It is a persistent, intentional effort to derail any meaningful conversation.

The primary offenders contribute nothing -- ever.  They are only interested in being argumentative about every ^#@#^%$ thing.

I'm outta here.  Waste of my time.

Mods, please lock this thread.  The trolls have successfully disrupted any possibility of meaningful conversation on the topic.

To admins, what does it take to stop people from consistently taking the discussion off topic?

The topic of this thread is Romney's tax returns and the reasons behind his refusal to provide transparent disclosure.

I am requesting that you take actions to stop that disruptive behavior.

Look, I'm not going to waste a lot of my time playing your little troll games.

Here's one citation that you could easily have found for yourself.

You can also easily find where Bani-Sadr gave a detailed first-hand accounting of the deal that was struck and produced documents that supported his account of the people who were at the meeting with him when that deal was struck.

You can also read Gary Sick's book -- a person who had the highest security clearances and knew what was going on.

Perhaps that is how it should be, but it isn't how it is.  Religion -- at least the major ones -- do indeed try to address many things that are more than adequately explained by science.  Before science, religion tried to speak for everything unknown, not just the moral code.  And the major religions have fought vigorously to cling to archaic ideas about the physical world long after science settled them very satisfactorily.

But you sound like you personally may be more open minded than the average religion, and I commend you for that.

But even in the case of a very open-minded person or sect, we still have this problem where religions seek to impose a moral code, and the authority that claim for that is a special connection to god.  That means nothing to me.  I certainly agree that there is a big part of life that is not at all connected with science.  Morals and laws would be two examples.  Given that you cannot prove any special connection to god, there comes a question how to decide on the moral code for the society.  From my standpoint, we don't need religions for that.  The legislative process works just fine.  It isn't always perfect (see the "stand your ground" laws, for example) but IMHO, that works infinitely better than listening to lunatics like Pat Robertson or Billy Graham.

Bottom line, I don't see where religion adds any value at all in the areas you identified.

That requires a fantastic leap in reasoning- such a leap that I could not even call that reasoning.

Are you familiar with drug resistant tuberculosis, for example?  What do you think is the process that causes/allows tuberculosis to become immune to our best drugs?

We understand that process perfectly well, and there is absolutely no reason to surmise there is anything remotely matching the meaning of the English word "intelligence."

Multiply that same process over billions of generations on organisms and it is well within the realm of likelihood that you end up with organisms with the "delicate 'engineering'" that you described.  And none of that requires any of the stuff we refer to as intelligence.

Yes, if you wanted to create all of that in 7 days -- THAT would require an intelligent designer.  But we know it happened over billions of years, not 7 days. That's a pretty important difference.  If there were evidence that it happened in 7 days, then I would have to agree that the only plausible process was an intelligent design.

That is all the same thing, in my book.  There are no miracles -- only things that are not understood.

Let's say that we had evidence of a god who played these various parlor tricks that have previously been described as miracles.  Once we had evidence that it was simply one of god's parlor tricks -- that is to say we had evidence that god (creature from another dimension or whatever you want to call it) caused the event, it would no longer be a miracle.

Ultimately this boils down to a situation where eyewitness accounts are the worst evidence because we are such unreliable witnesses.  It is interesting to note that in this age where everybody has a cell phone with a camera and obsessively shoots pictures of everything, the occurrence of seemingly reliable UFO claims has gone DOWN.  It is one thing for a respected doctor and his very sensible wife to report seeing a flying saucer plain as day.  It is another thing for them to answer the question, well then, why didn't you simply take a picture of ET with your cell phone?

If they had cell phones 2000 years ago, perhaps we wouldn't have most of this mythology.  Nowadays the "miracles" we have to settle for are the face of Jesus in a pancake.

It would take you 20 seconds to find this information.  The only reason you have not learned that by now is that you choose to remain uninformed.

This is why people refer to you as a troll. You have no genuine interest in learning anything.  You are only here to annoy people.

That is your own speculation.  Principals to the deal have testified to the details.

Donald Regan was not involved in this as far as I have seen.  He didn't become Chief of Staff until 1985 and the schemes were well advanced by then.

Stop making up conspiracy theories.  Stick to what has been brought forth in testimony.  Everything I have said has been testified to, under oath, by multiple people who were involved.  Moreover, there is no other plausible explanation for why the Ayatollah would keep the hostages and then release them 20 minutes after the inauguration -- exactly in line with the deal that multiple people with first hand knowledge testified to.

I'm sure that humans didn't take an evolutionary turn in this short a period of time, and I expect you believe that as well.  I agree that people are behaving differently now.  But why?  Because people just woke up one day and decided to become nasty?

I don't think so.  Most people have always been ignorant of matters related to civics and politics.  I suppose politicians have always taken advantage of that ignorance to some degree.  But there never was a full time TV network dedicated to disseminating complete, abject ignorance.  The right-wing talk radio phenomenon is also a relatively new invention that coincides with this era of incivility.

