whiteflame55

While there are probably more ways for people to get around these checks, these are the two most often pursued.

The Straw Purchase Loophole

The Brady Law is actually relatively easy to circumvent, through "straw purchases." This is when a person purchases a gun through a surrogate. Only the purchaser receives a background check. Straw purchases are technically illegal under a 1968 law, but gifts are not, granting a very large loophole to any surrogate who has a demonstrable relationship with the person who actually wants the gun.

The Gun Show Loophole

Another loophole is that the law applies only to licensed dealers. Non-licensed dealers can still sell firearms, subject to other federal, state or local regulations, and without making background checks. This exemption for private sales has been dubbed the "Gun Show Loophole," as these events are where many of those transactions take place.

Considering current law allows for these to occur, do gun advocates feel that these are appropriate? And for those who are pro-gun control, do you feel that this is an appropriate place for legislation to start?

This seems to be the topic of choice as soon as someone goes out and shoots up a place. "Was he liberal or conservative?" The fact is that we rarely come down to a solid answer on any given case, and the situations where we do are in the extreme minority.

But why should it matter at all? Does anyone REALLY think that the person's having been liberal or conservative was a major factor in their choice to wreak havoc in, say, a movie theater or a school? And even in the cases where there was obvious political incentives for the shooter, shouldn't we be more concerned with their level of sanity than their political affiliation? Or with their ease of access to weapons, despite that mental instability?

It seems to me like most attempts to bring up a shooter's political affiliation are just meant to make political hay out of a terrifying tragedy. And yet, I regularly see people on here trying to create a link between one person's insanity and the overall mindset of their political party, as though all conservatives or liberals are just one nudge away from blowing away a football stadium. Is this unreasonable, or is it just me?

that no one speaks out against people they generally agree with? I'm a liberal, and I find that most people on here don't believe what I say when I actually go against Obama because they don't believe I could possibly hold to those ideas.

No one is perfect, no president ever will be, and no matter how much support I give to someone, if they do something blatantly wrong, they deserve to be slammed for it. I know I'm going to get a lot of people calling me a sheep in this question, despite the fact that that's what I'm aiming to avoid, but can't we even have the common decency to acknowledge when we agree on something? Conservatives may disagree with me on a lot, but it always amazes me that almost no one will even acknowledge the overlap in our beliefs. For some reason, that can't be possible.

Not everyone is a sheep. People of both the liberal and conservative persuasions can be pragmatic, and therefore can agree. Why is it so hard for so many people to accept that?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/14/obama-on-...

Obama is literally taking responsibility for the economic problems we have right now. In 8 years, I never once heard Bush own up to the problems of his administration. And yet, 6 months in, Obama is willing to take it completely. So many people ask on this site about why Obama is spending so much time blaming Bush without getting anything done. You may not like what Obama's doing in terms of his governmental style, but it's good to have someone in office who is willing to take the high ground in this argument. He doesn't care who is blamed for the economy, all he cares about it getting us out of it. Please, focus on the question here, don't use this to attack his policies. I want to know what people think about the fact that he's willing to say this.

I just can't understand what's not available for people to view on this plan. I've looked over the entirety and I haven't seen any major spending on so-called "pork" whatsoever. But even if you disagree with that point, how can anyone say that something from the plan is hidden from view? Obama has not only made all the information available to the public (as seen below in the 6 CNN pages), but he's also created a website ( http://www.recovery.gov/ ) that will document every nickel being spent on this stimulus package. Even if you don't like where the spending's going (and feel free to argue which portion is bad, I haven't seen one piece that wont create more jobs or help people in desperate need), can we all at least agree that this bill is by far the most transparent piece of legislation in the history of this country?

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0901/gall...

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0901/gall...

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0901/gall...

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0901/gall...

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0901/gall...

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0901/gall...

Today is a day that many will remember as one of the worst in their lives. Today is Bloody Monday, and 71,400 people have lost their jobs, most of those from only 6 companies. People are visibly suffering from the massive unemployment, and it will continue to climb for a long while.

Meanwhile, this stimulus package is being presented to Congress for review. I believe it's an absolute necessity to pass it, but the problem I see is that it doesn't do enough. People would fault Obama with this, but my main source of blame is Congress, and not just one party. Both parties want the money to be going to different areas, and whether it's tax breaks or other programs, these unemployed people stand to gain little from anything that isn't giving them jobs. Sure, a small infusion of money will allow people to buy things in the short term, but it's not enough.

