Enoch

It's not semantics-- its Constitutional Law!! I got 5 credits for this a few years back!

Of course they have the AUTHORITY to do so. Or rather the President has the Constitutinal authority to order it. It does not assign the OBLIGATION to do so. But your example has nothing to do with your original point. As to your second point you an I are coming to a difference of opinion on the interperetation of the word "welfare". To me the welfare of a person is best served when they have the means and enviroment to take care of themselves. And no, I do not think the Constitution gives the authority to tax me into the ground to give me healthcare I do not want. If an amendment is passed and ratified, that is different. This wasn't about interpretation of "welfare," it was about interpreation of "of the United States." Your argument earlier was that the "general welfare of the United States" does not mean the "general welfare of the citizens of the United States." I was merely pointing out that the modifying clause "of the United States" applies to both the "general welfare" provision and the "common defence" provision. It is wholly inconsistent with the text of the Constitution to suggest that Congress has the authority to legislate to provide for the common defence of the citizens of the United States, but lacks it to provide for the general welfare of the citizens of the United States. By admitting that it's constitutionally permissible to do the former, you must admit that it is constitutionally permissible to do the latter as well. Now you're arguing that "welfare" can not include payment for medical treatment. That's just silly. From Dictionary.com: "1. the good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity, etc., of a person, group, or organization; well-being." I assure you that it had much the same meaning in 1789 when that clause was written. Really, your argument is more about how the government should provide for the welfare of its citizens. That is entirely a political matter, and you are free to write your Congressperson and voice your opinion.

The problem with healthcare in America is the costs. But almost 45% of the cost is regulatory compliance. So the government is creating a BIG part of the problem you guys are asking it to solve. If we get the FDA and DHHS out of the way, cost of service will drop. Add in tort reform for punative damages and it will drop again. Here is a GREAT example of how things should work. Last November I noticed one of my dogs was having trouble walking. So I checked her over and found she was in pain in her abdomen. I call the Vet, she gets me in there the next day. They examine her and find she has a hernia. Two days later they perform a simple surgery to repair the tear. The whole thing cost $450 and was over in two days. Now if that were me in pain, it would take weeks to see the doctor. weeks more to shuffle though the bueracracy, and then an outpatient surgery that will probably cost more than a used car. Why is there a difference? There is no federal and very little state regulation of veterinarians. US health care once worked exactly like my example. As the great American Ronald Reagan once said, "Government is the problem, not the solution. Ah, but veterinary medicine also usually doesn't involve insurance companies. And people don't die because they can't afford veterinary treatment. In my experience, most of the red tape that complicates healthcare in America is foisted upon providers by private insurance companies, not federal regulations. Private insurance also dramatically inflates costs through moral hazard problems-- because the people who are buying the services do not pay directly for them, they are not sensitive to price and have no incentive to look around for the best deal. That, of course, leads to healthcare providers and drug manufacturers jacking up prices to ridiculous levels (which slowly trickles down to consumers in the form of higher insurance premiums). These informational problems are a failure of the free market, which makes regulation appropriate. (Of course, the regulation we have currently isn't very good, but that's a separate issue.)

The general welfare of the United States. Not the welfare of the citizens. I believe that is the duty of the citizen to take care of themselves. Not ask me, or you, to do it for them. So, according to your logic, the U.S. military does not have the authority to launch operations to rescue American civilians trapped in hostile foreign nations-- that would be defence "of the citizens," not of the United States. What can protecting the welfare of a country possibly mean, if not protecting the welfare of its citizens? What can defending a country possibly mean, if not the defense of its citizens?

The problem with sales taxes is that they are essentially regressive. Poor people who have to spend everything they earn just to get by are hit with the full effect of the tax, while rich people who put 2/3rds of their income into their bank accounts and stock portfolios are taxed comparatively lightly. They also tend to over-encourage saving (which can hurt an economy significantly; see 1990s Japan) and encourage underground economies (which all taxes do to a certain extent, but it's generally considered to be the worst with sales tax).

Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 1: "The Congress shall have Power To ... provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." What could be more appropriately considered "general welfare" that bodily health?

The problem with clothing is that it's tough to determine where the necessary purchasing ends and luxury purchasing begins. Governments certainly don't want to let the sartorially inclined purchase multiple designers suits imported from Milan without taxing them on the purchase. For sales taxes, it is very difficult (and ultimately counter-productive) to distinguish one purchase from another, so the legislature is left to decide whether the 'obligatory clothing' rationale outweighs the 'luxury purchase' rationale. (To my knowledge, most of them have decided that it does not.) For income taxes, the solution is to allow deductibility of clothing purchases up to a certain point. Since this is a deduction that would affect every taxpayer, it is folded in to the personal exemption to save on adminstration costs (i.e., so you don't have to keep clothing receipts to prove your purchases).

Since I've started taking the subway to work, I rarely listen to the radio. When I do it's usually NPR or CSPAN (yes, there's a CSPAN radio in the DC area). But whenever I'm visiting my folks back in Jersey, I make sure to tune in WPRB, the college radio station out of Princeton U. It's always something different and often completely new to me.

I was going by Wikipedia, but just now I went back and looked at the paper form 1040 that's in my to-do pile, and it said $3,300.

For the purposes of U.S. federal income taxes, I believe that some clothing purchases can be deductable. Not everyday clothes or business attire, but if you have to wear a uniform, or protective gear, or similar stuff, you can deduct that cost from your taxable income as a business expense. Otherwise, the cost of clothing ones self is assumed to be covered by the personal exemption, which allows each person $3,400 of untaxed income (although it phases out at very high income levels).

