I enjoyed it but that's because I accepted it for what it is.

It's a movie with Star Trek trappings and windowdressing in the the age of comic book movies.  So we have cg.  We have space battles.  We have action sequences.  We have more more more more more.

It is what it is.  People who know Star Trek know that its mostly thought and psychological and talking.  Even Star Trek II was that, punctuated with fighting scenes.

It could be that in the age of comic book movies the audience won't sit still for Moby-Dick.

One thing I find really annoying is the uber badguy supership.

In ST3 we had the Enterprise looking small and minor next to the Excelsior.  But the Excelsior was just the next generation of ship.  A natural extrapolation. 

Then in Nemesis the bad guy's supership was something enormous and ridiculous with like hundreds of phaser banks and so forth. 

Why not make it thousands of phaser banks.  Why not millions?

And then in this new movie we have this badguy supership that's clearly way super advanced beyond the Enterprise.  We don't know how its better or more advanced its just bigger and more more more.

You don't need the escalation of superships to have a good story.  Wrath of Khan wasn't supership versus supership.  It was a psychological battle.  It was fought by duplicity and trickery.  And then Kirk wins by goading Khan into following him into the nebula and making the match even.

Ii feel the need to point out that in many cases (maybe all, I'm not an expert) theses "state employees" aren't paid out of taxes. They're paid by their programs which are massive revenue generators for their specific colleges. So yeah, they're top paid employee, but they're also a net gain because they're a revenue generator. (And the freely paid kind of revenue, not the coercive kind.)

Oh.  What came of it?  What came of that violation of the War Powers Act?

Not common ground.  

Barack Obama implementing specific policies that Republicans have either proposed, enacted or both.  Policies that are given as "evidence" that he's a scary un-American European Kenyan Marxist socialist.

And I don't disagree that she's playing word games.  But you see how nebulous labels quickly break down.  He's a "socialist" for doing what Senate Republicans proposed in 1993.  

Twenty years ago it was a serious policy proposal in Republican circles (serious enough that Mitt Romney enacted it and then went on to be the Republican standard bearer), but when Barack Obama does it, it's the end of the world.

And the Republicans in Congress gave their silent consent by not making a fuss about it.

And, not for nothing, but is there a president since Coolidge that the opposition couldn't claim was "drunk on power."

"Drunk on power" says nothing about the claim he's a moderate Republican.

But see, Senate Republicans proposed a federal mandate in 1993 based on something Heritage came up with in 1989.

Here is the full bill.  I haven't read it.  You're welcome to.

And here is a summary.

Subtitle F: Universal Coverage - Requires each citizen or lawful permanent resident to be covered under a qualified health plan or equivalent health care program by January 1, 2005. Provides an exception for any individual who is opposed for religious reasons to health plan coverage, including those who rely on healing using spiritual means through prayer alone.

Sound familiar?

That's the Senate Republicans' proposal from 20 years ago.  So 20 years ago Republicans proposed it.  Mitt Romney, who admitted he got the idea from Newt Gingrich, enacted a state version.  But Barack Obama is a fire-breathing leftist for daring to do it 20 years after the Republicans proposed it.

Edit: I added more to the original post as she gave me more this morning.

Proposing a flat tax is a far cry from calling for the abolition of the IRS.

Expect an all out assault to discredit them for daring to do this.

Well, since you're the advocate of the affirmative government action (prohibition), you are welcome to present evidence of the success of the policy.

I'd present evidence of its unambiguous failure and its destructiveness, but since that evidence is already so ubiquitous and freely available, any evidence I present clearly won't sway you.

You can read about it here.

Could be, could be. 

That everything else isn't too many things.

Most people don't.  Yeah, I blame Murray Rothbard.

But the best (and least radical and therefore least scary for most ears) phrasing of it is:

After we privatize everything else, we should think about police, the military, et cetera.

And when you construct it that way you don't get sidetracked on anarchist/minarchist debates and its a lot harder for people to claim every mainstream libertarian idea you espouse as a front for an ultimate crypto-nihilist-anarchist goal.

And while he may have had some good and valuable things to say, any statement has to be judged on its own worth rather than automatically having value because one or another particular faith tradition say's he's the son of God.

Another example would be Creation.  The Bible says God created the Earth in a certain number of days.  Well, that's fine.  But it conflicts with physical evidence, so some religions have adapted to accept science and some haven't.

What it comes down to is this (and this can apply to believers as well as non-believers): The problem with a religious argument is that it's highly subjective.  God said X.  Well maybe in your tradition he did, but what he said, and how we interpret what he said can go a hundred different ways.  

If you go wide enough with your definition of what counts as a "religious argument," you can eventually end up making the term meaningless.  You could make it so wide that it would count any argument written on a keyboard because that keyboard was invented in a Christian country.  Obviously that doesn't work.

So to be useful we tailor it narrowly.

I'd consider a "religious argument" to be one that requires the existence of a deity to work. 

The problem is, even if you accept the existence of a deity, what that deity has said or done is the subject of debate.

For example, I'll accept that a guy named Jesus lived in the Roman province of Judea roughly when he was supposed to have lived.  Freely granted.

But what he said and did and his divinity and its form, if any, is something that there's substantial disagreement on.  Different traditions have, well, different traditions.  The cannon gospels disagree with eachother on some points, and that's not even to get into the non-cannon gospels.