Grey Templar wrote:
If there was an option for all those services without abortions being funded and offered as well, I, and millions of others who oppose PP, would be all for it.

Nothing justifies state sanctioned murder, even if it also happens to save other lives.

Doing some good things doesn't excuse doing some things that are monstrously horrible.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Nothing justifies state sanctioned murder

 Grey Templar wrote:
Only because our system has too many appeals and delays.

If we either limited appeals or have much shorter unmovable deadlines it would be much cheaper.

Give them 5 years to prove their innocence, then at the end they get a .45 magnum point blank to the base of the skull. Guaranteed instant painless death. No possibility of botching chemicals or other crap.

 Grey Templar wrote:
There are criminals who must simply be removed from this earth, not having the Death Penalty is simply not a viable option. Take the guy who shot up that kids camp in Sweden(?), no death penalty. He'll either rot away his life indefinitely in a cushy prison(hardly justice, he has a platform to spew his rubbish), and the horrifying possibility exists that he'll get released eventually by some future review panel.

If someone commits deliberate premeditated murder, as far as I am concerned they have given up any rights they were previously deserved. Human life is at the most basic level equal with all other human life, and that is the very reason the death penalty should exist. Otherwise, someone can take a life and continue with their own, which basically says that their continued existence matters more than the life they destroyed. It creates a statement that the murders life is more valued than his victim. The death penalty says the lives are equal and that committing murder means you must lose your own life in exchange.

The same for any other heinous crimes. At a point, you lose your right to continue to exist.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
If there was an option for all those services without abortions being funded and offered as well, I, and millions of others who oppose PP, would be all for it.

Well, you're in luck because federal law prohibits government funding for providing abortions (unless from rape or to save the mother's life). It would help if you got your facts right before you decide to oppose something.

 Grey Templar wrote:
You and everyone else knows full well that the death penalty is not murder. Executing a convicted criminal is totally different from killing an unborn child because "I don't want it" or "I can't take care of it" or any other number of pathetic excuses for abortion.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
If there was an option for all those services without abortions being funded and offered as well, I, and millions of others who oppose PP, would be all for it.

Well, you're in luck because federal law prohibits government funding for providing abortions (unless from rape or to save the mother's life). It would help if you got your facts right before you decide to oppose something.

Abortions are still legal. Which is the issue I have here. Nobody should be allowed to provide them except when it is absolutely medically necessary.

Ouze wrote:
Sounds like there IS a justification for it, which you're making, right now. Hilarious. Again, no point in arguing about it since you are who you are and I'm sure everyone else gets the point.

 Grey Templar wrote:
But locking an innocent man away for life is no better than executing him. In a way its worse because he's being confined indefinitely.

And no, the possibility that he'll get exonerated isn't an upside. He'd still have lost potentially decades of his life. You might as well have killed him.

You've also exposed him to the criminal elements in prison, now he's more likely to actually become a real criminal.


The possibility of executing someone who is innocent is low enough that its an acceptable risk. yes, the justice system needs reform. cutting the death penalty isn't part of that.

 Grey Templar wrote:
You and everyone else knows full well that the death penalty is not murder. Executing a convicted criminal is totally different from killing an unborn child because "I don't want it" or "I can't take care of it" or any other number of pathetic excuses for abortion.

You may think there is some conflict here, but there really isn't.

The death penalty is a punishment for wrongs which have been committed. Abortion ends a life which has committed no crime beyond merely existing.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You and everyone else knows full well that the death penalty is not murder. Executing a convicted criminal is totally different from killing an unborn child because "I don't want it" or "I can't take care of it" or any other number of pathetic excuses for abortion.

You may think there is some conflict here, but there really isn't.

The death penalty is a punishment for wrongs which have been committed. Abortion ends a life which has committed no crime beyond merely existing.

Which then gets into the wild array of interpretations as to what an "unborn child" is, and what importance that has, which is...more than a wee bit varied across people, cultures, age groups, geographic location, religions & denominations/sects, history, and socio-economic status.

Those "I don't want it"/"I can't take care of it" concerns have very real importance, are very much influenced by the above factors, and often only affect one of the two parties to the original act, and that's typically the one who's body is involved in the full process for months.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Do you really keep down a log of everything I post?

Really pathetic man. How about you engage the discussion instead of trying to distract from what we are talking about.

Ouze wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Do you really keep down a log of everything I post?

Really pathetic man. How about you engage the discussion instead of trying to distract from what we are talking about.

No, I know how to use google. It's pretty easy.

And, the "discussion if what we are talking about" includes the absolutely ridiculous things you say in that discussion. If you don't like people pointing and laughing at the ridiculous things you say, you could stop saying them.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You and everyone else knows full well that the death penalty is not murder. Executing a convicted criminal is totally different from killing an unborn child because "I don't want it" or "I can't take care of it" or any other number of pathetic excuses for abortion.