Why isn't 75% or more of this money going to job creation? I think it's the bureaucracy created by trying to pass this through Congress, the fact that Obama needs to garner massive support on both sides of the aisle if he wants to get this passed. It is absolutely necessary to get it passed, and quickly, but to shift away from the most important factor is to ignore all the warning signs.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/26/news/economy/job_c...

The following lines aren't taken from a liberal website, they are taken verbatim from Fox News itself ( http://embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/10/20/biden-i... ):

“Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America.” he told a fundraising crowd in the Pacific Northwest on Sunday. “Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“He’s gonna have to make some really tough - I don’t know what the decision’s gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it’s gonna happen.”

The Delaware Senator made similar remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser the day before. “We’re going to face a major international challenge. Because they’re going to want to test him, just like they did young John Kennedy. They’re going to want to test him. And they’re going to find out this guy’s got steel in his spine,” Biden said. He told the crowd to continue to stand by Obama and know they made the right choice even when the going gets tough.

Republicans seem to have this great tendency to leave out some of the most important lines in here. Suddenly, people think Biden's saying Obama is going to face challenges that McCain wouldn't if he was elected. Wake up people, Biden was saying that either of them would face these challenges. He specifically talked about Obama because that's his job, to help his candidate specifically. Moreover, he said Obama can handle it, that he's "a brilliant 47-year-old senator" with "steel in his spine." Sure, when you take some of the words out, this certainly looks like he's going against his own candidate, but that's not the way the speech as a whole looks.

We can disagree all we want about whether there's really an issue (though the case is that every single registration form the Republicans brought forward wasn't passed through the system, and all were flagged), but can we at least get the terminology straight? There's a difference between voter registration fraud, voter fraud, and election fraud.

The first is registering a bunch of people who don't really exist, I think we can all agree on that. This is what ACORN did. While it often affects what people perceive before an election in terms of numbers of new registering people for each political party, it doesn't change the results of that election unless that perception changes their vote. As far as I know, that doesn't tend to happen.

Voter fraud is where a voter that is ineligible to vote votes. This happens through a technological glitch in voting machines most often, but can happen when a person who would otherwise be ineligible to vote. When this does happen, it's mostly by accident, and many times this will prevent a person from casting their votes more often than it will allow the wrong people to do so.

As for election fraud, it's illegal interference with the process of an election. Acts of fraud tend to involve affecting vote counts to bring about a desired election outcome, whether by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates, or both. This often involves such things as voter caging and removal of persons registered to vote from lists of those that can. These people are often not allowed to vote on the basis of things that aren't true about them, such as criminal actions that were never there, and a move that never happened. This is what we're experiencing today as well. Several states across the nation are seeing massive purges of their voter registrations for no reason. When the people doing the purges were asked about it, their response was that these people had moved out the state or died. When checked against the actual number of people that had moved or died, the number removed proved to be more than 3 times higher. Such was the case in Louisiana, Ohio, and Virginia. The part of this that's frightening is that this is going on all too often in college towns, by Republican leaders. Isn't this more worrisome than a nonpartisan registration group getting people that are dead or don't exist registered for the election, or are those people going to suddenly appear on election day and vote?

I'm reposting this question because all the responses to my previous one either deviated from the topic or didn't go into the issue much at all.

Obama's is the one that corporations like more? Here's why:

Health care plans for employees cost money. Normally, that money isn't taxed by the federal government, but McCain plans to tax it. Non partisan groups of business owners such as he U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Federation of Independent Business said this would force them to shell out more money into them, something which many small businesses are incapable of doing. Moreover, even large businesses, when asked if they were willing to put more into it, largely said no. The majority said they would have to reduce funding that goes into their health care coverage. Only 4% of those surveyed said they would increase funding for it. Meanwhile, Obama's plan lowers premiums on these health care programs, thereby saving money for business owners and people overall. It also helps more people because it follows premium inflation, while McCain's is a stagnant 5 thousand dollar tax credit that changes only mildly over time (at the rate of inflation, which is 4 times less than the rate at which premiums increase).

