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Still waiting for the first shred of proof that the NSA's dragnet methods do any good whatsoever. Until then: nothing of value was lost.

Like this?

NSA helped foil terror plot in Belgium, documents, officials say

The Belgium plot, though not confirmed to be one of the 50 that relied on the recently revealed secretive NSA program to monitor online messages, appears to fit the bill.

On December 11, 2008, Belgian authorities arrested an al Qaeda cell in Brussels that they feared had been planning a suicide bombing attack.

An intercepted e-mail from one of the cell members to his ex-girlfriend indicated he was about to launch a suicide attack. A defense lawyer in the case told CNN that prosecutors at trial acknowledged that the United States intercepted the communication and passed it to the Belgians.

To all the terrorists in the world: You are all worthless, pathetic, impotent losers. Whatever cause you're fighting for is equally worthless. I insult your god(s) and or prophet(s), where applicable. Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries! Come at me bro! I dare you!

Now, Mr. Fjord, watch a big fat load of nothing happen to me in response.

Your profile lacks your real name, address, email address, phone number, and employer.

If you care to post those along with an insult to the Prophet Muhummad (PBUH), we'll know you're serious.

Who knows, you might even make the news like Drummer Rigby.

...by Lara Logan . But I suppose that would be rude.

... 9/11 occured because intelligence folks thought that wire tapping was good enough...

How can I count the many ways that this is so, so wrong? I know a lot of Americans who feel this way, but it seems to fail to meet the facts as we know them.

There was clear warning. Wire tapping was more than sufficient.

...the intelligence community provided repeated strategic warning in the summer of 9/11 that al Qaeda was planning a large-scale attacks on American interests.

Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:

-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations," April 20
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent," June 23
-- CIA, "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays," July 2
-- CIA, "Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely," August 3

The failure to respond adequately to these warnings was a policy failure by the Bush administration, not an intelligence failure by the U.S. intelligence community.

Get back to us when people will put up with brown outs and failures in the modern world.

OK.

As for concrete examples of how information can be abused, consider the Cannibal Cop. No, he wasn't from the NSA, but he did use a much less extensive Federal database to stalk women he planned to kill and eat (imagine what he could have done with NSA access). Being killed and eaten is an objectively negative consequence, as is being staked for such a dinner date. Secondly, his interest in killing and eating these women had nothing to do with how innocent they were of anything.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/12/justice/new-york-cannibal-cop/

Back to the NSA, we do know that people stalked love interests. Certainly much worse than that has happened, but anyone who thinks the NSA is going to reveal that information is nuts. Considering the breadth and scope of the NSA's illegal activities, the chances that innocent people have been harmed is staggeringly large.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/loveint-on-his-first-day-of-work-nsa-employee-spied-on-ex-girlfriend/

You are quite wrong about that.

NSA helped foil terror plot in Belgium, documents, officials say

The Belgium plot, though not confirmed to be one of the 50 that relied on the recently revealed secretive NSA program to monitor online messages, appears to fit the bill.

On December 11, 2008, Belgian authorities arrested an al Qaeda cell in Brussels that they feared had been planning a suicide bombing attack.

An intercepted e-mail from one of the cell members to his ex-girlfriend indicated he was about to launch a suicide attack. A defense lawyer in the case told CNN that prosecutors at trial acknowledged that the United States intercepted the communication and passed it to the Belgians.

The US gov wants to keep it all for a legal, court usable replay over your lifetime.
Every call, email contact, a book buying list, travel arrangement, banking detail, friends, friends of friends, family, credit card use...
So if you become political, take up some issue in your State or federally, protest "the" next war, write to the press, write to political leaders, use your income for political issues, support charity events, support faith based groups - you end up on lists.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/06/surveillance_lockbox_why_can_the_nsa_search_your_phone_records_without_a.html
http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/18/nsa-whistleblowers-obama-administration-misleading-on-surveillance-programs/
From testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 30, 2011:
...."gotten together with the DOD where we've put together this technology database where I can go in, and I can, with one query, I can get all past and all future e-mails from a person,"
Parallel construction: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering
The tracking seems to be keyword and new contacts to know people, organizations, voice prints, call data, email, postage use, internet logging.... been seen at a protest or been linked to one.
With 2 -3 hops from any person been considered - the numbers of people been looked from one individuals positive identification: 1 person to 10-100 friends/contacts and all their 100's of friends/contacts and beyond with any their issues been linked back down that one person...
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/you-may-already-be-a-winner-in-nsas-three-degrees-surveillance-sweepstakes/

If only they made family, babysitters, after-school and other public sports/activity programs, organized sports, and free time for parents in the 16-or-so hours a day that they're not expected to be working

Articles like this and this claim that "after-school and other public sports/activity programs, organized sports," and the like are part of the problem.