You may think there is some conflict here, but there really isn't.

The death penalty is a punishment for wrongs which have been committed. Abortion ends a life which has committed no crime beyond merely existing.

Which then gets into the wild array of interpretations as to what an "unborn child" is, and what importance that has, which is...more than a wee bit varied across people, cultures, age groups, geographic location, religions & denominations/sects, history, and socio-economic status.

Those "I don't want it"/"I can't take care of it" concerns have very real importance, are very much influenced by the above factors, and often only affect one of the two parties to the original act, and that's typically the one who's body is involved in the full process for months.

Indeed. Although there are actually 2 bodies involved in this process. The mother and child.

 MrDwhitey wrote:
We all post ridiculous things sometimes. Some of us far more than others.

Ouze wrote:
How about the time Grey Templar argued it was actually OK if a few innocent people got executed, if mostly guilty ones were killed? Kind of the literal definition of "state sponsored murder":

 Grey Templar wrote:
But locking an innocent man away for life is no better than executing him. In a way its worse because he's being confined indefinitely.

And no, the possibility that he'll get exonerated isn't an upside. He'd still have lost potentially decades of his life. You might as well have killed him.

You've also exposed him to the criminal elements in prison, now he's more likely to actually become a real criminal.


The possibility of executing someone who is innocent is low enough that its an acceptable risk. yes, the justice system needs reform. cutting the death penalty isn't part of that.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Doing some good things doesn't excuse doing some things that are monstrously horrible.

 Grey Templar wrote:
How about you engage the discussion instead of trying to distract from what we are talking about.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You and everyone else knows full well that the death penalty is not murder. Executing a convicted criminal is totally different from killing an unborn child because "I don't want it" or "I can't take care of it" or any other number of pathetic excuses for abortion.

You may think there is some conflict here, but there really isn't.

The death penalty is a punishment for wrongs which have been committed. Abortion ends a life which has committed no crime beyond merely existing.

Which then gets into the wild array of interpretations as to what an "unborn child" is, and what importance that has, which is...more than a wee bit varied across people, cultures, age groups, geographic location, religions & denominations/sects, history, and socio-economic status.

Those "I don't want it"/"I can't take care of it" concerns have very real importance, are very much influenced by the above factors, and often only affect one of the two parties to the original act, and that's typically the one who's body is involved in the full process for months.

Indeed. Although there are actually 2 bodies involved in this process. The mother and child.

That's where the question is. What exactly constitutes a "life" is by no means universally accepted. That line is...quite nebulous.

Ouze wrote:

 MrDwhitey wrote:
We all post ridiculous things sometimes. Some of us far more than others.

I once posted that America was uniquely a nation of immigrants. I think it was Motyak who called me out on it. I still think about how stupid that was once in a while. Where did that even come from?

 Grey Templar wrote:
"Sanction" doesn't require the government to pay for it. It simply requires them to allow it. Then there was this whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You and everyone else knows full well that the death penalty is not murder. Executing a convicted criminal is totally different from killing an unborn child because "I don't want it" or "I can't take care of it" or any other number of pathetic excuses for abortion.

You may think there is some conflict here, but there really isn't.

The death penalty is a punishment for wrongs which have been committed. Abortion ends a life which has committed no crime beyond merely existing.

Which then gets into the wild array of interpretations as to what an "unborn child" is, and what importance that has, which is...more than a wee bit varied across people, cultures, age groups, geographic location, religions & denominations/sects, history, and socio-economic status.

Those "I don't want it"/"I can't take care of it" concerns have very real importance, are very much influenced by the above factors, and often only affect one of the two parties to the original act, and that's typically the one who's body is involved in the full process for months.

Indeed. Although there are actually 2 bodies involved in this process. The mother and child.

That's where the question is. What exactly constitutes a "life" is by no means universally accepted. That line is...quite nebulous.

I suppose, although a growing fetus is well and truly far from any line as far as defining life. Its not like its a virus that is straddling the line. Its a fully intact organism that respires, grows, and is capable of reproduction(in about 16 years or so). And furthermore its a member of our own species.

 Grey Templar wrote:
O'yes, please tell me more about how you know exactly what millions and millions of people actually want.

If there was an option for all those services without abortions being funded and offered as well, I, and millions of others who oppose PP, would be all for it. But the abortions are the rotten apple that spoils the whole barrel.

Ouze wrote:
I once posted that America was uniquely a nation of immigrants. I think it was Motyak who called me out on it. I still think about how stupid that was once in a while. Where did that even come from?

 motyak wrote:
Wait no it doesn't quite read like that. Let's keep this open by moving the rest of the abortion talk somewhere else, at least until one side or the other brings it out as a wacking stick in the polls.

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Tanner... there's a sort of schism going on with the establishment GOP vs the regular GOP voters.

