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How long am I going to have to sit on the side of the road while the officer waits for the drug dog to show up and sniff around my vehicle? Every traffic stop is going to take an hour while the K-9 unit finishes their lunch break and drives out to where the highway cop has you pulled over.

My father in law works for the USFWS and regularly works 9 hour days, and takes every other Friday off rather than get overtime pay. He could work every other Friday and get paid overtime, but he prefers the time off.

On the other hand. My wife used to work for the USFWS, and her refuge manager said that she should be able to get her job done in a regular work day, so no overtime pay. If my wife worked late, she had to take the same amount of time off later in the week.

If I understand correctly, Government overtime is mostly up to your immediate supervisor. Some would rather have you there every day and pay overtime. Some would rather have you take extra time off and keep the money in their budgets. Some don't care and leave it up to the employee. Not sure if this is how it works in all government jobs, just my experience with my family.

Culling entire family group may not be an option. Removing a few large animals may be all that is needed to bring the herd back to a size that the habitat can support. Your original post about culling the entire family group talked about elephants running around trying to protect their calves and dead elephants laying everywhere. That sounds pretty traumatic to me, right up till the last elephant gets a bullet. Another possibility is that they did remove the entire family group. Non-dominant bulls are not tolerated by the dominant bull, and often form small bachelor groups that function on there own away from the main herd. The three bulls that were sold might have been an entire bachelor group.

I'll say it again, I'm no fan of canned hunts. However, if culling needs to be done, it might as well be done in a method that lets the park make some much needed money. It is absurd to say that shooting an entire herd of elephants from a helicopter is more "moral" than a game farm selling canned elephant hunts.

I don't really have a problem with this. Call it unsportsmanlike, say it's not real hunting, but it's a pretty big reach to call it immoral. If the herd needs to be culled, why does it matter who does the culling? Would the elephant be any less dead if it was culled by a sharpshooter from a helicopter? At least this way some money was made (the park sold the elephant, the ranch paid to transport it, someone paid the ranch to shoot it). I hunt every chance I get, and I have no interest in taking part in a canned hunt. However, if I don't have a problem shooting a deer in the woods, how can I be against someone shooting a deer inside of a fence.

Just my opinion, donning flame proof suit.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that our military is as thin spread as some people want us to believe. None of the 10-12 reserves/national guard troops that I know have been called up, and two of the three active duty people that I know are still at their bases in the U.S.

Similar situation happened to me. I tried to buy a gun from a dealer at a gun show, and he wouldn't sell it to me because the address on my check didn't match the address on my license (I had recently moved, but hadn't changed my checks yet). My father tried to buy the gun, and the dealer said, "No, cause your buying it for him and that's illegal."

marked for posterity bump

I bet none of these women pay taxes either. If they make $4 to $5 an hour cash money, they are doing a heck of a lot better than someone working legally for minimum wage ($5.15 - taxes).

I'm with you. A prison sentence is supposed to be a punishment for a crime. When the sentence (I include parole/probation as part of the sentence) is over, the punishment is over. If the person cannot be trusted with the return of their rights then they should not be released from prison.

In post 158, you say "Biologists have to have a means to naturally explain the origin of life. Evolution, as imperfect as it is, does that." In your next post, you state, "It is a scientific theory and thus is either based on some proven fact or it is discarded."

Show me the proven fact (i.e. repeatable experiement) that proves the evolutionary origin of life. Science has yet to create life in a lab. Therefore, the evolutionary origin of life is just as faith based as creation.

"The problem I have with creationist theory of any sort is that, at some point, one must abandon reason and factual science and rely on faith. That's fine, within the confines of religion or philosophy, but not for science."

The problem that I have with evolutionists is that they refuse to admit that at some point they must abandon reason and factual science and rely on faith. Show me your evidence of how a living organism started from unliving random chemicals. If evolution doesn't have any assumptions involved in it, then show me one lab experiment where a scientist created a living organism by dumping chemicals into a test tube.

I believe that God spoke and life was created. You believe that chemicals bumped into each other and life was created. Because neither one of us can prove our theory of how life was created, both of our theories are based on faith. To disregard creation because it is based on faith, but refuse to admit that evolution is also based on faith is foolish.

Perhaps I was to quick to use the word "interpretation" in my original post. I should have used my trusty thesaurus and found a much more interesting word like "caviling" or "interlocutor" (I had to look both of them up).

It was not my intent to imply that any interpretation is wrong or to start a thesaurus battle between seemingly like minded people. My intent was to state that the entire Bible either is or is not the infallible word of God. I don't think that there is any middle ground. When I said interpretation in my original post, I meant the way which some people choose to accept parts of the Bible as truth and other parts as fantasy. I did not mean to imply that understanding the Bible can be done with making some interpretations of what the words mean. However, this interpretation must be done in the context of believing that the Bible is the infallible word of God.

I agree that interpretation is necessary to understand the Bible. But there is a difference between making an interpretation based on other Scripture references and further study, and making and interpretation based on "Creation isn't possible, so God must have ment something else when he wrote Genesis"

Also, without Genesis, the rest of the Bible becomes unecessary. If we are not created in God's image because he loved us and wanted us for companionship, why would he send his perfect son to die for our salvation. Why would God make that type of sacrifice to save some things that evolved out of the primordial ooze. To call yourself a Christian, but believe in evolution, is to believe that Jesus Christ died to save a group of cells that exists by chance and natural selection.

"The issue is Christ, not an interpretation of Genesis"

Genesis is the foundation of the Christian faith. If Genesis is open to interpretation, then the entire Bible is nothing more than a story book, and Jesus Christ ranks right up there with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Do I sometime find it hard to believe that there is an all powerful God that created the heavens and earth? Yes, of course. But I also believe that Jesus Christ was the perfect Son of God, died on the cross, was buried, rose again on the third day, and all this was done for my salvation. My faith does not allow me to seperate the parts of the Bible that I want to believe from the parts that I want to think are a nice story.

"six months of home detention for his May 2001 stunt"

Am I the only one who thinks that more time at home is the last thing this guy needs?

"Witnesses said he crawled up behind the tiny dik-dik - which was no more than 14 inches tall - and speared it.

I just gained a great deal of respect for Prince William.

(on eating the animal) "I don't think Prince William would even consider it."

Nevermind

"To be sure, the pushouts are not the top students. They are the ones who skip classes, hang out in the halls, get into fights or do not show up at all for days on end."

Well, Duh, the top students aren't going to be there long enough to get pushed out. Why didn't these people (parents and students) care this much about school before they got kicked out. If they had put half the time and effort into school as they are putting into this lawsuit, they never would have got kicked out in the first place. Do these people actually think that they can "skip classes, hang out in halls, get into fights, and not show up for days on end" and graduate on time with a full scholarship to rocket scientist college?

He must have been really mad and really strong. I'm a big guy and there is no way I could flip an SUV.

What's even worse is that I have to pay $80 a semester for a bus fee, but from where I live it takes longer to walk to a bus stop than it does to walk to where I want to go. The only people who ride the bus, are the people that live in the few apartment complexes that have bus stops.