I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

Garden...try white tea.  Much smoother and even better for you than green tea.

Blue...how did you like your acupuncture tx?

Oh, Blue, I think Lumosity is waaaaay out of reach. When there's nobody home, there are no synaptic connections.

Wabitt - See the previous page with my post about Rahel Maddow's definition of trolls - and a new twist. In this sense, the trolls running this debate are the NRA a.k.a. gun manufacturers. They are claiming that this is a human rights issue - when it is nothing of the sort. It is just a financial issue. I don't think the NRA believes half of what it says. Those people are just counting their coins, knowing that there are people stupid enough to take their tripe about Obama's children seriously in the way they mean it. As they infuriate more liberals, the true believers love them even more.

The concept of self-defense is already enshrined under common law. We don't NEED a Second Amendment for that purpose. And until the twit head Alito and his half wit side kick Thomas came along, nobody interpreted the Second Amendment as the right to own guns. The Second Amendment was intended to give people the right to fight tyranny and the right to self-defense. It is a revolutionary holdover.

Bolded this to bring point home (wishful thinking, I know...)

Blue, it almost makes me cry for my country. Can't possibly fault Canadians for their thinking. After all, I have no desire to set foot in Texas from all that I hear even though my late father, like many yankees, loved that state and went there frequently.

I do think people have to understand what drives the US - besides money.

Many people who moved here fled oppression by government, so there is a natural antipathy to central power. The NRA essentially stands for the concept that the government --any government-- does not have a monopoly on law enforcement because government can always turn tyrannical and cannot be trusted. It is also why the US judicial system is predicated on the rights of the individual versus the state; other democracies place more emphasis on the obligations an individual has to society. The revolutionary precept hasn't really disappeared in many places, especially the more isolated, less economically developed ones, and in places that have been hard hit by economic downturn, like western Pennsylvania.

This land was populated with rebels and outcasts and some of their descendants have never really accepted that we rebels and outcasts were able to form our own government and that, despite its faults, our system is failry free and flexible. That revolutionary distrust of tyranny has never left many areas.

The US is unique in that it is BOTH geographically vast AND extremely wealthy AND the product of a colonial overthrow. We are not Africa (free but poor); we are not Canada (still part of a commonwealth) or Russia, a country where standards of living and basic industry vary widely by region.

The average US citizen had a higher standard of living than most Europeans on the eve of the American Revolution. The place my ancestors settled was easy in that way. And despite the wide gap between rich and poor here, some of those characteristics continue today.

There are places like the south and northwest (a haven for both survivalists and white supremacists) that have the following characteristics:

--Wealth and industrialization (relative to others in the world)

--Political freedoms

--Geographic isolation

--A vast natural landscape that never challenges their misperception that they are alone

--A federal government that leaves the alone except when it comes to taxes, of course.

Thoreau made poetry out of this splendid isolation. Woodrow Wilson resisted getting away from it. Today, many citizens, no longer as well educated as Americans used to be, create fantasies in thier minds that somehow, they are the architects of this wealth and isolation - that it isn't the federal government or taxpayers which feed their freedoms. They really think they did it all themselves. They do not realize a government and a system are there for them. They resent Northeastern authority, wealth and industry. They are under the delusion that they can get by just fine on their own, and nobody around them is saying otherwise. So they build these castles in the air whereby they really don't need government, they can do their own law enforcement (which is what the guns are for) and, really are quite clueless as to how subsidized and coddled they are by rich states and other taxpayers.

I know people know this. Lame attempt to defend country here, while puking at what some of my compatriots say and do.....

Empires do get the most publicity. Serves us right for being so powerful. :-)  But every country has it ridiculous-ness - it's just that people only care when it's America.

Thank you for listening to "patriotic" semi-apologist rant!

Being a Northwesterner, I really do need to point out that Washington is one of the more blue states in the nation, and it is the most northwest of the contiguous US.  Oregon is quite blue, and even Montana is taking on a bluish tinge.  Idaho - well, what can I say, they grow potatoes - BUT, even though there is certainly a bastion of right-wing zealots (especially around Hayden Lake), there are also delightfully blue tinted regions.  In essence, there are a lot of crackpots - well - pretty much everywhere in these United States of America.  You don't have to be in either the South or the Northwest or the Mid-West or anywhere else in particular to be blessed by their presence.

True. There are nutsos everywhere in this darling country!

But there are also fabulous, imaginbative and courageous people.

I have always found the northwest interesting. Loads of white supremacists and militia people but also extremely progressive. Very interesting mixture. AND it is where much of the tech innovation happens that affects the entire world.

And while we are at it, no one has the jazz that New Orleans does.

I wish the US media would stop giving the trolls such a loud voice. Scratch that. I wish the US media would stop being populated by trolls.

Athena, have enjoyed your recent posts, including your patriotic "rant." And even though we have much to do to improve things in this country (gun control and the affordable care act are steps in the right direction), the paranoid extremists are, thankfully in the minority and their perceived power is being diminished each day. 

Proud to be an American and am looking forward to Monday.  Remembering the jubilation four years ago and looking forward to the next four years with President Obama leading our great nation.

And this:

Not me, Belinda. (Still haven't forgiven the OWN channel for displacing my erstwhile favorite, Discovery Health, to channel 182 where all it does is re-reuns.)

Besides, the Project Runway All Stars finale is tonight - can't miss that!!

I'm going to watch.  Very curious to hear what he has to say.

I'm not watching.  I was never a fan of bike racing and I really fear that like politics, guns and other sports....when the stakes get high corruption can flourish.  I can't think of anything Mr. Armstrong could say that could redeem him or the sport for me. 

Love our President and I also VERY much like how President Kennedy describes a liberal.  I've always felt deeply about MLK as I grew up in the years before black people had equal rights.  Well recall a couple of bus trips to Alabama.  A real lesson since I had never been anywhere to actually see segregation at work.

Can't remember the song ( rats ) but do recall it was about some of our greatest men and was asking the question if anyone had seen my old friend Martin, can you tell me where he's gone.  Don't remember who sang it either.   Anytime I think of MLK and Kennedy though parts of it pop into my head.

Jackie