The US would never do the same. They always accept when they are the enemy in a video game.

The percentage depletion allowance: This lets oil companies deduct about 15% of the money generated from a well from its taxes. Eliminating it would save about $1 billion a year.

The deduction essentially lets oil companies treat oil in the ground as capital equipment. For any industry, the value of that equipment can be written down each year.

But critics say oil in the ground is not capital equipment, but a national resource that the oil companies are simply using for their own profit.

The foreign tax credit: This provision gives companies a credit for any taxes they pay to other countries. Altering this tax credit would save about $850 million a year.

Foreign governments can collect money from oil companies through royalties -- fees for depleting their national resources -- and income taxes.

A royalty would be deducted as a cost of doing business, and would likely shave about 30% off a company's tax bill. Categorized as income tax, it is 100% deductible.

Foreign governments long ago grew wise to the U.S. tax code. To reduce costs for everyone involved and attract business, they agreed to call some royalties income taxes, allowing oil companies to take the 100% deduction on a bigger slice of their bill.

Intangible drilling costs: This lets the industry write off about $780 million a year for things like wages, fuel, repairs and hauling costs.

All industries get to write off the costs of doing business, but they must take it over the life of an investment. The oil industry gets to take the drilling credit in the first year.

Here's the practical outcome of these policies: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2013/12/20/81497/baucus-tax-reform-cuts-46-billion-in-oil-breaks/

The oil industry has prospered over the past decade, thanks to high oil and gasoline prices. The five largest companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned more than $1 trillion. In the first nine months of 2013, these five companies earned a combined $71 billion in profits. Certainly, these companies and other large oil companies will prosper without $40 billion in special tax breaks over the next decade.

The tax subsidies for renewable energy are dwarfed by the tax subsidies for oil and gas. The oil and gas production industry is hugely profitable. When an industry has the top five companies making a trillion dollars profit over ten years why do they need any tax breaks that other businesses don't get?

The real rich bastards are the oil company executives. You know how they spend that vast profit? Stock buybacks. About 25% of big oil company profit is going into stock buy back programs, which is more then they spend on exploration and acquisitions. Because of way that executive compensation is structured with stock options and deferred payouts, this ends up being a huge multiplier payout multiplier for the executives. They get their stock at a ridiculous discount, pump up the value and realize vast personal wealth.

All the investors are happy because they see their valuation go up as well so they don't complain. It's short term gain over long term profit. According to this 2007 Bloomberg article, the big oil companies are effectively liquidating themselves over the longer term.

If Chevron Corp. keeps buying back its stock at the current rate, the com

There are whistle blower laws that would have protected him if he'd played by the rules.

Bullshit. That link is to a story written by a retired NSA employee, who had many honors in his career.

Unfortunately, while federal law protects whistleblowers who work in other government sectors from reprisals for truth-telling and have paths for reporting wrongdoing and mismanagement, those who work in intelligence are expressly denied such rights. When Senior Staff Representative Diane Roark and longtime senior NSA employees Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, and I submitted a formal complaint about mismanagement at the agency, the government's response on July 26, 2007, was to send the FBI to raid our homes, searching them for seven hours and seizing our computers, phones and other digital media. We are just now getting our property back after having successfully sued the government in December 2012.

The government even indicted Tom Drake, although it dropped its criminal charges in the case against him. Still, for the five of us, it was the equivalent of a punch in the face and a warning to other would-be "truth-tellers" not to report wrongful government activities or the government will come after you.

