patrick.net

Dan8267 says

Whether or not the founding fathers believed that rights came from a god is irrelevant. In our government, rights are defined by law. They come from Congress, not your fictitious god. Get over it.

But thank you for your post. Claiming that rights "come from Congress" is probably the clearest example in this thread of the massive, irreconcilable gap between Thomas Jefferson and any of today's so-called liberal that believes as you do. Any commonality between today's Democrats or liberals with Thomas Jefferson on other issues is meaningless beyond this gap.

BTW, can you tell us which rights are specifically granted by Congress? Most of them seem to be written in the fashion of "Congress shall not interfere with 'the right of x" where x is not otherwise defined, and therefore assumed to already be held by the people. Perhaps the fact that this doesn't fit into a clear mathematical box is the reason you can't understand it.

indigenous says

A lot of verbiage and I still don't understand what an INTJ is? Maybe that is the intention?

It's the Meyer's Briggs Type Inventory, a type of personality assessment designed in part to help people understand how to work with people of various other types, and that is very frequently abused and applied in contexts where it doesn't belong, or using it in a way to signify something when it is meaningless (such as Dan's comparison of himself with Jefferson). This is one topic that, while I have never looked it up on Wikipedia, is probably one that is safe to look up there, if you were interested. But it's really totally irrelevant to this thread, other than an expression of Dan talking about things which he knows little of, but thinks he does simply because he's smart in general.

Paralithodes says

I can't recall ever quoting Wikipedia in a previous debate with you.

Back when you went by the handle Shrek, before MarsAttacks and the several other handles you used. Too bad Patrick kept nuking your comments. I always thought it was better to keep the posts to demonstrate how ridiculous they were.

curious2 says

Seeing you defend LBJ's decision to launch the Viet Nam draft

The Vietnam-era draft was a left-over from the 40s. Plus the US was experiencing a massive rise of 19 year olds in the 1960s (baby boom really got rolling in the late 40s) so shipping some of them off to fight the godless communist bastards in Indochina seemed like a good idea at the time, just like stopping the communist expansion in Korea was probably a good idea, even in retrospect.

Intervening in Vietnam to save the Thieu regime was a really tough call, given our mostly successful experience in Korea.

Failing to act would give the conservatives tons of ammunition for calling LBJ and the Dems pussies and not serious about containing communism, just like Truman failed to save China when he had the chance.

Against this LBJ had to make the call that our armed forces would prove not sufficiently more capable than the French to defeat the communists in SE Asia.

This would be a priori, in 1965, preposterous!

But after 3+ years of jungle slog, we began to understand that the guerrillas had pretty good freedom of movement within SVN, since the place was so covered with jungle and the interior was mostly uninhabited and the borders with Laos and Cambodia very porous.

Plus the Thieu regime mostly sucked and many if not most non-Catholic Southerners just wanted the wars over already.

And we couldn't really bomb the Hanoi regime to the bargaining table, since they were so poor they didn't have much worth preserving from the USAF & USN anyway.

The only way to win was to isolate the north from its support, which meant going to war with Russia and/or China, or somehow getting China to fight on our side, something our diplomacy was not sufficiently flexible enough to pursue in the 1960s.

So yeah, given our stupid domestic politics -- the conservative mouth-breather vote that appears when war is on the menu -- LBJ was railroaded into intervening in Vietnam as he did.

Obama has always had a nuanced, tactical view of health reform. First get the government involved, then move towards universal single payer over time. He's long said we can't get to there in one jump, and he's clearly right.

We don't have a single Democratic senator in the progressive caucus. Not one!

By the way, this looks like the full timeline, up to Obama.

http://www.davidwalbert.com/2011/07/01/timeline-of-u-s-political-parties/