I rest my case.  All AMNESTY! all the time.

If the "libertarians" among us did not virtually approach anarchy in so many cases, I think that these elements of government would be a bit more open. 

But ultimately, the issue is "who do you trust?"  Some administrations (W's) clearly care about national security and take precautions to ensure that the net does not grab innocents- others (Obama's) have shown that they consider every possible element of public and private data to be electoral tools, and have virtually no regard for the law.

We know what is needed to protect us.  What we should do is elect people who have the integrity and commitment to follow the law in a manner that is not abusive.

But if you do that, also include someone who is not anti-immigration; Josh Trevino or Linda Chavez, Fred Barnes, Paul Ryan, etc. 

I'm really tired of the "He!! NO!" caucus, which dooms us to eternal bad law because they never have any constructive advice other than impossibilities like "No AMNESTY!" (this stuff always comes out in a virtual shout)

Does anyone besides me think that women who go to bars and would allow themselves to be picked up by user jerks like this may not deserve a lot of sympathy?  What kind of decent guy spends his time in bars demanding perfect martinis trolling for lonely females he can use for a night?

There are ways to ask for your order nicely with humor and good nature.  The fact that this guy doesn't utilize them reveals a lot about him.

You mean those who recognize the silly, divisive, and unworkable proposals that the Randians (first or last name) try to promote?

Some "establishment" types are simply lifers.  Other who get trashed are simply smart realists- e.g., Ryan- who know that the temper tantrums thrown all the time by cryptonativists are divorced from reality.

The Senate Gang of 8 bill is a disaster.  But you don't fix it or solve the recurring problem by screaming "NONONONO" and pretending it will go away.  The same thing applied to health care from 1948 on, and we spent our time blocking everything against the rational concerns of a majority of the public- now look what we have.

Those two examples are why we are the stupid party.

Like it or not- and I'm not thrilled with it- the TEA Party "true right" makes up no more than 25% of the electorate.  If you want to effect free market policies, you either compromise or you do a major and smart selling job that in many ways goes against the nature of humans, especially spoiled 21st century American humans.

The Titanic is not under our control, and when it somewhat is, it takes a long time and a lot of work, with attendant fits and starts, to turn at all.

If we want to live in Coolidge's America, we'd better buy an unpopulated island and start our own country.  Sorry.

Yeah, the same rules of trespass and invasion of privacy (and 4th Amd search) still work for these as worked for telephoto lenses and ladders.  This isn't as hard as we make it out to be- overflight surveillance has already been subject to appellate decisions.

I suspect that Israel, regardless of the US position, is not inclined to sit still for passive suicide.  This does complicate things a bit on the surface, though the presence of Obama makes that complication total no matter what he may say.  The Iraq retreat will be seen in the future as one of the dumbest foreign policy decisions in history.

The question is not whether there are 7 categories of right-wingers.  It is how you set an issue that all 7 will support, along with enough in the middle to actually win something.  As long as we spend our energies trying to be the purest of us all, we will be on the sidelines watching Obama and his ilk make the decisions.

And I do despair at times wondering whether we will ever succeed.

So you took her to a hockey game?  For our upcoming 40th anniversary on the day of Mollie's, I'm taking Rubber Duckie to a football game.  At Wembley.

Now that's romantic.

You talkin' 'bout Vince Vaughn, or Mike Ditka?

So everyone at Ricochet is ready to throw Rubiop overboard because he doesn't scream "NO AMNESTY" loud enough?

We have- and will have- de facto amnesty already- if for no other reason than that it is currently utterly impossible to enforce the law.  If you do not understand that, you can't read. 

We would be far better off if we stopped screaming about how horrible immigration is and worked to actually fix the legislation instead of fragmenting up into multiple shades of nativists at the same time as business works as hard as possible to open the borders completely, e-verify is smothered, and activists lock in chain immigration.

I can't believe how strategically dumb we are so soon after completely screwing up TARP by ignoring the inevitable while we all yelled about "NO BAILOUTS".

Pat Caddell is right, isn't he?

I grew up in NE Minneapolis; my Mom and two siblings still live there.  On snowy days minimizing freeway use, I drive to work through that neighborhood past the Ukrainian association event center.  I had to go look through my HS yearbook for his kids, since they were born between the mid '40's and 1966. (No)

This looks to me like a King Lear tragedy situation.  I have no question that a) he indeed was present for all of those atrocities, and that b) he was no Nazi.  If you have know virulently anti-Communist refugees from Ukraine (e.g., the family of the guy who built our house), they remember Holodomor, Stalin-driven holocaust, in which 3 million people died.  The US did not care because of the socialist sympathies of lefty intelligentsia- Alger Hiss consciously ignored people like 13 year old Karkoc watching the death and destruction around him.

I think we need to put his deportation case on the docket.  We must prioritize.  With limited resources, we work on it as soon as mnurderer Kathy Boudin is fired at Columbia and all potential threats from people like the Tsarnaevs and al Alawki have been addressed.

Boy, are we in trouble, and so is the world.  A substantial portion of Ricochet, representative of the activist base, seriously believes that we can withdraw to our shores and survive no matter what else the world does- call it the Lindbergh-Paul (-Kerry) "foreign policy".

The fact that Obama is a wishy-washy hypocritical incompetent, and that the public desires to be lied to, to the effect that security and freedom, despite 100 years of evidence to the contrary, does not make the world safe.  Sen. Kyl is absolutely right-on.  So is Gen. Petraeus. 

God help us.

You stated my point, Mendel.  There is no substitute for basic science research not directed at a specific financial payoff. 

And from my years involved with venture and RAIN capital providers, except for saints like David Koch, I can tell you that there is absolutely no stomach for long term work.  I would bet that Myriad's BRCA pre-patent research work was accident more than it was vision.  They worked on the diagnostic application because they had the patent, but that gene would have  been teased out by someone.

I actually believe that commercial patent grants and FDA approvals should be conditioned on the entity offering access to every involved protein, compound, or antibody on a reasonable basis for unfettered combinatorial research.

All the nonsense you hear about how research will grind to a halt if patents are more restricted is just that.  The low-hanging fruit has been plucked. 

Future discoveries involve much more complexity and require many players- that is the exact reason that the major pharmas have not filled their pipelines as their old patents have run out- because they still try to play the 1980 business model, this time with a few (very few) biologics.

I don't think you two are really disagreeing very much, despite all the words.  Mendel surely sees the "heart" as being informed by facts, physiology, and moral logic, and James knows that after all of the good inputs he cites, the heart still makes the decision.

And I think we all see this as more situation fact-specific than the hard opposing line that Pseud suggests by the post title.