Can Edward Snowden get amnesty? Snowden clearly saw what the government does to whistleblowers who try to work within government to fix things that are wrong. He knew that our complaint to the United States Department of Defense inspector general in September 2002 went for naught. Although the report agreed that our complaint was well-founded, nothing happened -- no one was found guilty of wrongful behavior or waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

And he did try to play by the rules; his superiors made it abundantly clear to him (repeatedly so) that his opinion on the matter was not solicited, and furthermore, endangered his career.

You aren't talking about Snowden, are you? That doesn't appear to be remotely true in any meaningful way. Snowden has admitted that he took his job with the intent of stealing secrets.

the rich and the big enterprises pay nearly no taxes

That's ridiculous: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/12/news/economy/rich-taxes/

You forgot Snowden/NSA. And there's actually even a tiny scrap of "news" on that: he recently did an interview. (Stay tuned, same Bat channel. Or just go straight to http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/24/us/edward-snowden-interview/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)

a businessman with a very clear understanding of how to loot destabilizing businesses

FTFY.

And that businessman lost not because of "pity" for Obama, but because he went too far right to try to win a completely dysfunctional Republican primary, and then was stuck with either staying where he was and getting crushed or explaining how he wasn't stating his real opinions before, losing all credibility - and getting crushed. He lost the race before it even started.

And it's a lot easier to destroy an economy than fix it. But looking at the current economic indicators we're finally starting to undo the Bush disaster...

Unemployment 4 year low: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=LN_cpsbref3
GDP up over 4% in Q3: http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2013/12/20/us-gdp-grew-4-1-in-third-quarter-more-than-previously-estimated/
Stock market record high: http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/investing/stocks-markets/

You Republican middle class sheeple are so amazing in your loyalties. Your upper class overlords who have been making hand over fist in the market for the last 4 years must be feeding you an extra scoop of gruel in your dinner along with their usual lies about "the awful state of the economy"...

The morally bankrupt tactics are on the part of al Qaida and its associates who deliberately slaughter noncombatants by many means. The blinkered views of some in the West are of aid to them.

You are fundamentally confused about the source of the war against al Qaida - it is their decision, they declared war and began attacks killing many people years before the US made a serious response. They want a war of conquest. They want to restore the "glory of Islam" by restoring the Caliphate government that was dissolved in 1924 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and starting a world-wide conflict to bring all nations to the Muslim faith under Islamic rule. They want to take back lands formerly governed by Muslims, including the country of Spain, and al Qaida is not alone in that goal.

Alarm in Spain over al-Qaeda call for its "reconquest"
HAMAS Targets Spain

Please explain to me how it is the fault of the US that al Qaida and Hamas want to reconquer Spain?

This is about them, not about the US. You are simply mistaken.

North Dakota has the nation's hottest economy, with a growth rate five times the national average.

Mmm, that's tracking money - not sustainable by any measure.

Me: HELLO 911?

Op: What is your emergency sir?

Me: I AM HIDING IN MY CLOSET FROM THE GUY WHO KILLED MY WIFE AND IS RANSACKING MY HOUSE!

Op: Please quiet down, if you yell he'll hear you and find you.

Me: HOW ELSE CAN THE ASSHOLE POSTING ABOVE ME HEAR ME IF I DON'T SHOUT?

Seriously, though, I've always wondered why the hell it's taken 20+ years to be able to send texts to 911. At least when they finally get around to it, they'll be set up for MMS and you can send them the pic of the getaway car or whatever.

North Dakota has the nation's hottest economy, with a growth rate five times the national average.

This wasn't about "exposing" the NSA -- anyone with half a brain realizes that the very definition of a spy agency is that it spies on people. "They were spying on americans!" Yeah, ok, and?

And it's fucking ILLEGAL, damn it. Have a look at this article written by J. Kirk Wiebe, a retired NSA executive:

But how can anyone believe that Snowden would not be deserving of amnesty? Clearly it is the government and its senior officials who committed the crime -- people who took oaths to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic and who failed to take to heart the words they swore to uphold. Indeed, Snowden did not -- nor does any government employee -- swear allegiance to the president of the United States, or even to the secretary of Defense or the director of NSA. No, he swore to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Unfortunately, while federal law protects whistleblowers who work in other government sectors from reprisals for truth-telling and have paths for reporting wrongdoing and mismanagement, those who work in intelligence are expressly denied such rights. When Senior Staff Representative Diane Roark and longtime senior NSA employees Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, and I submitted a formal complaint about mismanagement at the agency, the government's response on July 26, 2007, was to send the FBI to raid our homes, searching them for seven hours and seizing our computers, phones and other digital media. We are just now getting our property back after having successfully sued the government in December 2012.