What we're seeing within the GOP right now isn't so much a schism as it is a reality check. GOP politicians are coming to grips with the waning efficacy of the strategies they've employed for the last four decades, and GOP voters are being forced to acknowledge that the ideology they've bought into won't produce the results they're after. The latter, of course, will happen much more slowly than the former as the natural response of any group that has a core component of its identity threatened is to double down on it; hence all the RINO nonsense.

 Jihadin wrote:
Anyone ever been to a "Body World" display/exhibit?

Number of Hillary Clinton’s emails flagged for classified data grows to 60 as review continues

While media coverage has focused on a half-dozen of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60, officials told The Washington Times.

That figure is current through the end of July and is likely to grow as officials wade through a total of 30,000 work-related emails that passed through her personal email server, officials said. The process is expected to take months.

The 60 emails are among those that have been reviewed and cleared for release under the Freedom of Information Act as part of a open-records lawsuit. Some of the emails have multiple redactions for classified information.

Among the first 60 flagged emails, nearly all contained classified secrets at the lowest level of “confidential” and one contained information at the intermediate level of “secret,” officials told the Times.

Those 60 emails do not include two emails identified in recent days by Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III as containing “top-secret” information possibly derived from Pentagon satellites, drones or intercepts, which is some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets.

State officials and the intelligence community are working to resolve questions about those and other emails with possible classified information, a process that isn’t likely to be completed until January.

That will be right around the time Mrs. Clinton is slated to face voters in the Iowa caucuses in her bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

As the number of suspect emails grows and the classification review continues, it is clear that predictions contained in a notification Mr. McCullough sent Congress this summer is likely to hold true: Mrs. Clinton’s personal emails likely contained hundreds of disclosures of classified information.

Hillary’s Emailgate: Understanding Security Classification

The rising scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton regarding her apparent misuse of unclassified email during her tenure as Secretary of State gets worse for the Presidential hopeful with each passing day. During the week now ending, I’ve explained in writing and in radio and TV appearances how Americans ought to look at this touchy matter.

Few Americans have ever dealt with Top Secret materials and understandably they are left perplexed by this complicated and mysterious subject. This is not helped by the fact that Clinton backers seek to blow off this scandal as “no big deal.” Obfuscation does not change the fact that the placing of highly classified information on an unclassified and unencrypted network is a very serious matter indeed, not to mention very likely a criminal act to boot.

To aid understanding of how security classification works in the real world of the Intelligence Community, I’m giving you a sample intelligence assessment which I will walk you through to illustrate how this plays out every day in Washington, DC.

Everything I’m presenting you is fake — Zendia for decades was used by the National Security Agency as its preferred made-up country in training exercises — but corresponds exactly to how the IC actually writes “finished” intelligence assessments based on multiple information sources, then classifies them.

Such assessments are authored every day by multiple American intelligence agencies and offices, then shared with senior leadership. The Secretary of State is always a top consumer of such intelligence. Moreover, the State Department has its own in-house intelligence analysis shop, termed the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to meet their department’s need for additional classified assessments and reporting.

What follows is a short intelligence assessment of the kind U.S. Government officials read every single day, made up by me but adhering to the style and substance of what I used to do at work when I was an IC analyst.

TOPSECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN

(S) Economic, Political Problems for Zendia Ahead

(TS//SI) The Zendian Ambassador to Dirtbagistan believes it is increasingly likely that his country will fail to make its next International Monetary Fund (IMF) payment, scheduled for mid-September. This IMF payment of 475 billion Zendian wangos ($8.4 billion) is beyond his government’s ability to pay, Ambassador Abu Travolta explained to a senior member of his country’s Ministry of Finance (believed to be Deputy Finance Minister Abu Nugent) on 12 August. The ambassador further opined that, in the event of this likely default, the government of Prime Minister Barack Dukakis would not last long, politically. For this reason the Zendian government is going to great lengths to prevent word of the impending IMF default from reaching the media, according to Ambassador Travolta.

(TS//SI//TK) This information was supported by Zendian Deputy Foreign Minister Abu Bon Jovi, who last week informed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) that budget constraints, which he expected to get significantly worse in mid-September, meant that MFA payrolls may not be met upon “something big” happening then. This is believed to be a reference to a possible default on Zendia’s IMF loan.

(S//NF) According to U.S. Government information obtained from multiple agencies, Ambassador Travolta is a well-connected member of the ruling party and is close to Prime Minister Dukakis. He has a track record of accurate predictions about forthcoming events in his country.

(FOUO) According to media reports, Ambassador Travolta has been experiencing health problems (NFI) which may indicate his willingness to be unusually frank with fellow members of the Zendian ruling party.

(U) This situation will be updated as soon as additional information becomes available.

TOPSECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN

Off the bat, you’ll notice the report’s overall classification, TOPSECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN, in big and bold letters at the top and bottom, which reflects the highest classification levels of anything incorporated in the assessment. Only people cleared to that level — here a very high one — can read this report.

Like any report, this has a title slug reflecting what it’s about. It’s classified S for SECRET: notice that each paragraph has its classification stated in parentheses at the beginning. This is called “portion marking” by the IC.

The first paragraph is classified TOPSECRET, the highest “official” classification in the U.S. Government, while the addition of SI, meaning Special Intelligence, indicates this is very sensitive stuff. SI is a security caveat that falls under the rubric of Sensitive Compartmented Information or SCI. Not everybody cleared for TOPSECRET also has access to SCI, that’s a separate matter and all SCI materials require special handling to protect them from compromise.

Here, SI indicates that the paragraph is based on information from signals intelligence or SIGINT from NSA — in this case an intercepted phone call between two senior Zendian officials. Although the report never states that this is SIGINT, the kind of information provided plus the SI caveat indicate this is based on NSA reporting, as anybody experienced with intelligence would immediately recognize.

The following paragraph is also based on NSA SIGINT, albeit from a different, even more sensitive source: the TK in its classification stands for TALENT KEYHOLE and indicates that information is derived from foreign communications intercepted by an intelligence satellite. This, again, is a conversation between top Zendian officials, so it’s valuable “horse’s mouth” information. Here two senior bureaucrats seem to corroborate each other, which is an important revelation.

The third paragraph has a lower classification, SECRET, is not based on SIGINT, and has the NOFORN caveat, meaning it cannot be shared with non-Americans (a good deal of NSA SIGINT, even at the TS/SI level, is shared with close foreign partners such as the Anglosphere Five Eyes countries). This paragraph is based on local classified assessments — probably from the US Embassy to Zendia as well as the CIA Station there — that are sent back as regular reports to Washington, DC about the political lay of the land in that country.

The last substantive paragraph isn’t classified at all but has the For Official Use Only marking, meaning it cannot be released to the public without official approval. It’s based on media reports, which represent an important source of information for the IC and the State Department. CIA’s Open Source Center is the IC’s hub for translating foreign media in many languages and, pound for pound, represents the best value in the Intelligence Community, in my opinion. Here, unclassified media (termed Open Source Intelligence or OSINT) by some, is used to round out the assessment, and how the analyst has reached a tentative conclusion based on that media is considered to be FOUO. NFI means No Further Information.

The last line is entirely unclassified, as indicated by the U at the beginning, and states simply that more information will be forthcoming on this issue as the analyst gets it.

That last line is the only part of the assessment that is wholly unclassified and, in theory, could be released to the public without a cumbersome approval process: of course, taken alone it says nothing of interest, which perhaps is the point.

The larger point, however, is that, save that last line, absolutely none of the information in this assessment could be released to the public, or placed on any unclassified information system, by anybody, not even a cabinet secretary, without specific approval from outside agencies. The SIGINT, in particular, is highly sensitive and could only be placed in unclassified channels with an explicit NSA (and probably Director of National Intelligence) go-ahead, which is rare.

Even “talking around” such information, especially in written fashion, is unwise and usually represents a serious security breach, not to mention it may be illegal. For example, this is how a top official who read that Zendian intelligence assessment might proceed:

1. “We’re hearing Zendia will probably default on its IMF loan.” (Marginally acceptable because there’s no attribution, no sources and methods are mentioned, though even so it’s really at least FOUO if it’s a cabinet secretary putting it in an unclassified email.)

2. “We’re getting intel that Zendia will probably default on its IMF loan.” (Unacceptable, a security violation, but not classified higher than SECRET due to lack of source attribution.)

3. “NSA says Zendia will default on its IMF loan in September.” (Absolutely unacceptable in any unclassified format, a compromise of TS//SI sources and methods….call the FBI.)

What exactly happened in the case of Hillary Clinton’s classified emails we don’t know yet, but the FBI is now on the case, and I’m sure the Bureau will eventually find out. What happens after that? It’s too soon to tell ….

Former-President: Gimme some coffee kid!

President: Feth you President Blow Job!

Former-President: Hey... Listen... my wife... she's in trouble man.

President: Gimme some coffee gramps!

 whembly wrote:


Question: If HRC was convicted and sent to jail for this... but STILL was elected President... does her jail cell become the Oval Office? (nah... she'd pardon herself )

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 whembly wrote:


Question: If HRC was convicted and sent to jail for this... but STILL was elected President... does her jail cell become the Oval Office? (nah... she'd pardon herself )

I would think that, if she were convicted after being elected and sworn in, she'd abdicate the "throne" and her VP would take over the job. If she were convicted after election, but before being sworn in, there may be a run-off? If she were convicted before election, it would depend on whether or not she's the candidate