The Dude wrote:yeah. any opinions

The Dude wrote:thank you, much better when you actually address the point

i think his actual policies on guns aren't much different than the status quo. I think his coming from a rural state kind of affects his view on it, and in interviews, like the one below, he won't state anything specific and deflect it towards the mental illness point to keep his base happy

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolit ... un-control

"So obviously, we need strong sensible gun control, and I will support it," "But some people think it's going to solve all of our problems, and it's not. You know what, we have a crisis in the capability of addressing mental health illness in this country. When people are hurting and are prepared to do something terrible, we need to do something immediately. We don't have that and we should have that."

mozartpc27 wrote:... the Republican Party has been cashing in the "angry white guy" chips since the "Reagan Democrat" days ...

SK790 wrote:Go for it

Curt Schilling, a star pitcher who was in the Major Leagues for 20 years and a baseball analyst for ESPN, was suspended from his Little League World Series duty after sending a controversial tweet Tuesday....The tweet re-posted a meme that reads: "It's said only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How'd that go?"

Roger Dorn wrote:Yeah I keep laughing when people say Trump doesn't have a chance and he's going to disappear.

mozartpc27 wrote:.... the question is: are they serious and do they have the ear of people who matter in the party, or are they themselves people who matter in the party, and if they are, are there enough of them to force, if not this time, then some time (particularly if they lose with a perceived middle-ground candidate like Bush or Kasich), the nomination of someone like Cruz? I mean, this is the Goldwater thing I am talking about...

mozartpc27 wrote:By the bye, here is how you can tell Republicans aren't serious about immigration reform: if you REALLY wanted to stop people from coming here illegally, you wouldn't bother trying to build fences or hire more border cops. All of that is equivalent to fighting the human spirit itself, the desire - the human need - to better one's own and one's family's material conditions. If history has taught us ANYTHING, it's that you always lose when you fight the human drive for progress: build the fence - err, the wall - as high as you want, as thick as you want, as long as you want, and as reinforced by military police as you can afford - people will still find a way over if there is more to be had here than what they can get at home.

No, if you were SERIOUS about it, you wouldn't bother with the people trying to make a way for themselves at all - you would put the screws to every business owner who hires an undocumented worker, make the penalties financially and perhaps even criminally draconian. If there were no jobs to be had, people coming here to work off the books or under the table would be out of luck, and the stream of illegal immigrants would stop much more quickly. But this, of course, would not only involve the unpleasant reality of driving up the prices of any number of consumer goods which would then have to be explained to the public, it would, more importantly, run afoul of the most important part of the Republican base - the rich part, the OWNER part.

Because their proposals involve putting up walls to keep out the powerless, instead of setting up penalties to punish the advantage-seeking powerful, you know the Republican Party isn't serious about anything to do with immigration - except pandering to the poorest and more disaffected among its ranks.