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This is a very fascinating discussion y'all are having. Know that the rest of us are on pins and needles, hoping this is intellectually brought to an ultimate conclusion. I'd hate to think these poor kids were killed in a less than efficient or un-optimally powerful manner....

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If you think the unprecedented corruption of the Trump administration says anything about the corruption of other administrations regardless of party then you're the one deserving of pity. And a healthy dose of ridicule. In my lifetime other candidates released their tax forms and divested themselves of personal holdings to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Dick Cheney didn't want to sell off his Haliburton stock before taking office and handing his cronies big no-bid contracts in Iraq. But he did. Trump's shameless use of the office for self-enrichment is unique in all of history. Yes, politics takes money and all politicians have to spend a lot of time and effort raising money to finance their campaigns. What Trump is doing isn't an example of that. At all.

Everyone that committed crimes in the 2016 election cycle should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law with maximum sentencing on the table. This can never happen again. If these confederates are let off the hook, then justice and the rule of law are truly dead.

This is the equivalent of a shoplifter demanding an inquiry into why the store's security cameras were pointed at him.

Fuck jail. Hang em. In public. And don't stop with the Trump campaign. Lets go ahead and purge all foreign influence on our political processes.

I imagine their definition of condescension includes anything from someone more educated, wealthier or younger trying to change their mind regardless of tone or merit.

I ain’t over thinking it. We are big 12 champs outright and swept those pesky mother fuckers on a weekend that really mattered. That’s Texas baseball magic. I don’t care who the coach is. Out. Right. Big 12 Champs. Choke on that bitches.

I can't believe how many people are still defending this piece of shit. I get that people hate admitting when they were wrong. But how much more do you need to see before you cut your losses? I said this on election night, and I still think it's right: in 25 years it will be impossble to find anyone who admits that they voted for Donald Trump.

Yep, had a visit from Daniel Vaughn yesterday. He was with one of his colleagues from TM, Chris Reid from Houston Chronicle, and Michael Fulmer from Houston Barbecue Festival. I served them everything on the menu and, after they ate, did an interview with DV. He took a bunch of pics and I suspect I’ll get a writeup sometime soon.

I mean his fucking campaign manager has been indicted.

[emoji106]

Fucking May recruiting reality is setting in? Fuck off aggy

Well that’s one way to come out of the closet as a retard

We told you it was close. But it wasn’t, so now we have to make up something that allows us to continue to take your money.

There are many ways to skin a cat.

The bigger issue is that back when the SEC wasn't good at baseball the NCAA committee would give them berths and regionals because the tournament "was supposed to be regional in nature" and they didn't want there to be too many teams from the West. Funny how that's not a thing anymore now that the SEC is good at baseball. If the system were fair then the Pac-12 and Big 12 would take the places from deserving SEC teams because that happened for decades when the East was worse than the West.

There is a lot to un-pack here, but it basically is a cherry-picked set of information from a "study" or "report" that was describing the overall body of information on the topic of gun violence of America. Note that this "study" or "report" did not conduct any science, it only reviewed the work of a vast range of folks - from gun proponents to academic researchers. You have effectively pasted your information from a pro-gun website, who cherrypicked the information that from gun proponents. https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15941-cdc-study-ordered-by-obama-contradicts-white-house-anti-gun-narrative I recommend you actually read the report and not a pro-gun website. As is often the case with pro-gun science, the level of honesty isn't always present. Lets un-pack this one statement "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008." Look at the range 500,000 to 3 million - wtf is that?? Second, this information was derived from a rate based on a small phone survey asking if people had defended themselves with a gun, and the rate of positives was similar to the rate that people are positive that they had been abducted by aliens. This is bad science. The best way to weed out bad science is to look at the source. The information comes from a 2001 book by Kleck titled "Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control." Note that this is a BOOK and not a peer-reviewed academic journal. I could write a book lol. Lets go ahead read the rest of the paragraph in the CDC report: "On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys." The CDC is indicating that more research is needed. That is all.