There's a formula for electric damage out there (try gamefaqs or the bio-boards), although I never found a book in the game that told me how to do it. You can't enchant with Sonic damage, although you can add additional enchantments to a found or purchased weapon that already does sonic damage (this is a popular choice for longsword-weilders).

My NWN2 game has stalled at the seige battle. At some point, I'll get up the motivation to finish it, but for now, I've re-installed the original KotOR and am having fun running around Taris. It's been long enough that I've forgotten a lot of the enjoyable little details of the game, and Taris always was my favorite part.

The Modern Jazz Quartet -- Django Which, of course, is an homage to the great Django Reinhardt.

An often-overlooked element of this situation is internal Iranian politics. What Iranian leaders fear most isn't being shunned by the international community, or being denied their Nukes & power plants-- it's an electoral victory in Iran by reformist politicians who would undo many of the theocratic (and autocratic) elements of the Iranian state. The conservative factions that led the 1979 revolution are legitimately frightened by the progress that reformist candidates made in elections in the '90s. They're trying (mostly with success) to hold on to power by stoking nationalist feelings in the electorate, indirectly blaming the nation's problems on outside forces (namely Isreal, the U.S., and the U.N.). Much of the rhetoric that comes out of Iranian leaders is intended not for the international community, but for the Iranian public.

My guess was that they weren't using any words with more than 6 letters. Which was true, but only because there aren't many one-syllable words with more letters than that. It was clear to me that something was constraining word choice, but I guess my mind is more visual/numerical oriented that I jumped to number of letters rather than number of syllables. Trivia: the longest word with only one syllable is "strengths," at 9 letters.

Classic Letterman: Dave wears the sponge suit. Dave wears the magnet suit.

Charlie Parker - Lover Man. Supposedly recorded at a particularly "low" moment in Bird's heroin cycle. Maybe I'm crazy, but I feel like I can hear the pain in his tone as he plays through the head.

RPGs I've never played (which would be an interesting topic in itself): NWN1, Bloodlines, Deus Ex, Fable, PoR2, both Diablos, both Dungeon Seiges, most of the Ultimas, all of the FF's but the first 2 (on GBA) RPGs I played but didn't finish: Arcanum (world was interesting; characters weren't; game mechanics sucked royally) Wizardry 6 (computer died), 7 (got frustrated), & 8 (lost interest at the very end) FF2 Morrowind Oblivion Pool of Radiance (original) Curse of the Azure Bonds (got stuck and couldn't get out of Zhenthil Keep) QFG2 (I stunk at the combat system in those games) Gothic 2 (played for a few hours and decided it wasn't for me) RPGs I finished but regretted after the fact: FF1 TOEE

It should be a class ability under the "Feats" tab in your character sheet. Just drag that icon down to a quickbar.

Romanes eunt domus? Seriously though, all that brings back memories. I'm far to rusty to be a reliable check, but nothing stood out to me as incorrect.

I suppose it's not entirely accurate to say that I'm "playing" it currently. I played it for a little while, tired of it rather quickly, and put it aside to try again when the next patch comes out. Even in Rome:TW, I found siege assaults mostly tedious, and in this game it seems that 80% of my battles are seige assaults. This may be historically accurate, but it's not much fun to me, so I end up using the autocalc whenever I have a significant numbers advantage. I did enjoy the open-field battles, the papal politics, the Crusades, the Guild system, and other neat features of the game, though, so I'm not going to shelf it indefinitely. The main reason I gave it a rest came after I checked the forums at totalwar.org and saw some of the ridiculous bugs that are still in the game. The two most shocking bugs are that some of the animations for halberdier-type units simply aren't working (and the attacks only work when the animations go, so it makes the unit completely ineffective in certain situations), and that the portion of a unit's defense rating that is attributed to their shield is somehow coded backwards so that it is a net negative in melee combat (it's still helpful against missiles). There are fan-made fixes to these problems, but I figure that I'll wait for the next official patch, as I have no shortage of things to do in my free time at the moment.

Advertising costs. For non-sequel, non-spinoff movies, most of the advertising costs go just to get the target audience to have a generic idea of what the film is about. If a film is a sequel, or spun off of a popular book, comic, game, etc., the target audience already has this general awareness, and advertising will be much cheaper. This is especially true now that studios are doing 2 cycles of advertising for all their films-- one at the theatrical release, and the other a few months later at the DVD release date. Thus, given the choice between original stories and game spinoffs, studios are more likely to give funding to the game spinoff because the cost of promoting the film will be lower. And, to get back to the topic: On PC, I'm playing NWN2 and M2:TW. On GBA, I'm playing Zelda: Minish Cap.

Oh, I wouldn't call my problem a bug-- this is separate from the problems with the knockdown feat. I see it as a rather annoying and illogical choice by the developers. It seems to me that, when a character is directed to attack an enemy, he should continue doing so until either he receives a new order or that enemy is defeated. I don't see how getting knocked on one's ass should terminate the standing attack order.

Yeah, a variant of that problem was annoying me last night. I'm a control freak puppet-moder, so I have to manually reassign targets all the time anyway. The thing that bugs me is that whenever a character is knocked down, I have to make sure to tell them to keep attacking their opponent when they stand up again. I fought the last night, and I think the Construct stood around for half the battle doing nothing because it got knocked down and was never ordered to attack again. (I was busy managing my spellcasters, and I just assumed that the melee attacks were missing due to concealment & DR.)

I don't think that OE has fixed the "sneak attack not working with touch attacks" problem yet. You might want to get a fan-made fix for that (I'm sure there's one out there somewhere) to get your eldrich backstabbing goodness. As for the game, I finally got into act III with my rogue1/wizardX this weekend. The characters are really getting interesting at this point.