The government even indicted Tom Drake, although it dropped its criminal charges in the case against him. Still, for the five of us, it was the equivalent of a punch in the face and a warning to other would-be "truth-tellers" not to report wrongful government activities or the government will come after you.

Snowden clearly saw what the government does to whistleblowers who try to work within government to fix things that are wrong. He knew that our complaint to the United States Department of Defense inspector general in September 2002 went for naught. Although the report agreed that our complaint was well-founded, nothing happened -- no one was found guilty of wrongful behavior or waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Even before writing the complaint, we -- all longtime and senior NSA employees -- along with Diane Roark, a senior staffer on the House Permanent Select Subcommittee on Intelligence, had approached Congress in 2001 about the matter of illegal collection of data about U.S. citizens. No action. Snowden might have known that we were ultimately punished by approaching officials, and even had our security clearances revoked when the FBI raided our homes -- despite the fact that four of the five of us were not indicted and none of us was found guilty of committing a crime.

For employees in the business of intelligence, there are no honest brokers, no viable paths to follow to report the subverting of the U.S. Constitution. It is the reason Snowden went first to Hong Kong and ultimately Moscow to seek refuge. He did not go to those places to give away national secrets, rather he needed a place to stay that was safe from extradition and where he could wait while the United States sorted through the facts, especially those regarding government leaders who violated the most basic of our nation's laws -- the right to privacy.

BTW, your sig is right on target this time -- you've pissed off fans of freedom and privacy.

The Washington Times article credits Fox News. It quotes but does not credit the Reading Eagle, which appears to have first reported on this incident:

http://readingeagle.com/article/20131218/NEWS/312189945/1052

The Reading Eagle quotes but does not credit CNN. CNN last reported on the issue in June when this happened in Alabama.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/us/drug-survey-roadblocks/index.html?iref=allsearch

Close.. but not exactly.

Try a median of 51k.

However that median is brought down by young kids who don't have children who go to university.

The typical wage earners in a family that send their kids to university will be arround the 45-55 mark (having had the kids around 25-35)

On top of that the typical parents of a kid at uni will live in a 2-wageearner households, where the median wage will be pulled down by 1 wage earner households.

Close.. but not exactly.

Try a median of 51k.

However that median is brought down by young kids who don't have children who go to university.

The typical wage earners in a family that send their kids to university will be arround the 45-55 mark (having had the kids around 25-35)

http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-Incomes-by-Age-Brackets.php

backs my figure up, and earning twice what the average earn (pre-tax) doesn't make you rich, it's just a divide and conquer that the truely rich like to put out there.

$150k a year for your household means you can afford a hosue about $400-450k, something like http://www.trulia.com/property/3029951135-8514-S-124th-St-Seattle-WA-98178, sure a nice house, but not rich by a long shot.

Close.. but not exactly.

Try a median of 51k.

and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.

That seems unlikely. The future is never as bleak as some would have you believe.
There have been a number of developments of late that suggest real progress is being made:

http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/cellulosic-ethanol-heads-for-cost-competitiveness-by-2016/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/04/same-moonshine-different-name-welcome-to-the-age-of-cellulosic-ethanol/

Somewhat dated:
http://www.nrel.gov/continuum/sustainable_transportation/cellulosic_ethanol.cfm

However, its still ethanol.
It may be wiser to take a look at other fuel stretchers as well.
Butanol is being looked at because it is less corrosive and also higher energy density than ethanol, almost approaching that of gasoline. (Exhaust smells like bananas).

Butanol trumps ethanol in several ways: Adding ethanol to gasoline reduces fuel mileage, but butanol packs almost as much energy as gas, meaning fewer fill-ups. Butanol also doesn't damage car engines like ethanol, so more of it can be blended into gas. And because butanol doesn't separate from gasoline in the presence of water, it can be blended right at the refinery, while ethanol has to be shipped separately from gas and blended closer to the filling station.