This quote from West Wing explains why people think he's doing a good job. Trump understands this and plays it to the hilt

It’s not controversial to assert this administration is historically corrupt. There is a very real possibility the President directly received $ in exchange for executive action. Not just China/ZTE but Qatar and the Kushners too. I’m not sure why there’s any equivocation here. And that’s *just* the tip of the iceberg with bribery allegations. The Novartis thing was so controversial that the GC of a multi billion dollar pharmaceutical company resigned last week. That doesn’t happen for some lobbying payments.

JJ Watt isn't out there trying to join the Eagles

meh. you people just get off on being upset.

Let’s try 1979.

Get her name right, she's sick.

No thanks, I don’t want my son to be educated in a prison.

You know they molest people, the Catholics.

From my perspective, there are multiple steps that can be taken and ought to be taken to counter the problem especially of school shootings. I see three steps that should be taken, in the following order, based on enforceability and immediate impact that are primarily focused on gun violence in schools as we have a premier duty to protect the ones that cannot protect themselves accordingly. 1) Regulation on gun storage: Every gun has to be stored accordingly if it is not carried by the owner. With stored accordingly I mean some kind of safe or locker. You have to limit accessibility to guns for prospective school shooters and since they can't buy the guns by themselves for the most part, family stocks are a main weapon source. Further, you have to penalize failures to comply with this regulation pretty seriously. Similar laws are already in place in other countries and are for my point of the view the best short-term action that also has a chance of making it through the legislative process. 2) Intensify mental health screenings: From my point of view, guns are not the main problem. School shootings are foremost a symptom of deeper problems, but access to guns is what creates a deadly combination. But for every school shooting, there is also a kid that has been lost along the way and that feels the urge to go out on a killing spree and eventually kill himself. For the poster that asked what the number of mentally ill school shooters is, I'd argue 100%, but not all of them have been diagnosed beforehand and that's where we have to get better. Most of those kids have a history of being outsiders, being bullied, or being loners, and we as a society have to make a better job of helping kids before they get fantasies of shooting up their school. 3) Gun control: Lastly, and this is by far the hardest point, which I do not feel like happening anytime soon, is that we enact stricter gun control. I don't think it is the premier measure that should be done, as there are already too many guns in circulation and you can either get guns illegally or use some other weapon (think knifes, explosives, cars, etc.). What I would like to see though, is tighter regulation on who is able to buy guns with a focus on a mental health screening/ psychological background checks. While I do not want to take the guns away from the rightful citizens, I fail to understand while we wouldn't want to check who might be unfit for a weapon of lethal force. You wouldn't hire some lunatic to be your pilot or physician or whatever, why would you give them a deadly weapon. That's something I cannot really comprehend.

The transformation of world cuisine following the Columbian exchange is interesting. Tomatoes, corn, potatoes, vanilla - all new world crops. No paprika in Hungarian cuisine before that.

