Acts of war require states or national bodies of some kind. Just because a criminal group is very dangerous doesn't make them suddenly a belligerent power. Anybody remember the time we invaded Panama just to arrest Manuel Noriega?

For that matter, when people advocate treating the WoT as a war...they do know that after a war ends most combatants are simply released, right?

Not that I expect the WoT to ever be declared over.

Honestly, I'm tired of the nonsense that comes with militarizing anti-terrorism efforts. They didn't do this in Afghanistan, so try them in a court of law. 

Republicans can sell out on social issues; I'll just stop voting for them. Political parties are expendable, values are not.

1;  22.

I'll go against most here and say that I think it was a pretty good video. The simple reality is that inequality matters because people think it does. More egalitarian societies are happier than very imbalanced ones, even if egalitarianism comes at the expense of slightly less overall prosperity. America's imbalance is a massive outlier here as well; Japan, Germany, Canada, and so forth are all plenty well-off and innovative and have far more equal wealth distributions, and in many cases their economies are doing better than ours.

This doesn't necessarily mean that all this should be corrected by aggressive redistribution, but I do not think it's extreme to suggest that a very unequal society is undesirable and corrosive to American civil society. If it helps, I'll point out that the most unequal American states are basketcases like New York and California or relatively poor ones like Alabama, while well-off and well-run states like Utah, New Hampshire, and most of the Midwest are the most egalitarian.

As a Dartmouth student, I can at least attest that V-Week is a lot better than "Sex Week" (it's old name) was just 4 years ago, and it's definitely better than things were a few years before that.

Hey, at least we aren't Yale.

Honestly, I'm far more annoyed by people who feel "doctor" should be reserved for physicians. As others have pointed out, it's actually medical doctors who borrowed the term from theology, law, and so forth. 

No, you would not, unless you wanted to do time for a lot more than skipping a tab.

Then cite it. It's easy enough to cite the consequences of minimum sentences: 2 million prisoners at an particular time, and still growing even as crime falls.

Furthermore, it should be pointed out that mandatory sentencing laws hardly result in equality. Two acts may both violate the same criminal statue but have dramatically different contexts, yet mandatory minimums compel that both offenders receive draconian penalties (and mandatory minimums are very often draconian, as they are increased rather frequently and rarely cut). Nothing fair about that.

Once again, I think all of you are overreacting. Obama and the Democrats performed about as one would expect given the direction of the economy (upwards, but slowly) at the time. It was 2004 all over again. Did 2004 kill the Democrats forever?

Is there any evidence to the notion that judges commit rampant injustice by routinely giving absurdly light sentences? We're a nation of 320 million, so you can always find isolated incidents.  Law should not be built on isolated incidents of limited harm.

In comparison, the destruction wrought by our absurdly punitive criminal code (perhaps the most punitive to exist in any free country, and certainly the most punitive in American history) is enormous and systematic. Keep in mind that, among other things, extremely high sentences almost certainly incarcerate innocents who are terrified into plea agreements to the prospect of a life sentence. It's also enormously expensive (the money would be more effective if used on cops, and the system would be more just with more courtrooms), both in dollar costs and in the economic destruction wrought in communities with high incarceration rates.

Those interested in this subject should read William Stuntz's The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Very fascinating work on how criminal justice has changed throughout American history. 100 years ago, America had both much lower crime rates and a far less punitive criminal justice system, and Stuntz does a good job explaining why.

If it makes you all feel better, I'm 22 and was pretty much born conservative.

They aren't unwelcome, but I'd be one of many to call such a belief patently silly. There is not a shred of evidence the Earth is that young, and there's no religious necessity to believe the same.

I'd have greatly preferred to lose all the bets I made on Obama winning. As is, his victory netted me $100 and a Ricochet mug. One of the first conservative principles ought to be realism, and I simply saw very little chance of Romney winning as the election approached and bet accordingly. If I was going to be miserable on election night I might as well make some money in the process!

I could handle a soft cave on gay marriage, but if the party dumps abortion I dump them. Full stop.