Even Zebra poop is helping, it yields a particular strain of Clostridium bacteria that can convert nearly any form of cellulose into butanol very efficiently.

Burned by itself, (B100) you might have a 10% mileage penalty. Mixed with gas it might not even impose any significant mileage penalty.
Its been found that the mileage penalty does not exactly vary in lock-step with energy density. (Theoretically ethanol should only see a 2 to 3% mileage penalty, but some claim 10%, especially on older vehicles). But to date, no one has done significant real world testing on Butanol + Gas blends.

Some links to Butanol stories:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/12/the-fuel-that-could-be-the-end-of-ethanol/
http://farmindustrynews.com/blog/bio-butanol-can-be-produced-about-same-cost-ethanol-optinol-reports
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2013/april/cost-saving-measure-to-upgrade-ethanol-to-butanol-a-better-alternative-to-gasoline.html

Saddam had both air forces and artillery. They merely were restricted in their operations as part of the post Gulf War 1 cease fire, which also brought in the UN weapons inspectors. With a clean bill of health from these inspectors the UN and US would have left and Saddam would be free to rebuild his WMD capabilities.

From Saddam's FBI interrogation:
"After several months, Saddam started to talk. There were no longer weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he said, although the capability to build them remained. But Saddam said he kept up the ruse that those weapons still existed to preserve his power and protect Iraq against Iran, which Saddam viewed as his country’s biggest threat. Not even senior leaders within his government knew that there weren’t any weapons, Piro said." http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/the_intelligencer_news/fbi-agent-saddam-interrogation-was-unique-historic-opportunity/article_6306f1c9-b9c0-5fc7-b4ff-398cf04ad103.html

Thanks to another contributor to a related thread:
"The U.S. military spent $70 million ensuring the safe transportation of 550 metric tons of the uranium from Iraq to Canada, said Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/iraq.uranium/

You called me on it, and I goofed. It was 45%. They also took 55% of cell phone profits, used to be 80% back in 2011. The point still holds, apple dominates even with a small market share.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/16/apple-pc-profits-dediu/
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-and-samsung-take-109-of-the-smartphone-industries-profits-2013-11

Operation McCall on CNN
IAEA Al-Tuwaitha site report

A little bit of critical reading of the two sources in conjunction with each other will show some discrepancies. I have a nice award from the OSD hung up in my basement that says I was at Al-Tuwaitha. My time in Iraq with dosimeter badges and looking at the abandoned fortifications atop the depicted berms (in the IAEA report) convince me that there was every appearance of a WMD program in Iraq. There may have been no nuclear weapon produced, but the theater was excellent.

Quite true. Under US law, "WMD" includes any rifle with a bore larger than 0.50", and anything explosive for use against persons or property, including hand grenades. So of course Saddam's army had WMDs.

That may well be the case, is some irrelevant lawyer fashion, but the existence of large-bore rifles were definitely not the justification the Bush administration was using during the lead-up to the Iraq War:

"Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." -- George W. Bush, Oct 6, 2002 (link)

Put simply, the Bush administration was telling the American public that Iraq had the capability and them motive to nuke (or gas) American cities, and that was why an invasion was necessary. And that was a lie.

That pretty much sums up how people feel about DRM. They also feel like that about security, btw.

BINGO! How many people wake up to go to the airport thinking "OH Goody! I get to go through the TSA checkpoints on my way to grandma's." but they do it because it's the only way to get on the plane. There are plenty of people who will not fly because of the hassle flying has become since the TSA was enacted but they are still a minority. Same thing with 2Factor authentication. It is a PITA but the threat of a security breach has made it a reality for most of us. Steam has made DRM as unobtrusive as I believe is possible with current technology. I still don't like having the DRM there but at least it gets out of my way.

I'd argue that freedom is economic security. When you've got food, housing and healthcare then your free. When you're fighting to keep those things (like 76% of Americans) that's when you become a slave.

It is worse than that. According to this article the NSA budget is between $8 and $12 billion per year.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillance-cost/
To put that into perspective that is approximately what the twin towers were worth. Is the NSA really helping to keep someone from knocking down the twin towers every single year? Eventually someone needs to do a cost to benefit analysis.

In addition to the Chinese moon-rover landing Iran is claiming a 2nd successful launch and recovery of a Rhesus macaque.

