the top floor of the since-demolished Pruitt-Igoe housing development in north St. Louis. Her family didn't know that on the roof, the Army was intentionally spewing hundreds of pounds of zinc cadmium sulfide into the air.

Three months after her birth, her father died. Four of her 11 siblings succumbed to cancer at relatively young ages.

"I'm wondering if it got into our system," Spates said. "When I heard about the testing, I thought, 'Oh my God. If they did that, there's no telling what else they're hiding.'"

Mary Helen Brindell wonders, too. Now 68, her family lived in a working-class mixed-race neighborhood where spraying occurred.

The Army has admitted only to using blowers to spread the chemical, but Brindell recalled a summer day playing baseball with other kids in the street when a squadron of green Army planes flew close to the ground and dropped a powdery substance. She went inside, washed it off her face and arms, then went back out to play.

Over the years, Brindell has battled four types of cancer — breast, thyroid, skin and uterine.

"I feel betrayed," said Brindell, who is white. "How could they do this? We pointed our fingers during the Holocaust, and we do something like this?"

Martino-Taylor said she wasn't aware of any lawsuits filed by anyone affected by the military tests. She also said there have been no payouts "or even an apology" from the government to those affected.

The secret testing in St. Louis was exposed to Congress in 1994, prompting a demand for a health study. A committee of the National Research Council determined in 1997 that the testing did not expose residents to harmful levels of the chemical. But the committee said research was sparse and the finding relied on limited data from animal testing.

It also noted that high doses of cadmium over long periods of exposure could cause bone and kidney problems and lung cancer. The committee recommended that the Army conduct follow-up studies "to determine whether inhaled zinc cadmium sulfide breaks down into toxic cadmium compounds, which can be absorbed into the blood to produce toxicity in the lungs and other organs."

But it isn't clear if follow-up studies were ever performed. Martino-Taylor said she has gotten no answer from the Army and her research has turned up no additional studies. Foster, the Army spokesman, declined comment.

Martino-Taylor became involved years ago when a colleague who grew up in the targeted area wondered if the testing was the cause of her cancer. That same day, a second colleague confided to Martino-Taylor that she, too, lived in the test area and had cancer.

Martino-Taylor decided to research the testing for her doctoral thesis at the University of Missouri. She believes the St. Louis study was linked to the Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project and a small group of scientists from that project who were developing radiological weapons. A congressional study in 1993 confirmed radiological testing in Tennessee and parts of the West during the Cold War.

"There are strong lines of evidence that there was a radiological component to the St. Louis study," Martino-Taylor said.

Blunt, in his letter to the Army secretary, questioned whether radioactive testing was performed.

"The idea that thousands of Missourians were unwillingly exposed to harmful materials in order to determine their health effects is absolutely shocking," the senator wrote.

McCaskill agreed. "Given the nature of these experiments, it's not surprising that Missouri citizens still have questions and concerns about what exactly occurred and if there may have been any negative health effects," she said in a statement.

Martino-Taylor said a follow-up health study should be performed in St. Louis, but it must involve direct input from people who lived in the targeted areas.

"Their voices have not been heard," Martino-Taylor said.

[Professor Tiger]

Shades of Tuskegee.

[hedge]

Hedge, FYI, I personally oppose porn and drugs, but I am enough of a libertarian to believe that states have the right to decide whether they are legal or not, with the BIG exception of kiddie porn. FWIW, I am not aware of anyplace in the US where porn is ilegal. I am currently in one of the most conservative states in the US - Alabama. Porn is for sale here. Unless your pro-porn zeal extends to kiddie porn. Please tell me you are not a cho-mo/chicken hawk.

Of course I oppose kiddie porn, but the main thrust of my post was about drug laws. But you really didn't address anything I said about the State vigorously exercising deadly force on a daily basis against its citizens, confiscating their property, trampling their civil rights, and throwing them in prison (to the point that we have more people incarcerated than any other nation on the planet, and most of those people are in there b/c of drug laws). Somehow you seem OK with that type of action at the federal, state and local level all over the country, but yet as soon as you can focus on some stupid local ordinance about soft drinks, you start squawking about liberal "tyranny". If you really see any equivalence b/w the situation I describe and that stupid soft drink shit in Manhattan, there's no point in continuing this discussion. Sadly for me, b/c I expect that kind of idiocy from the usual fucknuts in here, but you seemed a bit more reasonable...

I don't really feel as antagonistic towards that church as my second rant made it seem, I guess they've done some good here and there, but they've fucked up alot of people over the centuries as well. Not really interested in discussing that, however, b/c those type of discussions don't ever go anywhere. I do like to sass the church, but the issue of state tyranny as it relates to drug laws is deadly serious IMO...

[Jungle Rat]

Leave hedge alone. Its North Carolina. Kiddie porn is a family tradition.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Well I'm not sure how much impact debates actually have on the election...but good Lord...Obama is getting his ASS kicked tonight...I really didn't think it would be this bad...I thought Romney would show him up slightly...but this is an absolute CAN OF WHUP ASS. I think Romney actually has a great chance of beating The Teleprompter now...

cue Rat to post how great Obama did

[THE_WIZARD_]

...now on to the VP debate...where it will be an even bigger CAN OF WHUP ASS for the GOP...

[Dr. Strangelove]

I have to agree that Romney had an excellent night. I don't know how much impact it will have overall, but he will re-energize a base that was losing heart for weeks.

Obama looked apathetic and tired. Nothing like the 2008 debates. I'm guessing in Round 2 he will pick it up

As for Ryan/Biden....irrelevant. Biden is such a joke amongst most people, that it's seen as a major triumph if he doesn't throw up all over himself. Just like Romney benefited from low expectations, so will Biden. But ultimately, no one's ever been won over by a VP debate.

[10ac]

Why am I here?

[Owlman]

can lose points however