Okay, back from the Keys. This bag absolutely rocks -- I had it very heavily packed, all my camera gear and all my computer gear, and a bunch of other stuff besides. Fits under the seat like a good "personal item", even that stuffed, and the straps are great. Once all the extra stuff was out, the bag worked just fine as a camera bag. Too bad it can't help with editing!

H**x? Let's wait until we get to see the whole Mueller Report, not just the executive-privilege summary. What do you think Ronald Reagan would have to say about how Trump sucks up to Putin?? And don't you care why someone who is supposed to be the leader of the Free World refuses to confront one of the most aggressive and repressive dictators on the planet? Just because the Russians aren't C*******ts any more doesn't mean they are any less interested in destroying the US. They are a far bigger threat than even what you imagine the "lefties" present.

Our government was designed for the 18th Century, with hopes for the 19th. The U.S. back then had no standing Army or Navy. The steam engine hadn't been invented yet. More people were working in agriculture than any other industry. Now? We have a military-industrial complex, that gets fed a steady torrent of tax dollars, year after year, with little oversight. President Eisenhower (flaming radical anti-American, right?) warned us about that, but nobody listened and it has gotten far worse.

The government we have now is a welfare program for the ultra-rich and big business. The highest paying jobs in America today are for hedge fund managers, who produce nothing, they're basically professional gamblers playing the stock market with other people's money.

You're not one of the super-rich, I'm guessing, nor the layer of elite hangers-on they keep (lawyers, accountants, advertising and PR types, etc.). So your attitude, "I've got mine, up yours" is really pretty short-sighted, because you're being s**mmed just like the rest of us who work for a living.

/

Liberals don't want to do away with the Constitution. We want to enforce and preserve it. We don't want a President with the power to do wh**ever he pleases, spend money that Congress hasn't appropriated (see U.S. Constitution, Article I, please!). There are more examples, but you get my point.

Even that one Representative who referred to the 9/11 attacks as "some people did something," hasn't advocated abolishing the Constitution. You might have heard something different - but someone must have made that up.

Yes, liberals may be more concerned with the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, where conservatives are more likely to get worked up about the Second Amendment. But "do away with the Constitution?" It's complete b.s. and you know it.

Let's see now. Russia basically grabbed Crimea away from Ukraine, another sovereign nation. This is fact, yes?

Russia regularly arrests dissidents, and sometime dissidents outside Russia end up dying of mysterious poisons of one sort or another. Fact, yes?

Russia has used its military to make sure that Bashar Assad remains in power in Syria, despite Assad's having murdered untold thousands of his own people, in some instances with chemical weapons and nerve gas. Fact, yes?

The Trump Administration has done nothing meaningful to protest any of this. Trump all but kisses the ring of Russian President V.V. Putin. This is fact.

John McCain got all of this. What would Ronald Reagan have to say about it?

It isn't just "lefties" who have been brainwashed by listening to the same Big Lies over and over, the "righties" just tune in to a different channel. Meanwhile, the real owners of this country sit in the shadows and get richer, and richer, and richer.

The 1964 e******n had a few themes going besides Civil Rights. Outside the South, a big part of LBJ's campaign was portraying Goldwater as a dangerous extremist who was too likely to start a war. I remember flyers that had the shadow of a mushroom cloud behind the text. As crazy as it would seem a few years later, LBJ successfully ran as the "peace" candidate.

And LBJ was working to get earlier civil rights legislation passed even while he was still a Senator from Texas. There's a great story in one of Harry Golden's books, where LBJ said that he and the other southern senators would have to v**e against it, but he'd see that it went through.

So - nobody "forced LBJ's hand." Within the context of American politics in the 1960's, he was a decent enough man and a very effective Senate Majority Leader before that. He knew the Civil Rights Act was necessary, and he used the wave of sympathy following JFK's assassination (the bill had stalled, in 1962-3) as a lever to get the v**es.

OP linked to an interesting article. Included a definition of "patriotism" from George Orwell, following is a full paragraph from the article, referring to pursuing the author's concept of the liberal/progressive agenda:

Needless to say, it is hard to pursue this project while simultaneously feeling what George Orwell, in his definition of patriotism, called “devotion to a particular place and particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world.”


Liberals and progressives are less satisfied with the status quo, less likely to be content with however "great" America actually is at the moment, more likely to be concerned with making America better than it is right now (and there's plenty of that work to be done).

If that makes liberals and progressives less "patriotic", then I'm guilty as charged. But it's complete B.S., and if you think about it, you'll understand that it's illogical. A person can love the USA just as much, who thinks that we need some serious changes, as someone who is comfortable in life and threatened by change. We all care about our country, we just disagree about policy, okay? Cut the us-vs-them crap and let's all BE Americans, respect each other and learn to work together again.

That part about different people working together - that, my friends, is what has always made America great. We need to reject voices from both left and right that ask us to go for each others' throats. It's the empty oil drum that makes the most noise.

Ditto!! Mine just arrived - feels very solid, well made. It has a nice, wide soft grip for the hand strap. Will be tested soon, we are headed for the Keys in a couple months, and this will stow under the airline seat with the camera, lenses and laptop, and their respective etc's, no problem. There isn't room for much else, but the packpack is your "personal item" and you can use any old carryon for clothing and related trivia.

Was in an electronics warehouse chain store this afternoon, fancier backpack that would only take a 15" laptop was on sale for $99, no brand name. No thanks!

And, thanks to all who posted about this bag. I would have bypassed it as too cheap to be good, if I had even found it.

I used Canon Powershot cameras for years, before I "graduated" to an EOS Rebel DLSR.

I think it's a great choice. For jewelry photos, I'd suggest getting a small tabletop tripod, and you should have a "macro" mode on the camera. Get a good dark solid backdrop and some lighting, and you should be taking jewelry photos in no time!

If it's like the ones I used, in addition to the full automatic and pre-programmed modes, you can start to work with setting your own exposures, etc., later on. Of course, once you start that, you'll want more camera...

They would keep the whole sandwich, and insist that the story about the sandwich was "f**e news"!

It's called the "KISS Rule" - Keep It Simple, Son! [PC note - no gender bias intended, just substituting something with the same first letter for a gender-neutral insult!]

If you have the good sense to stick with age-appropriate women, all you have to worry about is keeping up!

And I don't have a problem with the first one either - if I remember correctly, which at this age isn't a given!

I used to do in-house IT for a lawyer I worked with. He had Win 95, bought a USB scanner when the court system started requiring electronic filings. He asked me to set it up. I told him the USB support for Win 95 was "theoretical at best," and I had heard nothing but bad experiences. "Try it anyway." So, after the inevitable "blue screen of death", I was able to bill several more hours getting his data back!

Once upon a time I had a Timex computer - ran BASIC programs from a cassette tape drive, had a memory expansion module bigger than a pack of cigarettes to take it from 2 Kb to 16.....

No, I am not making this spit up! I was programming mainframe COBOL in 1974.

Then I went to law school. First wife thought there was no future in IT.....

I got a backpack much like what you described - from the Canon website. I'm carrying one camera body and 2 lenses, so there's lots of extra room, sometimes I pop my old point-and-shoot into one of the empty compartments. Second compartment for birding binoculars, snacks, etc., and other outside pockets and so on, straps supposedly for the tripod case that I haven't figured out yet (mostly since I am still learning basics and don't use the tripod all that much for now).

I bought the camera from the website so I got a discount on the backpack. I'm really new to all this, but I have taken it to a few wildlife refuges and so far it's working well for me.