Ookay - cutting out the paqrts that have no relationship to anything I noted anyone actually posting . . .
Her fiscally irresponsible mayoral activities were referendums voted on by the people. Yes, some fucktard that didn't vote for them is pissing and moaning about it. The massive spending increases barely kept pace with population growth. It's a rapidly expanding small city, they're improving their infrastructure to handle the growth and attract more. Haven't any of you shittards ever borrowed money to expand your economic potential? The current mayor has already said it's a bunch of crap and the city is on target to pay the projects off sooner than expected.
The city has a population of ~9,000 now, about 5,000 at the time. $22,000,000 is $4,400 per man, woman, and child. Now maybe it's an investment, maybe it didn't need to be done, but the fact that she was forced to accept a city administrator tends, to me, to suggest that there was a degree of 'buyers remorse' among the resident after they saw her with their credit card in hand.
And hey - I'm sure there are people that agreed with her there, as well as those that don't. That doesn't make the ones that don't agree with her bastards because 'hey - there are resident od Wasilla that dare to disagree with Psychoak'
This shit is as dumb as the "Obama" is an islamic fundamentalist" crap the utter fucking morons on the republican side put out. Learn shit that's actually relevant, not the latest regurgitated idiocy of a guy that's so far out on the left wing he makes Stalin look like a capitalist christian fundamentalist.
Obama, voting record wise, is *not* a leftist. Among the Senate, Divide the senate into 'thirds' - 33 Liberals, 33 conservatives, and 34 moderates, and Obama's voting record is not quite the left edge of the center block, #66 (#34 to #67 being the 'moderate' third) by the general accounting of his voting record. Given that the Senate is evenly divided at the moment, I hardly think that is damning evidence of his hidden pinko commie agenda.
Educational funding going to religious schooling.
Wah. Excuse me for pointing out the obvious, but public schools fucking suck dick and the left wing fucktards in congress block any attempts to strip the NEA of it's power over them. I don't care who's running the school, if they're doing a better job, fuck off and let people take their kids, and their money, out of the shithole they're being forced to go to.
Exemptions from the law for churches using federal funds.
You mean the unconstitutional laws they have no right to enact to start with? I must have missed it, but where does it say that congress shall have power to fuck businesses in the ass? Where does it say I have to hire someone regardless of my opinion of them? It's the land of the free, not the land of the beholden to their employees. The only travesty here is that Home Depot can't fire someone on the same grounds. The flipside of the coin is that the ass thumper can fire someone for being a bible thumper.
If your opinion of them is based, to an extent that its verifiable in a court of law, not in whether they're a good employee but on the color of their skin, the church they go to, their gender, or the gender of the person they are having sex with, then frankly I have no sympathy for your opinion on this.
No one has said you can't fire me for being a jerk.
But if you're defending firing someone based on religion, gender, sexuality, or race - and that *is* the law *I* was referring to church charities trying to be exempt from, while they take money that *I* paid into the tax system too, and frankly appears to be the law you feel is somhow 'unfair' to business, then gee, I feel sorry about your luck.
Attempts to use churches as political tools without losing their tax exempt status.
Non-profit organizations don't pay taxes. Most of them have better cost/benefit ratios than the actual charities do. Aside from that minor, trivial detail, corporate taxes are disgusting to start with. Yay, increase the price of goods with a tax premium at every step of the way! To think the lefties are the party of the people and looking out for the little guy that pays six bucks for a burger.
Corporations are a special kind of company founded in laws that separate the owners from the day to day running of the business, creating a 'person', so that, when a company I own stock in does something illegal, unless the lawsuit can prove I actually had something to do with running the company and making the decisions, my personal assets are completely shielded from being seized to compensate people the company I owned hurt.
And for all the bitching and griping about the 'corporation as a person' decision, that is a position everyone is bloody happy to take advantage of - right till you have to pay taxes. Then, suddenly, everyone remembers that corporations are not 'real' people, and it's oh so terribly unfair that we are taxed twice, once as the corporation and once as a stockholder - it's . . . it . . . Oh GOD it's so UNFAIR!!!!!
Wah. That the deal - you can own your own company, be a partner in a company, own stock in an S-corp or something similar, where you *take* personal responsibility for the actions of the company and are not 'double taxed', or you can separate yourself behind a legal veil in which if your company poisons family, they can sue the company but not you personally - oh, and by the way, we'll treat the company as a different person for tax purposes as well.
But this BS of "I wanna be protected *and* get all the money" is the whiniest thing from the 'libertarian' right I ever did hear. Run your own company and take responsibility, or don't, but don't *whine* about it.
Attempting to put religious symbols in courthouses and on public grounds specifically as displays of our 'christian heritage' (As distinguished from displays that honor a variety of cultures)
Religious requirements for holding office, down to nice little details like having to belong to a specific church. Some other country? Nah, common practice here in the mythically secular USA. It's a nice try, but there was never a monolithic ban on church and state interactions. The amendment in question specifically states CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW for a reason. Pretending the founding fathers are utter fucking morons and couldn't write clearly shows someone grossly ignorant of history. Most of them clearly had genius I.Q. levels and were an extremely well educated bunch.
