pawnman

Oh good, we should be all set until this time next year.

Ah. So if I really want that Jewish Synagogue to recognize me, I need to get other atheists to help me lobby Washington. Or the difference might be that heterosexuals in a marriage don't have their rights taken from them by the federal government when they cross a state line.

Bingo. The president is playing politics with this one, knowing that the fiscal cliff will give him the tax increases he wants, and knowing he can just keep forcing continuing resolutions through to avoid cuts to programs he wants to fund.

So your claim is that the government will not force churches to marry heterosexual couples that do not meet the church's requirements, but that the government will force churches to marry gay couples? Doubtful.

Then you're saying I could waltz into a Jewish temple and demand that they my wife and I (atheist and a christian)? I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. I know I've had friends marry into the Catholic church that had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get a priest to oversee the wedding.

So you would support a state stripping a married couple of their rights at the state line if they were married in another state? Especially for military members who don't always get a choice in where they move?

I'm pretty sure that's not what I said. Any one disadvantaged youth probably does have opportunities. Any one youth could take advantage of those opportunities. Statistically, the ones in these lower-class neighborhoods don't. Like I said, I couldn't tell you the fate of any single person, but I could predict the high school and college graduation rates given some basic demographic data about the parents.

Just because any one person can escape from that kind of poverty doesn't change the fact that being born into a single-parent home to someone who didn't finish high school is going to place you at a disadvantage compared to someone with married parents in a middle or upper class home where both parents went to college. It isn't JUST the poverty, it is the emphasis the parents place on education, the surroundings that are not conducive to good study habits, the peer groups that view school as a waste of time, and the lack of resources in the school district itself. You're right, no one person can say "I got dealt a bad hand, that's why I'm a criminal". But on the macro level, it's pretty easy to predict which neighborhoods will generate future PhDs and which will generate future dropouts.

They want it to be called marriage because the federal, state, and local governments don't grant all the same rights and privileges to "civil union" couples as they do to married couples. If marriage is only the province of the church, why does the state issue marriage certificates? There is no compulsion for a church to have a ceremony for a gay couple if they feel it isn't congruent with their teachings, just like an atheist will have a tough time getting a Catholic priest to administer the wedding vows.

2013 could be a good year for sci-fi movies.

Except that Obama rejected this plan too. What was it the president wanted to do in the first place?

History says: new date. A little more ambitious than "I'm working my way through school".

If there are so many of you deployed, why are the finance hours so restricted in the deployed locations? And what is it you are doing, since the answer to 90% of my problems is, "You'll have to call your homestation finance office for that"?

Passing a budget would be a reasonable start.

Yes, I really, truly believe people who aren't paying any taxes not only don't care about government spending, they want to see the spending increase because it directly benefits them. And when was the last time the republicans were the party of "fiscal conservatism"? Sometime right after Clinton's first election? Neither party has been fiscally conservative for a LONG time. What I'd really love to do is force everyone to pay something. And I would completely stop payroll deductions. People don't even realize they're paying taxes. Force people to write a check, and let them see just what they are really paying. I'm not especially in favor of raising taxes, but I'm not seeing a lot of alternatives to generate the sort of revenues we're going to need to pay off any portion of our national debt and get back to a balanced budget. If we are going to raise taxes, I see no reason NOT to raise them for everyone instead of declaring class warfare and attempting to stick the rich with the entire bill.

No, we're done with that now. Remember, it's not "Global War on Terror" anymore, it's "Oversease Contingency Operations". There's no more fighting left to be done.

What I mean is, if they aren't using their own money to pay the taxes you claim gives them "skin in the game" in the first place, it's meaningless. If I give you a hundred dollars, and the local government collects twenty dollars in taxes, do you really care? No, because you're still up eighty bucks. People who aren't paying into the system, but are collecting from the system, have no incentive to cut the spending. They don't care that politicians are wasting billions of dollars, because it's someone else's money.

It doesn't give anyone "skin in the game" if they are paying these local taxes using money they got from the federal government in the first place.

Yeah, "non-punishable, but if we find something that violates GO-1B, we'll prosecute you, but we're not on a witch-hunt...unless we find something. And even though it's not a witch-hunt, we're reporting the data squadron by squadron, but there won't be any punishment, unless we decide your squadron has too much of the stuff, then we'll make an example".

Well, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, and local property taxes aren't exactly helping to balance the federal budget, are they?

It's because you don't get OPR bullets by delegating things.

It gets better...he has a female sidekick.

In all fairness, they came back with this reply when someone pointed it out: I kind of see the point. If the pinups have been part of military heritage since WWII, why are we suddenly stripping out the remnants of that heritage now? Why is Maxim's girl of the month more offensive than the Memphis Belle or the Strawberry Bitch? I think the point here is that the USAF has created a giant, knee-jerk reaction to a series of events that created bad publicity for senior leadership. As I've said before, they can't do something useful, so instead they're doing something visible.

It's not one person's complaint, it's the 700+ sexual assaults this year. Leadership has to be seen doing SOMETHING, and since they can't think of something useful, they're doing something visible.