And Slashdot has already reported about India's Martian expedition.

The rate of social mobility in the US is the second lowest in the industrialized world (after the UK). Many poorer, developing countries actually have higher rates of upward mobility:
"Social immobility erodes the American dream", Washington Post
"The Myth of the American Dream", CNN

This, combined with the highest income inequality in the industrialized world, is the legacy of 40 years of anti-government policies, breaking trade unions, and reducing taxes on the wealthy.

The roll-back of the New Deal has produced this, not the imposition of whatever you call "socialism"

http://marketrealist.com/2013/10/shutdown-101-perceived-wealth-distribution-isnt-reality/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Health care disparities would presumably reflect that too, to some extent. But a deeper issue is how health is more than access to "sick care", What you eat, how much you worry, where you can live, whether you have time for self-education and exercise, these are also big factors, and those connect to at least a certain level of wealth.

The USA is really confused about that, in part because of decades of propaganda funded by very selfish people.

On global issues, see:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/world/gapminder-us-ignorance-survey/
http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/
http://www.gapminder.org/GapminderMedia/wp-uploads/Results-from-the-Ignorance-Survey-in-the-US..pdf

Meanwhile, China is about to land a robot on the moon!

As George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, whene we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

The same goes for conservative Kentucy.

"While the federal health exchange website healthcare.gov has been brought to its knees with ongoing technological problems, Kynect had enrolled nearly 48,000 people in new health coverage, including Medicaid and private plans, as of Nov. 14, according to the state's most recent data. "#Obamacare is working in KY, an average of 1,000 people sign-up each day," Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear recently bragged on Twitter."

I hate to reply to an AC, but I hate wrong information more.

Multiple stories corroborate that the actual number potentially losing healthcare is one million, not the five million the AC suggested. These are policies that don't meet the ACA's minimum coverage levels, and thus are no longer allowed to be offered.

This has been a point pounded hard by those on the right ("If you like your plan you can keep it" was a lie!), wanting to point to people losing insurance. The left's typical response is that the plans are junk plans, and folks are better off being forced to get a real plan. Since those arguments are all over the web, I'm going to skip past them. Visit Google News to find them if you have missed out.

As is often the case, reality isn't simple enough to be captured in a sound byte. The law had a provision to grandfather old plans:

So what happens to the plans that don't meet the new minimum standards? They will likely disappear. A handful of existing plans will be grandfathered in, but the qualifying criteria for that is hard to meet: Members have to have been enrolled in the plan before the ACA passed in 2010, and the plan has to have maintained fairly steady co-pay, deductible and coverage rates until now.

What insurers have done is made sure no pre-2010 plan stayed in effect (yes, they cancel millions of plans every year), and for the few that have they have made sure the co-pays, deductibles, and coverage have changed significantly. Why would they do that? Well there are a about 4 million people on junk plans. How bad are these plans?

One example: the "Go Blue Health Services Card'' for which cancer survivor Donnamarie Palin of New Port Richey has paid $79 a month. For that, she gets $50 toward each primary care doctor visit, $15 toward each drug — but zero coverage for big-ticket items like hospital stays.

Get in a car wreck, no coverage. Get cancer, no coverage. Need a wart removed, no coverage. Break your arm, no coverage. Yeah. That bad. But they have one thing going for them, they are cheap. $79/month if you don't understand what you're (not) getting seems pretty cheap compared to hundreds of dollars for real insurance. In plain, simple terms these people were going to get a price hike. Now, you're an executive at a health insurance provider faced with the prospect that 4 million people are going to get letters saying "Your $79/month policy is going away, we'd like to offer you a $450/month policy, but it covers a lot more!" Yeah, that's going to lead to lots of bad press on the evening news.

But the way ACA was written had a convenient out. Make sure the law forced the cancellation of the plans, and then flip the narrative to say the government is canceling your plan. It should be no surprise that it took insurance executives about a nanosecond to figure this out and set the wheels in motion. Just make sure no plan qualified or could be grandfathered in.

