The Goat Pen

crashcourse wrote:ron paul domesticaly is just what the country needs

ron pauls foreign policy would have us wiped out and praying to mecca within 20 years

May 20, 2009: By a vote of 90 to 6, the Senate votes to deny funding for the transfer of any Guantánamo detainees to facilities on the U.S. mainland. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, states, “Americans don’t want some of the most dangerous men alive coming here.” More than 250 convicted international terrorists are already held in U.S. prisons; none have escaped. The congressional action greatly complicates the task of persuading other nations to accept detainees either as prisoners or as residents.

Vijay Padmanabhan (State Department counsel): The result of Congress being so negative toward resettling anyone in the United States is that other countries say, Well, the U.S. knows something we don’t know, and that’s the reason why they want to push these people onto us.

The word Guantánamo is frankly toxic, put most simply. What we found is that countries did not want to take detainees from Guantánamo without a clear plan to close the facility and a willingness on the part of the United States to accept some number of detainees for settlement.

I think Senator [Lindsey] Graham made a very good point. He said it’s ridiculous, absurd, to think that our prison system is incapable of detaining these people without preventing them from escaping. I don’t think it’s happened from a super-max prison in the United States, ever. So, you know, the notion that if you hold them at some prison in the U.S. we’re not going to be able to keep them from escaping, it belies realty.

With the U.S. government trying to pass what Google's Sergey Brin has called "China-like censorship," China has found a new way to tamp down free expression on the Internet: make people use their real names. After the Chinese government realized that Weibo, a Twitter-esque microblogging service, gave rise to "irrational voices and negative opinions and harmful information" -- in the words of Wang Chen the deputy director of Communist Party's propaganda department -- it has decided to clamp down by requiring all bloggers to register their identities with the government, reports The New York Times' Michael Wines. A lesson for U.S. Internet users, after old-school government control of websites comes censorship 2.0: Total removal of online anonymity.

Bklyn wrote:Speaking of your Avatar...

when I was a kid watching football games, I thought "John 3:16" was someone's graffiti handle. I was sure dude was rich out the wazoo to go to so many football games.