To be blunt, the incivility was a fringe thing, mostly on the right fringe, for years.  It was only when that Limbaugh-style of rhetoric started becoming successful in mainstream politics that people form the mainstream and the left felt like they had to match fire with fire.  In other words people were plenty civil until they saw that being uncivil was the easiest way to be successful politically.

That being the case, I don't think the answer is for the average person to commit to being civil.  As long as the big incentives are there for people to lie, smear and distort, that is exactly what will happen.  I believe the way forward is to support fact-based groups that are willing to call out parties from both sides when they are lying and distorting, and in particular, put pressure on the mainstream media to improve the quality of their reporting so that they don't give equal time/credence to lies and the truth.

In the end, most things can come down to facts -- and they should.  We can certainly disagree about the relative weight of various facts, and frankly that sort of discussion (as rare is it might be) is generally civil already.  The problem is the lying.

It was the same thing, just a play in two acts.  In Act I, it was arms that Casey, Bush, Reagan et al traded in exchange for the Ayatollah holding the hostages until after the election (and actually until 20 minutes after Reagan's inauguration, as it turns out.)  And the arms dealers they engaged to make that deal remained on and played exactly the same role in Act II (Iran-Contra affair.)  In the second act (Iran-Contra) there weren't hostages to deal.  In this case, what Iran provided was a secret way for Reagan (and carried out by Ollie North) to fund illegal activities in Central America.

Same cast of characters with the possible exception of Ollie North.  I'm not aware of any role he played in Act I(arms for no-hostages).  But the main cast played in both acts: William Casey, GHWB Bush, Poindexter, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Richard Perle,  Adnan Khashoggi.

Please stop with this moral equivalency business.  I am not "postulating" anything.  There was a formal commission that studied the whole Iran-Contra scandal and documented in great detail EXACTLY how these arms illegally made their way from Ollie North to Iran by way of a network of arms dealers.  There may not have been an audio recording of the exact deal struck, but it is obvious there was a deal struck, and the central terms were clear -- hence the name Arms-For-Hostages.  We don't need a tape to understand that.  A Google search returns a quarter million documents that refer to the exact phrase "arms for hostages", and I would point out that Reagan made this treasonous deal 15 years before Google even existed.  It isn't as if I just woke up this morning and made up that story.

And we certainly DO have a tape that spells out in detail the treasonous deal that Nixon made with the Vietnamese to improve his election chances.

Now let's get back to the current topic.  I only brought up these historical FACTS about Nixon, Reagan, and Bush-I because they seem to have echoes in the moves Romney is making this week.

Is this the kind of thing that makes it worthwhile for Israel to try to buy our election, $50,000 at a time?

Is Romney telling his life-long friend Netanyahu, "Get me 50 million election bucks and I guarantee you won't have to worry about that 'little CIA problem'"?

I think another interpretation is "outside the laws of nature as we understand them."  For example, many physicists believe it is possible there are multiple universes interspersed within our universe, just invisible to us because they belong to dimensions we do not perceive.

I would call that "supernatural".  If there comes a time when mankind has a good understanding of other universes and dimensions, then it is no longer supernatural because it falls within the nature that we understand.

For example, maybe there will come a time when it is well understood that Jesus was a being from another dimension and his "ascension" was simply a case of his returning to his own universe.  Personally I think that is pretty far fetched, and if such a phenomenon were possible, it seems very unlikely it would have occurred only once in the entire course of human history to our knowledge.

What can we expect for minimum wage?

Trolling 101.

When confronted by reasoning or facts that are irrefutable, try to divert the conversation into an irrelevant area where you can engage in pedantic, petty arguments mostly about semantics.  The goal of the troll is to pull the discussion away from a meaningful area worthy of exploration and to make the atmosphere so unpleasant that honest participants will get frustrated and go away.

You, sir, are one of the best at troll tactics.

That is off topic.  Do your own Google search.  It only takes 5 seconds.  Try "Arms for hostages" and "Iran contra scandal"

Here's a video that will show you how to do a Google search.

Indeed.  And the point of this thread is that Romney (like his peers in the 0.1%) is likely sheltering all sorts of income through shell corporations and offshore accounts.  Without a disclosure, we cannot know HOW MUCH is going on, although recent articles suggest it is in the range of $21 - $32 T-T-TTRILLION.

Let's say that the rich are sheltering one-half of their income (which is probably extremely conservative).  That means that even by the logic in the Economist article, they are paying far less than their fair share, and that doesn't begin to adjust for the other factors that folks have listed above.

That is well established fact.  The hostages were released 30 minutes after Reagan took the oath of office.  Wheat followed was the Iran-Contra scandal.  There is absolutely no question that there was a quid pro quo.  "You help me get elected and I will give you the parts you need to service all the American weapons the Shah bought."

So behold, Piano Man's evil alter ego is saying, essentially, "As long as people keep introducing facts I don't want to hear, I will refuse to be civil."