Well, Obama himself has certainly not caused a net change. But was the increase in distrust of government around 2006 a result of actual Bush-era policies, actions and scandals, or of conservative propaganda claiming that government can’t be trusted?

The current 60% cloture rule was actually designed to prevent filibusters, not facilitate them. If the Senate returned to the old rules, a small group of dedicated pro-Obamacare fanatics could still mount a filibuster against a repeal, just as southern Democrats used to filibuster against Civil Rights legislation. In those days, Congress actually did things, so holding up all business with a filibuster was considered destructive. Now, who would notice if business was held up by a filibuster? Nothing ever gets done anyway.

Wait a minute – shouldn’t you have to sacrifice some kind of animal to get God’s attention? What kind of animal would have to be killed for this purpose? God’s instructions about sacrifices are in the same general part of the Bible as the strictures about homosexuality.

Th”More evidence is accumulating that the Boston Bombing was entirely preventable.” If that’s the message, it ignores the fact that security agencies have to sift through a huge amount of information that might pertain to attacks, and to actually prevent such attacks would require all sorts of preventive and unconstitutional action. Then the last paragraph implies that all this surveillance is not worth it – this post seems to want to have it both ways.

This type of attack is actually not preventable unless we have an opressive police/surveillance state. And why should we try to prevent them? The danger is actually negligible in comparison to other things such as vehicular accidents or various types of gun deaths (both over 30k/year). Even 9/11 represented only a few weeks worth of deaths from these other dangers.

The photo is horrifying, but so would be a photo of a typical fatal car accident or shooting or stabbing death.

So Senate Democrats should have brought up a bill the next day and have it filibustered then? Or in the unlikely event it would be passed by the Senate have it voted down in the House? Meaningful action was doomed and the timing was basically irrelevant. The Senate failed to bring up a real bill because Reid and many other Democrats didn’t want to do it, not because they acted too slowly. Even if all Democrats had voted for such a bill it would not have passed.

How many times do you have to be told, moral hazard and fear of punishment are not deterrents in finance. The awareness of guilt is irrelevant for the future. Punishing the bankers will not deter future crashes, even if prosecution succeeds. The effort should be directed towards making these kinds of financial manipulations impossible. If armed robbery of banks is easy, people will do it, regardless of the punishment – and likewise for less obvious forms of robbery.

Of course attitudes about Obamacare have not changed – it hasn’t really kicked in, and won’t until 2014. This delay may be one reason it was not opposed more vigorously – opponents knew they would have plenty of time to mobilize opposition.

No, your position should not be based on benefits to a family member. If your son/daughter commits murder, does that justify you in calling for the repeal of the law against murder? Morality is mostly based on overall benefit to society.

Masaccio is being unfair to organisms in the financial world. They are constantly inventing new things to enrich themselves, such as credit-default swaps and other derivatives. These may be ultimately destructive to many people, like gunpowder and nuclear weapons, but that’s technological progress. Anyway, derivatives have not really been harmful yet to those who made the most use of them.

Are these financial organisms a new species which will replace humans because of their greater ingenuity? Or are some branches of humans, such as Democratic politicians and the media, just degenerate and slated for weeding out?

Actually, I don’t “remember when the Tea Party was supposed to be a grass roots organization”. The movement officially began with a rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange – what’s grassy about that? It was obvious all along that it was being supported by big money, not to mention Fox News.

If the objective is to reduce gun deaths and injuries significantly, it is madness to focus on assault weapons because they account for a very small fraction of the problem. Banning 20-round magazines and military-looking weapons but allowing 10-round magazines is just not going to have much effect. The fact that mass killers prefer the big magazines does not mean that they would not consider mass killings if they only had a bag full of glocks (how long does it take to drop one and pick up another?)

There is a basic biological law which underlies evolution, which is that reproduction must be maximized. Ultimately all behavior is for the purpose of reproduction; those species which do not reproduce are not “fit” and cease to exist. So Cardinal George could argue that if people are constrained to act only instinctively, like most animals and plants, homosexuality should be avoided if it interferes with reproduction. Of course even in non-human nature it sometimes happens that populations overstrain the capacity of the local environment, and then there is a population crash. There are reasons to think that humans will overstrain the capacity of the entire earth before long, which would likely lead to a massive crash of many other populations besides humans. If Cardinal George could find a passage in the Bible which tells us how to deal with this, he might have something.

The post is on the whole a good one, but accepting the popular picture of the Tibetan lamas as advocates of Democracy and pre-communist Tibet as an idyllic Shangri-La is a manifestation of ignorance. There were some very bad aspects to both the previous theocratic rule as well as the communist takeover, and there is no need to accept the extreme propaganda of either side.

There is no need to call on racism to explain the ouster of Steele – he was simply grossly incompetent, at least in terms of public relations. And the selection of Priebus probably has little more real significance than the original selection of Steele. Priebus’ “populist” Tea-Party principles will not necessarily affect the real running of the party any more than Steele’s did (whatever Steele’s principles were). The big-money interests which actually run the party have obviously evolved mechanisms to bypass the chairman.