We played with the "no auctions" variant in my family until we started using the Nintendo game to play (on the NES, its so much better to not have all the free pieces rolling around, and no banker).

Now we buy every property we land on until out of money.

Also, there is the "Trade in lieu of Rent" clause, where, if someone lands on an owned property, and cannot pay the rent in cash, trades of other valuables are allowed, like properties.  However, when playing on the NES version, the landlord has to have enough cash to pay the rent for the trade to work, because the game does not accept property in lieu of cash.

*GayFreedomLover

*And for the record, here's a partialmea culpa:

cited and appreciated.

*It remains true, however, that it unjustly and disproportionately *burdens gay people when combined with Texas's denial of  equal *marriage rights.I see your point here, it does seem unfair to disallow shacking up and deny a way to make the living arrangement legal.My point of disagreement is that there is no requirement for morality to be fair.We make distinctions in life and distinctions are important.  I am an excellent pilot, but my eyesight is sub-optimal.  It is unfair that I cannot become a fighter pilot in service of my country.  But it would not be good for the military to be made to relax its rules on visual acuity because the rules are unfair to me.What if the other person involved was a male sibling or a close non-sibling relative?  Or some other class of person similarly barred from legal wedlock by another reason other than sex?  It would still be unfair that the relationship could not be made legal, but it would still be unwise to change the definition of marriage to include that relationship.

One of my best friends from high school and I were discussing politics, a rare thing because we know we disagree so completely, when I said I was mainly for the Republicans because of their closer proximity to the smaller government idea, and lower taxes.  He replied that lower taxes were bad for the economy.  I asked how that could be, and he explained that taxes were a necessary brake on income, and without them income would rise too quickly and cause hyperinflation.  I was incredulous because I thought he was such an intelligent person, but how could he believe something so absurd.  He apparently had no inkling of free market capitalism and how it self regulates.  No government control just equals runaway prices and bedlam.  The weirdest part is that he often tells me that he is practically libertarian.

I'm seeing effects right here in Colorado. The fast food restaurants are hiring like crazy. All low level jobs are you going to be part time so they can avoid O-care. And they won't necessarily reduce workers' hours, they will fire the full timer and hire 3 part timers.

Yo momma so statist she got 2 obamaphone!

The failure (reluctance?) of Republicans to articulate conservative values, let alone run on them, leads me to believe that they don't necessarily share those values.

Thanks for the clarification WC.  It is a conflict for our existence, not a guns out, shooting war.  The point is, that you don't compromise with people who are seeking your destruction, physical or ideological.

That could be effective in 2 ways: literally as their head explodes from the pressure of so much paper trying to exist in their already overstuffed skulls, or figuratively as they try to deal with the sudden dissonance of the facts with their weltanshauung!

I think its largely cultural too, just by observation.  The non-westerners that I work with don't seem to reshuffle the same way.

Me!  I am somewhat of an anglophile.

If Barbara Tuchman's book is half as good as "A Distant Mirror" it should be great.

Thanks for your post WC.  I'm going looking for the Longfellow translation.

I suppose I am defending against the conflation of "Right" with "Racist" because we have somewhat adopted the term, hence one of this site's founders consistently calling this place "center right".

I don't see moving away from whatever landscape our opponents have staked out as moving toward racism or some other flavor of totalitarianism or some other flavor of corporatism; and I resent the OP's insinuation that it is.

If we have conceded the loss of "liberal" and those we oppose were "left" and are now "progressive" and we are not "regressive", how do we call ourselves?

I am conservative in that I wish to conserve the society built on the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bible.  There is no "Golden Age" to which I would have us return, but there is no Utopia toward which I would have us progress.

Let me tell you why I took "Right Wing" as conservative/ libertarian:

Left means Large Government controlling minute aspects of peoples' lives, problems are solved by government intrusion, elite intellectuals know better than anyone else how life should be organized, wealth is for the use of the powerful (ostensibly on behalf of the weak) and should be taken by force to that end.

I am against all of that, therefore I am not Left, where does that leave me if not Right?  Up?

My wife got the latest iPad with a view to replacing her too inconvenient laptop.

It has largely fulfilled that function except, ironically, for iTunes.  She cannot get her iPad to synchronize to her iPhone music.  She uses the phone for listening and she wanted to use the iPad for buying, but after weeks of trying to get them to work together she has given up and resurrected a windows laptop for the job.  And don't get me wrong, she is a highly technical person; it took a lot to make her give up.

I use the iPad for watching tv shows from netflix (Dr Who, Red Dwarf, The IT Crowd), playing games (Plants versus Zombies, 4 pics 1 word), a little surfing, and for knitting patterns (because its easier to look at than the small pictures on my android phone).

I vehemently disagree.  If left means totalitarian large government central control, the opposite of it is NOT racist totalitarian large government central control!

The extreme opposite is no government.  Racist does not equal Right Wing in any way.