@Jacanuk: don't be talking smack about the Princess of Persia, and leave Britney alone!

I think he made more than a dime though.

Well, this guy, is a better singer than either one of those two!

To be honest I don't know much about either Mercury or Morrison, they're probably before my time.

Oh yeah, obviously Trumka's going to have issues with Walker, but I still don't think he should have made that comment. I think the unions are going to have to get used to different states moving over to voluntary rather than mandatory unionism, and the unions have to make themselves more attractive to potential members.

Walker probably would have had a good chance (and we all make gaffes so that's not really a big issue), but there were so many other candidates and it was hard for Walker to stand out. Also if he "suspends" his campaign, does he still retain the option of potentially restarting it in the future?

I wasn't particularly impressed with Fiorina, and I don't think she won the debate. I was most impressed by Christie and Jeb at the debate. Rubio is looking like he'd make a good secretary of state, but maybe he'll still win the nomination. I wouldn't be surprised if someone else won the nomination and went on to appoint Rubio as secretary of state after winning the presidency.

I did have a dream - not in the sense of a desire, I mean a literal sleep dream, last week in which Cruz won the election (I think the presidency, though maybe it was just the nomination, I don't remember exactly).

@mattbbpl: Is there a fundamental difference between Francis and his predecessor's in terms of his focuses and emphases? It seems to me he talks a lot about poverty and the poor, but I think that's something all the recent popes have done. He places a lot of emphasis on mercy, and has initiated a Jubilee Year of Mercy, but John Paul II wrote an encyclical on mercy (Dives in Misericordia) and he established Divine Mercy Sunday on the Sunday after Easter (he also died on the vigil - i.e. the evening before the feast day - of Divine Mercy in 2005, and was Beatified in 2011 on Divine Mercy Sunday). He's spoken out about issues of proper environmental stewardship, but so has Benedict XVI who was sometimes referred to as the "Green Pope", and Francis's environmental encyclical "Laudato Si'" includes a lot of references to Benedict's social encyclical "Caritas in Veritate". He does talk a lot about the elderly, but I think his predecessors have talk about them too. One concept/term that Francis is known for is the "throwaway culture" (i.e. where people use other people and then discard them when they're no longer useful), but that seems to me to be quite similar to John Paul II's "culture of death" idea.

Of course Francis is a Latin American and not a European, so his experiences would be different. Specifically he comes from a more religious culture where secularism isn't as strongly entrenched, as he predecessors, and economic poverty is more common (though John Paul II and Benedict XVI probably both experienced poverty growing up, John Paul II was poor if I remember correctly, and Poland certainly has had a lot of poverty, Benedict's roots are probably more working class than poor, but he did need some financial aid for his education, plus Germany did have a fair amount of poverty prior to and immediately after WWII). So that can influence how he perceives the world and his overall outlook and emphasis.

Theologically I'm not aware of any major differences between him and the other popes, though maybe in terms of priorities he doesn't seem as concerned with Europe and intellectual issues and seems more concerned with day-to-day moral issues.

@MarcRecon: You're welcome.

My first advice would be don't waste your time trying to pursue sex with "random" chicks. What good is it if it's really meaningless and it's not with someone whom you care about and who cares about you? Too many bad things can come out of that: hurt feelings, strained friendships, diseases.

Don't feel ashamed of your virginity or feel that you have to get rid of it by a certain age. I'm older than you and I never had sex or dated or anything like that. Hey Time's 2013 Person of the Year is a virgin in his seventies:

Sarah Swafford says that the problem in many relationships is that people go from the acquaintance stage straight to dating. She says people should get to know each other as friends first and spend a lot of times in groups of friends before they move onto dating and then into courtship. I don't know if she's right or not, but what she says does seem reasonable.

This morning I was watching EWTN's coverage of Pope Francis' ongoing trip to Cuba (after which he'll go to the U.S.), and they had a panel discussing the trip before the event started. Raymond Arroyo who is EWTN's news director showed a clip from "60 Minutes" which mentioned how Pope Francis has chosen to live in the Casa Santa Marta rather than the in the Apostolic Palace, and then said that much of the media makes a big deal of this decision and he sees this emphasis on that little factoid as "lazy journalism" and that it makes it seem like Francis is being more humble or ascetic than his predecessors. Arroyo said that he was close to both John Paul II and Benedict XVI and has actually been to the Papal Apartments in the Apostolic Palace and the apartments are not very luxurious like the media try to make them seem, he said the papal bedroom is actually quite small (Pope Francis has also said that the papal apartments are small and hard to fit a lot of people in, which is part of the reason why he chose not to live there. he likes to be in contact with people), and that in fact John Paul II's bed was very austere and is actually smaller than Francis's bed. The panel then mentioned the real reason's for why Francis did this was because he didn't want to be isolated in the Apostolic Palace, which is indeed what Francis himself has said, not as some kind of rejection of the supposed "luxury" of the Papal Apartments.

Arroyo said that Francis and his two most recent predecessors where all holy men and that it is pointless to try to compare them or make it look like Francis is being more holy than them.

So why is it that the secular media keep making a big deal out of Pope Francis living in the Casa Santa Marta, is it "lazy journalism" or are they ignorant about his true reason for doing so? Do they think it's good for business to try to depict Francis as being really different from his predecessor's to the point where they seem to imply that he is rejecting them and the Apostolic Palace, or do they really buy into the narrative that Francis is fundamentally different from his recent predecessors?

Richard Trumka's comment was rude and unnecessary.

I considered making a topic on Walker suspending his campaign, so I could joke that Walker is no longer running, just walking (after all he's not a runner, he's a walker), but I decided not to bother.

I don't know about these CNN ORC polls, I mean wouldn't it make more sense to poll people than to poll Orcs? Who cares what the orcs think, they don't exactly live in representative democracies, do they?

In all seriousness though, I don't think Walker did bad in the debates, i think it was more an issue that he just didn't receive a lot of questions and chances to gain much coverage for himself (same goes for Huckabee). With that many candidates up on stage it sames like the big names - Bush, Trump, Paul - got most of the attention.

Maybe he should also close his eyes when he pees so they doesn't end up getting charged with anything for looking at his johnson!

Brianna doesn't sound that strange to me, from what I understand female names ending in "-a" and "-na" are quite trendy right now. One of the professors at my college has a variant of that name which I find stranger: Briann, I think it's pronounced Bry-Anne, but to me it looks to much like Brian.

Cormega on the other hand, sounds like it could be the name of some old computer or video game console from the 1980s. I wonder where his parents came up with that name.

@TheHighWind: Thanks for clearing up the differences. I was confused as to what the differences were.

Of the three I mostly use jelly, I don't know enough about the other two, to know which type I like best of the three.