Rex Kickass

That being said, in areas where legal recognition of same sex unions is not available, ethical agencies who believe in equal rights for equal people should offer benefits to same sex couples in committed long term relationships.

Us gaybos don't want special privileges. If I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't be able to insure her with most plans unless we got married. Assuming that I could marry my boyfriend, I would assume that the same rules apply. Equal people = equal rights.

I think if this kind of punishment is a matter of degree. Once in a while, aint nothin wrong with it. Is it anymore humiliating than when you were punished in front of your friends as a kid?

That may be a first.

I just remember Brian Dennehy playing a drunk Bobby Knight in that first movie. Put me off ESPN films for life.

Offering health insurance to my husband and not my boy friend? Fine with me. As long as I can have my husband legally be my husband.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/st...d=316582&page=1

Well, if you read the email, its more of a self serving save my ass move. This guy was an embed for the unit that was scheduled to take those unarmored Humvee up north. When he found out what was going on, he filed two stories about it. Nobody noticed. I think it had more to do with him being scared to have his own ass blown up by an IED than anything else.

That argument only holds water to me if the US government was willing to go after any government for the same reasons. Yet we're allied with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We are not going after China for human rights abuses. In the broader sense, if our government truly had the viewpoint of protecting the world from tyranny - I'd agree with you in this respect. But the cold, hard truth is that the American government doesn't care about doing the right thing when it comes to protecting non US residents and citizens. We only care to protect our own. And that has nothing to do with who's in power. Clinton sat by and let Rwanda chop themselves in half literally. Reagan helped to fuel the Iran Iraq war by arming both sides. Carter stood by and allowed one million Ethiopians to starve because it didn't fit US interests. I could go on and on.... But to answer your questions more directly - probably thousands, not that many, and none. I'm not going to get into an argument about what kind of justification necessitated regime change in Iraq here. Because this whole argument kind of takes away from the point. Our soldiers feel like they got a raw deal. And they oughta get what they need. Including armored transport. And they sure as hell don't need a guy who never served telling them that even if they had a fully armored tank, they might still get blown up instead. We have had 18 months to react to new realities and we just aren't doing it. And the thing that's most disturbing about all of it is that in order for anyone important to notice, a reporter had to arrange for a soldier to ask a question of the defense secretary yesterday.

How many lives will it cost the US to uparmor military transport in a battlezone? There's a big difference between forcing a hand to make a policy change with a nonresponsive bureaucracy and putting military in harms way by means of armed conflict. You're comparing Apples to Rutabagas.

If the ends equal troops getting the protection they deserve before going into battle - and the means include an embedded journalist getting a soldier who expressed his frustration to said journalist to do the same to his boss - where is the problem?

I actually thought the guy ages so little that he was that Y2K bomb everyone was talking about.

I think the important question is to that: so what? These are valid concerns that the soldiers have expressed to a member of the media to begin with? If this creates better conditions for reservists fighting in Iraq, what's the harm?

Another example of shining leadership from the great state of Alabama. First, they refuse to remove segregationist language from their constitution. Then, a state rep proposes banning public libraries from carrying books with a homosexual character in them. Seriously, if any other country wants this waste of a state, thats fine. Can we hold an ebay auction maybe? Buyer pays shipping!

So is not reporting for duty with your National Guard post, but hey - who's counting?

Poor Parenting skills drive a family out of their house. Ha ha ha. How cute! Child abandonment is only a crime when there aren't marshmallows around! These people make me sick. Seriously, the therapy bills in 20 years are going to be huge I bet.

I had a friend who's family had to face an agonizing decision over something very similar. They chose to end the pregnancy because the condition appeared so severe that the baby wouldn't have been able to survive beyond a few hours outside of the womb without life support. These stories are just sad.

So Rumsfeld addressed the troops today, gave them a chance to ask him questions directly. The questions seemed to have an aggressive or angry tone towards the government - not a great sign two years into a war. But what puzzles me is whether or not this kind of event is extraordinary to begin with. Is this kind of thing common for Defense Secretaries to do? I got my opinions on the questions and answers - a lot of you can figure out what they were - but if this Q&A is as strikingly unique as it seems to me, I gotta give Rumsfeld some props for having it - as much as it may pain me for doing so.

There's a non porn use for the internet?

But why the need to privatize Social Security in the first place? I thought we already had proposed PSAs. They were called IRAs as I recall. I think what Krugman and a lot of people that are against the idea of privatization of SSI want to say is about more than the numbers. Its about the ideas behind Social Security, the basis of thought behind its creation. SSI wasn't meant to participate in the forces of the economy. It was specifically created to shield our senior citizens from want due to the forces of the economy.

Math confuses me, but at least its nice to know we did something right behind the scenes

Good luck tex!

He's got a point there. I like NPR, but there just aren't many African Americans involved - Kojo Nambee, Tavis Smiley and ummmm doesn't Aaron Freeman do the occasional piece for NPR? It's pretty pathetic - but I think its symptomatic of radio as a whole. In the nine years I worked in professional radio, I can count the number of African-Americans that I've worked with on one hand. Which is kinda sad.

Yes there are. And there's probably nothing more annoying to me personally than a shrill whiny left wing person who claims to be on the same side, but really doesn't know or support what true liberals really are. So people like Ralph Nader and Michael Moore and anyone that refers to Bush as Karl Rove or Dick Cheney's puppet would also be considered an asshat in my book.