Cheech

I like multiple choice tests, but your options need to be expanded a little. Romney - 2008 McCain redux. Flipped on all progressive issues when he left MA, now a hand-puppet of a man. Perry - Complete, unadulterated, fucking moron. Shrub v2. Gingrich - Utterly untrustworthy, prone to engage in worthless distractions to steer attention away from personal issues. 100% sociopath. Bachmann - In it for the book sales, will be out after NH. Also batshit crazy and exists in a echo chamber. Huntsman - If I had to pick a horse in the Conservative field, he would be it. Unfortunately, he still panders to the "cut corporate taxes!" GOP mantra, but he can at least articulate his positions without having his record undermine his statements. On foreign policy, he can't be beat. Santorum - Bitch, please. The thumpiest of the thumpers, I really believe he'd see America turn into a quasi-theocratic state. Paul - All the above, plus he signed onto Norquist's tax pledge, which basically tells me that he's not willing to look at any other tax options other than spending cuts. Nevermind that the tax rate to the upper brackets could stand to be raised by 2%, that would clearly result in Grover Norquist chopping your head off in the middle of the night. He also got his son to sign on too, how nice. Obama - Needs to find some bollocks when he's off the campaign trail. Not happy with him removing the public option from the healthcare bill. He hasn't been ideal, but he's been a damn sight better than Bush.

Don't be obtuse. There's a perfectly good way to destroy Satan's daemons, and that's the holy "kill -9". It says so right in the holy Books of O'Reilly, maybe you should RTFM next time. n00b.

Keep fuckin' that chicken.

If you are suggesting that Paul would remove corporations (and their associated money) from politics, then I would have to ask for a citation since I don't see it in the Wiki article. As long as corporate personhood is intact, and Citizens United is in force, you aren't removing corporations from anything political anytime soon. I would need to see his positions on that to form a opinion about his stance. So much to process... Government didn't create credit default swaps. Government didn't create CDO's. Government didn't lump subprime mortgages into complex derivatives that they sold to rubes (with AAA ratings from private ratings firms, government didn't do that either) then started betting against them. Government didn't... you see where I'm going with this. Government, however, did repeal Glass-Steagall, which was one of the major pieces of regulation to come from the Great Depression. It greatly reduced the separation between commercial and investment banks. There's also this: "In 2004, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relaxed the net capital rule, which enabled investment banks to substantially increase the level of debt they were taking on, fueling the growth in mortgage-backed securities supporting subprime mortgages. The SEC has conceded that self-regulation of investment banks contributed to the crisis." In short, a completely-free-of-regulation market is not feasible as long as humans are running it, especially humans in large groups, and ESPECIALLY the types of people that usually get into this line of business. I hate to use a movie reference to make a point, but Boiler Room/Wall Street may have been caricatures of Wall Street traders, but but they weren't far off the mark. People need boundaries, institutions run by people need even bigger boundaries, and institutions that are as integral to the economy as the stock market need army of people to make sure that things are running as they should. I'll be the first one to admit that Obama hasn't lived up to the hype. I'll also be the first one to point out that the Republicans have behaved like whiny little babies for his entire term. I recall seeing a news article about one of the new Tea Party congressman whining about how his new, lifetime, taxpayer funded health coverage didn't take effect immediately, here it is Or how Republicans seem to come up with distraction after distraction. Family values, mentioning God in addresses, homosexual agenda, gay marriage, gays in the military, abortion (forcing debate on unconstitutional laws in defiance of accepted precedent) Don't misunderstand me here, I am well aware that Democrats have more than their fair share of failings. Glenn Beck? Dude, that seriously hurts. Besides, I though Fox News was a respected journalistic outlet amongst the Republican base?

For the record, I read through all of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul. His economic positions are a joke. Gold and silver backed currency? Really? At the end of the day, it still comes down to people determining the value of things, whether they be the dollar in a fiat state or a hunk of shiny metal. I'd argue that in order to ensure currency stability, he'd have to outlaw speculation and market manipulation in the gold/silver commodities markets to make sure you don't have some errant trader somewhere who tanks the market on purpose just as a bevy of other traders have before. But that's ZOMGREGULATION!, and clearly that's bad. No income tax? Or was it a 10% income tax? I especially like how he's going to fund the federal government on excise taxes (on what goods, specifically?) and tariffs (which surely won't spark retaliatory tariffs on our exported goods, oh no!) I especially like the bootstrappy, you can opt-out of all government involvement with a 10% income tax. Earmarks, of course, are bad unless, you know, he does them: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292334,00.html. The guy is consistent, I'll give him that. I'll also accept that he's got a lot of good points in there (at least auditing the Fed, if not outright destroying it, his stances on the judicial process, war on drugs, stem cell research), but the bad, and his unwavering belief that the "market will sort itself out", especially after the financial crisis, is way too overpowering.

