Troy, I agree with you. But, if you take a look at the post I started in the Member Feed on this very subject, you'll see we may be in the minority. 

Brian Clendinen, from Bachmann's own press release:

I automatically became a dual citizen of the United States and Switzerland in 1978 when I married my husband, Marcus. Marcus is a dual American and Swiss citizen because he is the son of Swiss immigrants. As a family, we just recently updated our documents.
“I am proud of my husband, Marcus, the love of my life, and his Swiss heritage. Even though I have been a dual citizen since I was married in 1978, I have never exercised any rights of that citizenship. Rather, I have always pledged allegiance to our one nation under God, the United States of America. We live in the greatest nation humankind has ever known and I am proud to be an American.”

And I think whether she hasn't exercised any rights of that citizenship or not is irrelevant. The point is that she could if she wanted.

Ricochet member Kevin Walker is exactly correct. Dual citizenship is divided allegiance. Granted, we can never know what's in a person's heart but I'd rather have a person w/o dual citizenship than one with.  

Hmmmm, so far the responses are interesting because I find this article  to be convincing.

Would it not be weird to see the President of the U.S. saying the Swiss Pledge of Allegiance (does it have one?). And I start extrapolating out to what if she shared dual citizenship with Russia or Iran or China or N. Korea under similar circumstances.

I'm not saying Bachmann is some kind of Manchurian candidate. But, I'm sure if there were a Democrat running for President with dual citizenship from, say, Greece, we might all be a little afraid the USA could get too involved in bailing that country out. I mean, if nothing else, we'd certainly make it a political issue.

But, in Bachmann's case, since she's a conservative, and it's Switzerland, we say no big deal.

I realize regular citizens have dual citizenship and that's fine. But, if you're gonna be the leader of the free world, the least a person could do is renounce her dual citizenship.

Reveal it very early on. And then disown that other country. It would be a great way to show a person is a true American. 

Thanks for the responses, everyone. And thanks to whoever put this on the Main Feed.

Additional thoughts: 

We are only customers. And the players are simply employees. The NFL is the "owner" of the game, so it is ultimately responsible for the quality on the field. It will have to live with whatever choices it makes. We may tune out. Another harder-hitting league may form. Or, the NFL might even get more popular. For now, it seems it is trying to make the game safer no matter how a (I suspect) majority of the fans feel about it.

But, I wonder if that majority would feel differently if it wasn't the NFL but a coal company. And those weren't players, but coal miners deciding on their own free will to get black lung. And one day the company decided (without government intervention, just like the NFL case), "we're going to make coal mining safer."

Would that same majority still say, "why's the company doing that? Those miners know what they're getting into,"?

I wonder.

It could be we accept things in our favorite entertainment that we would never accept in other parts of life. 

Oh yeah, I agree with the other posts: He sucks on Israel.

Peter, Peter, Peter!!! You were SO close to painting him into a corner on the free trade discussion. What you should have pointed out to him in the tennis shoe discussion was that if the company moved its manufacturing back to the USA, wouldn't they be making less per pair if they continued to charge $150? 

And then, wouldn't the price of the shoes rise? Or, even worse, what if the company decided it couldn't charge more given the competition? What if its decrease in profits made it decide to get out of the shoe biz altogether? So, not only would the workers overseas lose their jobs from the manufacturing moving back to the USA, but the salesmen and truck drivers and rubber makers, etc. would lose biz because the company went out of business, period?

See, my gut tells me that confronted with this scenario, Pat would eventually attack greedy businessmen and may even start to argue for some sort of price controls like his mentor Nixon pushed. 

The moral of the story: Protectionism causes all the businesses not involved in it to subsidize the ones that are involved in it.  

I was born and spent 27 years in Western PA but, like Israel above, I've been away from the area long enough now to hear the accents of the people. Whereas, when I lived there, I never noticed it. And if people are unfamiliar, a Western PA/Pittsburgh accent is like the midpoint between a Boston and Chicago accent. 

Having said that, and for some unusual reason, I never really picked up the accent and didn't use some of the vocabulary of the area: read up (meaning: to organize), pop (meaning: soda), yins (meaning: you people).

And to this day, people think for some reason I grew up in the South but I don't hear a Southern accent in my voice at all. I may live in the South now but I lived in NV for 13 years before that.

I think for that test to be more accurate it would need to include some audio and vocabulary tests as well. I tested as being from the Mid-West. With additional information it just may be able to narrow me down to Western PA but it may be tough given my seemingly neutral voice.    

I've read the Derbyshire article 4 times now. Like others, I'm familiar with his work from Radio Derb and elsewhere. So, I think I know his schtick fairly well.

I must say: I believe NRO should've fired him. But, it's not so much because the article is or isn't racist. And not so much because it's a bad version of flipping around some kind of black rite-of-passage talk.

But because too many of  his points are demonstrably untrue. That . . . is the reason he should've been dismissed. We can have all different kinds of people on our side but we can't have people who lie. Moreover, people who lie while trying to act wise.