Well, gee, so you feel we *should* allow our government to support certain religious doctrines and oppose others? Because, that's kinda what you seem to be saying here.
There are so many quotes from Madison and Jefferson diagreeing with you on every particular I shan't bother posting them as a group, and leave it at the fact that you seem to support "Religious requirements for holding office, down to nice little details like having to belong to a specific church.", one of the few things banned by our constitutional convention even prior to the Bill of Rights.
Article sic of the U.S. Constitution: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Attempts to override Roe v Wade and restrict a womans right to control her own body. (I have my own, secular, objections to Roe V Wade, but they are not based in fundamentally religious arguments)
Really? Me too! Specifically, it's bad law, pulled from a judges ass. If you want to change the law, change it, don't make shit up. Never mind the whole murdering children, a violation of the fundamental right to life? To err is human, I'll go with the "at conception" crowd any day since the alternative to them is the fucking crazies that will pull the fully developed kid out and stab it with a pair of scissors. That shit is murder, pure and simple.
Saying "the alternative to them is the fucking crazies that will pull the fully developed kid out and stab it with a pair of scissors." would be a better argument, if there were actually examples of fucking crazies pulling fully developed kids out, and stabbing them with a pair of scissors.
That said - the Ninth amendment is quite specific in stating that there *are* other protected rights not enumerated. In 200+ years, the Supreme Court has recognized exactly one, a right to privacy with specific portions enumerated in (amongst others) the 1st, 3rd, and 4th amendments, but with a greater 'penumbra' the court takes into account in some cases.
If the courts finding one additional right in 200 years is some deeply disturbing overreaching of the court for you and your fellow "Constitutional purists" like Scalia, and zero additional rights would mean that the ninth amendment was indeed a meaningless paranoia that our founding fathers thought they might have made a mistake once but they were wrong, may I ask for a judgement from you for how many hundred of years the court was required to wait before finding an additional right that the ninth amendment might apply to?
The Gay Marriage thing, although that is, in general, more red meat that gets tossed out to the base every four years than anything I feel deeply concerned about.
I'm at risk of taking serious shit from my relatives when discussing this one. In the spirit of full disclosure, I loath homosexuality, if they fuck off and leave me alone I wont build up a desire to kill them. The entire concept from start to finish is reprehensible. On that note, I don't care what the disgusting perverts do as long as they don't bother me. If I see a pair fucking in the street, they better hope I'm not armed, but they can screw each other in their own homes till the cows come home. Yeah, I'm a bigot, it's my constitutional right, one that's actually written down too.
Unfortunately, that has dick to do with marriage. Marriage is a religious institution, going by the fictitious separation of church and state, it is unconstitutional for marriage licenses to exist in the first place. Making it a legal right for some fag to get "married" is taking that intrusion into religion, and telling the members of it to go fuck themselves, their abhorence towards a behavior is irrelevant and their religious ceremonies are damn well going to support it anyway. All marriage licenses are either unconstitutional, or separation of church and state is a myth, take your pick. I give a shit not on civil unions.
Like it or not, Marriage is a legally recognized state that may, or may not, have religious connotations, but definitely has secular ones including rights to property, recognition in estate battles, access to legal documents, and other protections.
Now, I have homosexual friends, but, as liberal as I am, I can't bring myself to really care whether or not a given church is willing to marry them. I *do* care about whether one of them can visit the other in the hospital, pick up the kid when the other is sick, and get the bills paid on time - all shit that's a big enough pain in the arse *with* the legally recognized protections of marriage, nevermind without it.
So, yeah, if you want to make marriage a completely religious convention with no legal repercussions, you get the bill in congress I'll write my congressman to vote for it - but until *that* happens, I'm all for extending it to any two people that fulfill the reponsibilities to each other that it requires.
The general attempts to politicize religion on the right, or to attempt to pretend that "The government shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion, or restricting the free exercise thereof" (Probably not exact quote) means something other than that government business and religion should not be mixed.
It's good that you know it's not an exact quote. It's "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. For those of us that can read, that means congress isn't allowed to set up a national religion, that would be what establishment of religion is. Furthermore, congress is congress, not government, states can and did do whatever the fuck they wanted to.
You're right - I said restricting instead of prohibiting. To coin a phrase "Ohhhh Myyyy Gawd!"
That said - hey, right up to 1868, you were right. Then they passed that pesky 14th amendment:
"1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
So, it's only been 150 years, so the news may not have made it all the way to Alaska yet, but it turns out that, no, states cannot do "Whatever the fuck they wanted to", sorry 'bout that. I'm betting Scalia might accept an argument that the first amendment just restrict congress and doesn't *actually* establish a right to free speech and freedom of religion applying to the states under the 14th amendment, but since at least some of the conservatives are still talking their meds on a regular basis I'm guessing none of the others would go for it, but thank you for playing and let me remind you, you still get a lifetime supply of Rice a roni, the San Francisco treat!
{G} - Jonnan
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if they are, and I don't like them, then as it happens I have a lot less leverage to object to that than I do to object about a group using federal funds in a way that conflicts with a constitutional amendment. Don't like it - get an amendment started that bars the activity of your choice. But as it happens, yes, I agree with the madison/Jefferson interpretation of that amendment, and churches using my money bother me more than greenpeace or whoever.