The link below provides practically all the information I have here and a lot more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/us/politics/07he...

Obama's is the one that corporations like more? Here's why:

Health care plans for employees cost money. Normally, that money isn't taxed by the federal government, but McCain plans to tax it. Non partisan groups of business owners such as he U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Federation of Independent Business said this would force them to shell out more money into them, something which many small businesses are incapable of doing. Moreover, even large businesses, when asked if they were willing to put more into it, largely said no. The majority said they would have to reduce funding that goes into their health care coverage. Only 4% of those surveyed said they would increase funding for it. Meanwhile, Obama's plan lowers premiums on these health care programs, thereby saving money for business owners and people overall. It also helps more people because it follows premium inflation, while McCain's is a stagnant 5 thousand dollar tax credit that changes only mildly over time (at the rate of inflation, which is 4 times less than the rate at which premiums increase).

The link below provides practically all the information I have here and a lot more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/us/politics/07he...

I really want to know what your opinion is of her not doing any press conferences and limited interviews. The Republican party didn't even allow her to take questions or be listened in on during her meetings with various world leaders. I don't like Sarah Palin, but this question isn't about her, it's about her handlers. Why aren't they allowing her to speak her mind to the press? Why are they sheltering her? She's a strong woman, right? This is someone who (apparently) took on corruption in Alaska and fought it back. She can handle a few press appearances and questions. Why is she not being allowed to speak for herself?

Feel free to answer this question from both sides guys, because I'm confused. I know my take on it, but I don't understand why someone who is so beloved on the other side for her tenacity and strength is being kept on a short leash.

Please, I'm begging everyone who reads this question to actually read the details before you respond that I'm a crazy nut job. The case against him is pretty frank and set forward in the links below. People in this forum and in the world at large disagree with him on multiple levels and so many would call what he's done in office an atrocity, yet doing something about it has been viewed as too extreme. After this man is out of office, he will walk away without any sort of justice if nothing is done. Vincent Bugliosi has a detailed case against him, and to not even look at it is to deny that the president is an American citizen, and just as culpable for crimes as any other.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/09/883...

http://www.prosecutionofbush.com/

Granted, this isn't a reason to say you're completely opposed to him, so if you're a McCain supporter reading this question, don't take it as a "never support this man" question.

When Karl Rove starts saying you're a liar (in many many more words) and you begin to change your definition of economic fundamentals to the workers of America, there seems to be no doubt that something is wrong here. Even if you like him guys, I'm asking that you take a look at the facts and be honest with yourselves and everyone - McCain is not running a clean campaign. He's not trying to be fair to the other side, and he's not trying to be honest.

I'm perfectly willing to hear arguments as to otherwise, but I can give a very long list of the lies he and his running mate have told, I just don't plan on doing it in a question.

At the end of the day, whether you support him or not, isn't this just the perfect example of destructive political attacks that prevent people from talking about the issues at hand, like the economy?

Did the Mondale/Ferraro ticket of 1984 teach us nothing? The ticket recieved a huge boost after the Democratic convention because Ferraro, a surprise pick VP, was added to it. The Democrats lost that boost shortly after, since Ferraro was viewed as a bad candidate after the initial hype due to many of her positions and arguments in debates and interviews. With the same sort of trend occurring now for the Republican party, since new evidence about Palin's past that is damaging to her is coming out on a daily basis, should we really trust the polls at this point, that tell us the same trend is likely to happen as it did back then?

In July, McCain stated:

"Look, I know the area, I've been there. I know wars, I know how to win wars, and I know how to improve our capabilities so that we will capture Osama bin Laden - or put it this way, bring him to justice. We will do it. I know how to do it."

What exactly is he withholding from the current government? I'll give him my full trust that he's entirely correct, that he knows exactly what to do to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Since that's true, he's obviously been withholding this information from the government in a time of crisis, where the information could lead to the capture of one of the most dangerous individuals in the history of the country. Even if we assume that he only learned this information recently, he still plans to withhold that information till he is in the White House, in January. Why would someone withhold such important information when it could be used immediately to the advantage of our national security? Is it to blackmail the American public into voting for him?