What’s the point since nobody knows what gender it will end up as

Plated up. Pork belly, roasted pork, fresh lo mein, broth, nori, fresh peas, and a slow-poached egg. Well worth the effort. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The Republicans and the NRA are playing a stupid fucking game of chicken that they will not win in the long run. At some point in the near future - next week, next month, next year, two years from now, we are going to have a school shooting that is live-streamed on Facebook, Periscope/twitter, whatever, and we are going to see victims being killed in real-time. We are going to see kids being executed live. And then we will see the nation respond in a way that we have not before now. Whatever happened at Parkland as far as awareness/social/political activity will be dwarfed by what comes out of a live-streamed shooting. And the Dannie Goebs of the world are going to whine about schools having more than one door to get in, and probably whine about kids having access to cell phones. And the Republicans are going to keep on taking NRA money and flipping the middle finger to everybody talking about gun control. And Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are going to be quietly writing gun-control legislation, or rather pulling out legislation they've been thinking about for years. And if Nancy and Schumer aren't in a position of power to push it through, they will be within an election or two. And then the Republicans will whine and say "we want a seat at the table to discuss gun control since we like guns!" And Nancy and Chuck are going to say "get out your fucking shine box and sit in the corner, because you had your chance after Sutherland Springs and Parkland and Santa Fe and all you did was voice your continued allegiance to the NRA and bitch that there were too many exits or entrances to schools." And Nancy and Chuck are going to bend us over and run a train on all of us, whether it's those of us with a handful of rifles and shotguns, or the guys who think they live in the American suburbia version of the Korengal Valley. And there is absolutely no guarantee that whoever is the President will side with us, and there is absolutely no guarantee that the Supreme Court will also side with us. But there is an absolute guarantee that the NRA and Wayne LaPierreLafontaine are going to get a whole lot richer.

A little palette cleanser, one of my friends...

Upon review of that post, I regret agreeing with it, certainly the partisan take, as my subsequent response indicated. But I do think that the Trump debacle is shining something of a light on the forms that corruption and influence peddling can take. I think we would all agree that there's too much money in American politics. You'd kind of think there's so much in it already, and "legitimately," that there would be no need to dalliance with foreign governments and general-purpose crooks like Cohen, and maybe Trump is singular in that regard, but I rather doubt it. He's probably singular in his brazenness/stupidity, but not in the spirit of what he does. To the same end, I have wondered off and on over the years how unique the Watergate burglary was and how many other campaigns have used quasi-legal or flat illegal tactics to gain information about the opposition. Part of me says it was unique to Nixon's megalomania and G Gordon Liddy. But Liddy-like characters have been all too common in US politics forever.

"By no means am I minimizing how awful it was for Trump to take a shit on my living room couch. I'm just saying, all other politicians take a shit on my living room couch, too. Believe me, I'm not letting Trump off the hook for that massive dookie he left on my sofa. I'm just saying, it opened my eyes to just how often these politicians are just dropping their drawers and unloading their burrito remnants on living room couches. I've long been suspicious that they're doing it, and now that Trump has taken a shit on my couch, I have proof that they all do it, all the time."

King Ranch Bluestem and it's a sonofabitch. Control of King Ranch Bluestem (Bothriochloa ischaemum) Repeated sprayings will eventually get it, but turning up the roots will help the process.

Family's out of town for the weekend.

How about mandatory gun insurance?!

Haven't read this whole thing. My college roommate's dad was the mayor of Santa Fe back in the late 90s-early aughts. Spent some time there with her. It's a sweet little town close to the Gulf, much like where I grew up. I'm so sad and tired of all this. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know what will fix it. I just know that whatever fixes it will be change. Something different from what we're doing/not doing now. I know this because we have yet to do anything that has helped. It's getting worse, not better. I'm sad and tired and sick that sending my kids to school and my husband to work makes me nervous. As someone who has lived with depression for almost the last decade, and who has several family members being treated for it as well, I can say from experience (as can many of you) that treating mental health is terribly complex and treatment success varies wildly among individuals. Because of this, it seems like limiting access to firearms, or certain kinds of firearms, has a much better chance of bringing down the number of mass shootings in the short term. But what the fuck do I know. My love to everyone in Santa Fe.

Says the guy who just tried to call out somebody for derailing his own thread.

Here’s a couple pics taken by Scott Sandlin (he writes for Houston Food Finder).

Was hand watering during a drought a few years ago and a hummingbird was hanging out flying through the mist. So, I then started spraying a fine mist in the air for him. In about a minute a dozen hummingbirds showed up and just had a fine time in the water. It is still a little moment life highlight.

wife and dog away for the weekend and weather was good so i went out to burn through some fuel some kid's gnarly slide old 3nglish and some dude's extra house

And he can’t predict the weather for shit, so you’re practically twins.