I agree with you 100%.

Oh good.  Because killing scouting by admitting a tiny percentage of the population was exactly the goal.

Never play the game with two people who share the same bed.  The first time she gets wiped out and looks at him and asks him to let it slide, the game is ruined.

MONOPOLY IS A HORRIBLY UNFUN GAME.  If you want all the trappings of Monopoly minus all the horrible stuff (math, boringness, having it ruined by people who don't know the rules, having it ruined by people who don't know how to play and therefore hand over monopolies to other people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera), I highly suggest the card game Monopoly Deal.  It's getting hard to find.  There's a second version called Monopoly Deal Millionaire, it's good.  Just not as good.

I always take the statue as my thing because its the easiest for me to pick up.

I'm going to jump in here and make several comments about Monopoly in no particular order.

Yes, I've read the entire rules.  I try to insist on the auction rule and on Free Parking not being a random cash jackpot.   Insist on either (you know, actually following the rules) and people look at you cockeyed.

Monopoly is fun for about 20 minutes.  Then it gets monotonous.

The first person to get a Monopoly wins, unless the other people don't know how to play the game.

Maybe they'll start taking it to mean what it was meant to mean originally instead of the moronic interpretation that's been applied by some in the last 20 years.

I'm sure this comes as a great comfort to the atheist community.

It isn't just liberals.  Conservatives do that too.

Is there any over reaching federal intrusion  big or small, that couldn't possibly be justified by claiming it was for the sake of "security"?

That's about the size of it.

People get freaked about cyber security and opportunistic politicians make noise about it to appease those people.

Frankly, nobody has a bigger interest in the network security of Sprint/Nextel than Sprint/Nextel.  Their interest is a financial one.   Security breaches and the appearance of such is really bad for business.

If you left it to them, we could let the market sort it out because markets are really good at doing that.

CS is right.  The government demanding control over a seat on a corporate board sounds like fascism.

And long ago the standard started being not constitutionality of a government action but common practice.  So if we get an established practice of government demanding seats on the boards of large corporations (to ensure network security, don't ya know?) then eventually they can demand a seat on the board of Ford or GE (do with that latter one what you will) and it won't be a question of propriety or constitutionality but of common practice. 

David Icke was right!

I don't see that there's a "fault" to be had, Joseph. It's an interesting discussion to have.

There's not a lot of people who are pro-abortion.  Or did you just mean that term to cover everyone who is pro-choice?

Look, I'm not "pro-abortion."  I'm just an anti-prohibitionist.

Where is Jonah Goldberg?  

I know he's a serious intellectual now, but is there somebody who can ring is red emergency Bat-phone and tell him to come by and talk to us about this?

You know, I think all the recasts are correct.  I never had a complaint about them.

They weren't just recasting the original series, they were recasting younger versions of all the characters.

I buy the recasts.  I'm cool with them.  Scotty's little green helper?  I'm cool with that too.

With regards to parodying Deforrest Kelly, yeah, fine, I get that.  But that's not the only Trek cliche they play with.  They also play with the red shirt thing.

Yeah.  That too.

The problem with having a public-private partnership is that if its the govt providing a service through a private entity, usually the private entity has a monopoly on the service (the municipality doesn't break up the contract to two or three providers of the same service) so the market mechanisms that provide the beneficial outcomes are diminished.  

And those contracts are subject to cronyism and all sorts of crooked mischief.  

If its not a public entity providing the service at all, then companies have to compete for service, providing better outcomes.

So contrast if my town provided the garbage service through a contractor versus not providing it at all.  In the former case the very lucrative contract would be awarded to one company and there would be negligible (if any) cost savings versus half a dozen private trash haulers competing for my business.