People have asked this question a lot about Obama, I intend to prove that McCain is the one who has been getting the pass all along. He has tried to prove time and again that he's best for our troops, with his main reasoning being that he's a veteran and therefore knows what they want. Here's some facts for you (they're all in the link below in case you don't want to read them)

1. He only showed up for 4 of the past 14 votes on the Iraq War last year, he's shown up for none this year, which included a resolution honoring the sacrifice made by the fallen soldiers.

2. Time and again, he's either tabled, voted no on, or simply not attended a vote to fund national guard and reserve troops, or even the main troops

3. He has attempted to stop bills that would give veterans health care

4. Voted against bills that would say troops would limit troop times in the field

After all this (and by the way, this is the "new" McCain, the one that's very recent), the media has hardly even said a word. Everyone takes it for granted that since he's better for the troops since he was one. The problem is that even among veterans Obama is favored as far better for them. Iraq and Afghan veterans and disabled American veterans have all been far more in support of Obama's voting in the legislature than McCain's.

And it's not just that. McCain says things and then acts like he never did. At one point he said that Obama's timetable was a good one on CNN, and then when asked about it on ABC said he never said anything about a timetable. He has specifically said in the past that he was not an expert on the economy, and when he tried to say he'd never said that before he finally got called out by Tim Russert.

Obama is a more popular guy for the media, but the fact that he has so much attention has actually caused more focus on him. The amount of negative media vs. positive for Obama, under a study touted by Republicans not too long ago, is a ratio of almost 3:1, while for McCain that ratio is just under 1:1.

And it's become the same for Palin. Palin has become a face and a personality, and though she has dodged questions on policy and past earmarking practices, none of that seems to matter to most Republicans. After all, this is the great family values candidate, the moose hunting governor. So what if she fired some librarians who refused to ban certain books? So what if she was the one who pushed the bridge to nowhere, and then when it got laughed at acted like she was against it all along, but kept the money? So what if oil companies have been allowed full range to drill most of Alaska with the only price being that they have to pay each Alaskan a meager $1000 dollars to make billions?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKSBYO6aiHU&feature...

That when you're asking a question involving this daughter of Palin that you're targeting her? I'm going to try and be as frank as possible with this question:

Does the fact that she was willing to run for office make sense as a mother when she knew about it beforehand? Does anyone think it makes sense to bring this so far out into the political sphere? When someone is touted as having the best of family values, you would think that means they value the opinion of their children. I don't think Bristol Palin was too keen on having the entire U.S. learn that she's pregnant at the age of 17.

Please, I'm begging you, don't go on and on about how I'm exploiting this knowledge. I'm asking a question about people's opinions on the candidate connected to it, not on the person themselves.

That Palin, whether or not she's qualified for the job, exemplifies the lack of experience that McCain has been using as a weapon against Obama? Let's take away our prejudices, OK, and assume that I would say Palin is more than qualified for the job. Does McCain's choice in a VP make sense, even then? Does it make sense for him to pick someone who has less background in politics than Obama himself, when his main point is how important experience is? How is this not shooting himself in the foot?

I'd like to hear mainly from conservatives against him on this issue, though anyone can feel free to answer these questions. Why should it matter that he didn't put his hand over his heart during the pledge of allegiance, which he still spoke? Why would it matter if he hadn't even spoken it? Why does it matter that he didn't wear the flag pin that everyone loves to bring up?

Before you answer, I'd like people not to write "he's unAmerican," "he's a Muslim terrorist," or anything similar. Those don't answer the question. What specifically makes him a terrible person and a terrible candidate that he's done these things? Don't reference outside things, we're talking about these issues, these right here. When he doesn't wear the pin, how does he prove himself to be an incapable American leader? When he didn't put his hand over his heart, how does it make him unpatriotic and therefore an awful option for president? Are we all free to expouse our patriotism as we wish, or not?

This is not a question with a one sentence answer. I am asking anyone who supports him, even in the slightest, to give me a full and detailed response about what he's planning on doing that you like, and why. I have reasons for not appreciating his proposed policies, but no solid reasons supporting him. I don't want to hear he's an agent of change, that he's progressive, that he's different, and I most certainly don't want to see people just mouthing off about him or any other candidate. If you're going to say bad things about them, back those up as well, otherwise this question is worthless to everyone. I'm imploring responders to this question to say something worthwhile on this forum so that others may benefit from their wisdom.