Yes, they do, however you can change affiliated parties when you go to vote on the primary.

deep-space radio telescopes reported picking up a transmission from the "ship", and decoded an image: "I can see you, Kirk, can you see me?"

lollerskates

I'd say that Carie has rendered autonomous usage of your cark out of the question for some time now. Ute = mullet is invalid in Oz. Everyone and their fucking mother seems to have one (a ute, that is) The way it was explained to me is that many years ago a wife of a farmer wrote a letter to Holden expressing her desire to have a vehicle that would be "nice enough to take to church on Sunday, but still be able to bring their harvest to market on Monday". The ute was born. Extra bonus points for having the snorkel on it, if you are planning to live anywhere in the NE quadrant of the country (central and east Queensland), you're going to need it when the rains hit. Damn, now I really want to go back. Why do I have to be so financially responsible, I can put all this on my CC and rock out for at least 2 weeks...

I'm willing to bet a not-inconsequential amount of money you'd have a Holden Commodore ute within your first year of living there.

I only remember the dreams in which I get laid.

That's possibly true, and TEPCO certainly did their share of what-the-fuckery by downplaying the scope of the meltdown as they have. However, in my layman, Internet-educated opinion, Chernobyl was ecologically bad on a completely different level. With Fukushima, the fuel melted due to heat decay from the newly shutdown reactors (1, 2, and 3) which were unable to get coolant to flow through. The building explosions were a result of the fuel rods getting so hot that they strip the hydrogen from the steam, once enough hydrogen accumulates all you need is a spark to set it off. Chernobyl, however, was a result of the Soviets removing some of the safety features of the reactor, then not making sure there was enough water to act as a moderator to the reaction taking place. A feedback loop was generated which caused the water to start boiling off, creating steam which allowed the reactor to gain power, boiling off water faster, and so on. This created a massive steam explosion which not only blew apart the building (like Fukushima) but the CORE as well, exposing the graphite moderators to air which caused THEM to burn, releasing more radiation into the air, not to mention scattering pieces of the core all over the countryside. So from a ecological disaster standpoint, I'd much rather have a contained core meltdown that's leaking than try and pick up bits of still-fissile uranium from a 5km radius.

I can't wait to see the impotent rage in this thread.

babies! They're slaughtering defenseless newborn babies!

This country is also quite resourceful in innovating new and exciting ways to be complete fucking idiots.

In about 10 years this is going to be the next Chernobyl, with the guided tours and wildlife reclamation. Sucks for Japan that they can't really afford to lose all that land to reclamation, but the only thing you can do with radiation is wait it out. I watched a documentary somewhere about the state of the Red Forest and Pripyat in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that extends from southern Belarus to northern Ukraine, almost up to the northern tip of Kiev, 30km wide. They said the wolf population is stable with no adverse mutations, and that there are more wolves in the Zone than anyplace else on earth. Nature finds a way, and a hell of a lot faster than you'd think. Here's the PBS documentary: http://video.pbs.org/video/2157025070/ and some pictures of Pripyat: http://abandonedkansai.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-red-forest-pripyat-in-general/

Holly, you want to eat meat but want to make sure it was slaughtered humanely? Take your ass to a local farmer's market or drive up to the West Side Market and buy all your meat there. You can actually talk to the farmers directly and find out for yourself, plus you aren't buying into the big meatpacking conglomerates that raise livestock (chickens, especially) inhumanely. On top of that, the meat actually tastes better. Yes it will cost you more, but that's the price you pay, plus you're supporting local farmers and local butchers.

heavy, heavy government subsidies. You charge Venezuelans market rates for gas and see how fast they start rioting.

Natural market forces like supply and demand don't exist in a market that is fueled by world events and is dominated by speculation. Someone punches someone in Saudi Arabia? Gas prices could go up, so the speculators start making bets and like a self-fulfilling prophecy, gas prices go up. Even making it so that purchasing oil contracts would automatically end up in a delivery (right now they are sold tens if not hundreds of time before the ship enters a refinery) may not stem the speculation tide, the last time oil was down there were supertankers anchored in international waters at the behest of their contract owners, waiting for prices to come back up. And Parks, even if we used every drop we had as surplus, we'd still be sucking in hundreds of millions of barrels a month.

Them's good eatin'.

FTFY. Sure he has some good points, but it gets offset by him being batshit crazy on others. His consistency to his values, OTOH, can't be denied. I just have to wonder, are they actually his values or the values of the district he represents? You know, the whole "representative of the people" and all...

I've had AA's first class meals on more than one occasion and I have to say I may not condone what the wife is doing, but I certainly understand. Nah, bitch is just crazy. I was on a Portland-Minneapolis flight where a elderly guy died 6 rows in front of me. Not sure if he had a heart attack, but they laid him out on the aisle, started giving him oxygen, and made an emergency landing in SLC. Once I saw the medics taking their time after assessing the situation and the crying flight attendants, I figured the old guy punched out. Sometimes it's just the guys time to go.

According to the designer's site for the salt+pepper shakers, they are available for sale. They have a lot of other cool stuff too, sucks that they haven't found a distribution/manufacturing partner for most of their designs. Designer site: http://antrepo4.com/ Amazon link to S+P battery shakers: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004T1YON0/ref=s9_simh_se_p79_d0_g79_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=auto-no-results-center-1&pf_rd_r=0DDD97B2C1BF49AD81BA&pf_rd_t=301&pf_rd_p=1263465782&pf_rd_i=spoticam

Interesting, it's not a name I recognize from DI.fm. My fist is getting the urge to pump though... Time to rally the ravers! MJ!

Condensing stupid is never a wise decision, it forms a super-dense derp and you'll never be able to get it off you without absorbing some yourself.