The truth is millions and millions--enough to surely form a large majority--of whites and non-blacks have broken quite a few of Derb's "rules" over the last 100 years with no consequences. For example, just on my own I've broken every rule from 10a to 10i multiple times. But, somehow I'm still here. And I'm white as Wonder Bread.

But, I'm sure Derb would say I'm just lucky. 

This is an easy one.

He's a Nova. 

Why?

Because he loves minorities and in Spanish, "nova" means, "it doesn't go."

For the record, I, too, am no fan of the income tax at the Federal level. I believe it's unconstitutional. And it's also immoral because it is a direct tax on survival. So, I guess it would've been much easier for me to put eliminating it as my #1.

However, I have to admit the rascal in me would love to really see how many people would pay their complete taxes without them being taken out of their paychecks directly. True, some people--particularly private contractors--already collect their gross income and then pay in an I-9 situation.

But, having lived in Vegas for many years, I'd put the over/under at 50 percent as to how many income earners, in a "gross" situation, would pay the required amount without shorting the Fed Gov.

So, I suppose my #1 would be more of a scientific tax study than anything else but it would be entertaining!!! 

Good ones so far! These have been a few of my favorites over the years:

1. Everybody's paycheck is in gross dollars not net dollars. We would have tax reform in seconds.

2. Back to the gold standard.

3. Set up a mandatory military-like training program similar to Israel's. No, not a draft. But a year-long school for high school graduates--men and women--so as to learn the basics for having a good militia: weapon use, basic survival skills, communications, etc. No marching, no uniforms. Just to prepare everyone--just in case. Then, they can join the military, go to college, etc. Americans have guns but coordinating a defense of the USA at the citizen level is something totally different.

4. Disband all the Departments that aren't in the Constitution. Good-bye Energy, Labor, HUD, Education, etc. And if I can't do that, I'll just tell all the employees in those departments to stay home--we don't want you anymore.

5. Sell off all Federal land, except for military bases, outside of D.C. Buildings, National parks, all of it. States or American citizens/companies can be the only purchasers.  

I think DocJay hit upon something at the end of his comment that I myself have begun to suspect after listening to a lot of different opinions--conservative and liberal--regarding the 3 days of arguments.

If Justice Kennedy--since he is seen to be the deciding factor in this case--looks at that 2500 page document and sees it as a new way to get everybody healthcare, then we as conservatives are screwed. 

However, if he looks at that 2500 page document and says to himself, "There is absolutely no way it takes 2500 pages to explain that the Government is going to pay for everyone's healthcare. Thus, this entire case must be about something else other than healthcare." Then, we as conservatives will probably come out on the winning side.

Kennedy needs to come to the conclusion that this is a power grab. If he doesn't, I think we're screwed because I don't think he has the courage to reject a bill that he really believes to be about healthcare, no matter if it restricts freedoms or not. 

As I've mentioned before, I've spent many years in entertainment so I have a lot of "listening to liberals" experience. I had my very own Pauline Kael moment after the 2004 elections. A guy I worked with said, How did Bush win? I don't know one person who voted for him. In response, I said: You really should get out a little more.

True, it's purely anecdotal but his statement probably illustrates the world in which many liberals live much more closely than we all realize.

What has worked for me regarding dealing with liberals and their illogical thoughts is trying to get to the core of how do they know what they know? I rarely ask them why they think what they do. Instead, I try to get them to trace back to the moment they had their liberal ideas. And what you find out very quickly is that they don't "know" anything. Commonly, you discover that how they think the way the world should work is vastly different from how they think their daily lives should be. True, we conservatives believe this of Pelosi, etc. But your layman liberals are exactly the same.  

For me, endorsements don't mean anything at this point because no matter what--even if I am dead--I am voting for the Non-Obama in November. As for what it makes me think of Rubio (I live in FL by the way), it makes me think neither more of him or less of him. However, I do think it makes him less likely to be a VP pick--just a gut instinct, nothing factual to back it up. My opinion is Chris Christie will be Romney running mate should Mitt get nomination. I think this would go along with the Romney-Coulter alignment that has gone on for a while now. Once again, just a gut instinct. 

Hey, tofu and ricecakes have their fans, too. There's no accounting for taste . . . or lack thereof in reference to those so-called foods. 

As a 41yo, single, conservative, straight guy, I could fill up the memory of this entire website with insights about what's gone wrong with the sexual revolution, women, dating, and marriage. But, I only have 200 words so . . .

First, Fred Cole's post makes a very good point: What parts of the sexual revolution should be revoked? It's not so easy to start slashing all of it. Why? Because some of the changes were improvements. However, it's these improvements that can lead to women behaving badly. For example, more women in the workforce alongside men increases the chances of more cheating. 

Last, here's what Emily didn't mention. On one hand, women were being taught to act like men. On the other hand, they were being taught men were scoundrels. But, at the same time, women were being told how happy they were going to be. Try to figure that puzzle out!!! All it really did was create a few generations of women who are arrogant scoundrels who have babies on their own because they believe all men are inferior. However, they're popping pills because they're so unhappy about being so awesome.