Now that the Scooby Doo "how did they do it" moment is over, there is one bit left to tidy up. The savvy reader will notice 1 million Californians had their policy cancelled, but o

Food aid is a poisonous gift. You might feed a bunch of people, but it undercuts the livelihoods of local farmers, and just creates dependency on handouts. Disaster relief is one thing, but without a transition plan towards self sufficiency it is almost worse than nothing.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/rights/commentary-dependency-hinders-development

I saw a documentary about the aid industry in Haiti, and it was quite disgusting. Local builders and plumbers living in tattered tents without proper sanitation, just living on hand me downs from aid agencies whose interest was already focusing on the next disaster. Real aid would help the locals help themselves, not pay for aid industry fat salaries and materials manufactured in the donor countries.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/09/opinion/where-does-aid-money-really-go/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9545584/Poverty-barons-who-make-a-fortune-from-taxpayer-funded-aid-budget.html

The recount only covered 175,000 of the 6 million votes. It only counted 'marked or blemished ballots'. They arranged the ballots so confusingly that 113,000 people voted for two people at the ballots. 79,000 chose Gore and a minor candidate, and 29k chose Bush and a minor candidate. (don't know how many chose both Bush and Gore but I should think blue and red are easier to tell apart)

http://web.archive.org/web/20040820122543/http://www.norc.org/fl/results/media/mediagroup_readme.txt

Even at that stage, the recounts drove down Bush's end result by nearly 400 points from 537 to 154

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12623-2001Nov11.html

They also arranged the ballots so confusingly that 113,000 people voted for two people at the ballots. 79,000 chose Gore and a minor candidate, and 29k chose Bush and a minor candidate. (don't know how many chose both Bush and Gore but I should think blue and red are easier to tell apart).

http://www.issues2000.org/Florida_Recount_Official.htm

Realistically, the Supreme Court ended things for a number of reasons. Firstly, if we had found out that Florida was cheated, then the whole integrity of the voting system, and public confidence in it, would have been shattered. Secondly, Bush had just been granted executive power over the Courts anyway.

Also, whilst the NSA have existed during Obama's watch, he certainly wasn't he person who put PRISM in place. Bush put PRISM together. First he tried to use the Protect America Act in 2005, then when he found that the wiretapping hole still wasn't open for the internet he later amended the FISA act despite a lot of resistance. Without those changes in law PRISM would have never been legal. Granted, Obama re-signed it, but at that point in time PRISM would have kept on running whether or not it was legal.

Source: Protect America Act: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1216-01.htm
(That's actually a NYT report, but NYT pulled it from their site in 2007) See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_qYGbieoMM for lawsuits

Source FISA Amendments: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/20/ST2008062001087.html Resistance: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/06/26/senate.fisa/

If you want luxuries like reliable electricity

It's better than many third world countries but "reliable" is not the word I would apply to the US power grid

no hostage taking

Unless someone, somewhere declares you a terrorist, then they have a spot for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

no need to bribe the local politician

In the US they are called "Campaign Contributions" - functionally identical

and no government shakedowns

Unless you don't cooperate with the NSA - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30/a-ceo-who-resisted-nsa-spying-is-out-of-prison-and-he-feels-vindicated-by-snowden-leaks/

well, sometimes you have to pay your workers a bit more to go along with that...

Not really, the tax payers will pick up the slack - http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/04/news/companies/walmart-medicaid/

So basically, this is a meaningless article written by some idiot at Fox News who wanted to make a headline that would stand out.

Hmmm, it says right there:

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story is published in many places... (clickety-click) Ah... According to Chicken Noodle News it was the Financial Times that first reported the story. So the sequence of events appears to be:

* Financial Times breaks the news.

* The story gets out on the AP wire.

* Fox News runs their version of the story.

* Some left-wing kookbag on Slashdot gets a thrill up his leg, because slashdot published a link to foxnews.com. Perhaps he should've asked Chris Mathews for help in dealing with that.

If you think the laws are to blame you're delusional. All of our ancestors were equally violent, just take a step back and look at the big picture. On a happier note: http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/25/reasons-for-optimism-in-todays-world/

A lot more than GM ...

http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/bailouttracker/

You mean Eric Estrada was a malware kingpin?
I don't believe it!

How is that hard to believe? His sidekick was busted for stock fraud.

Here's a headline from 2011, "Indiana state government unearths $320 million in unknown tax revenue" http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/09/politics/indiana-missing-money/

2011 is **the same year all State Universities went on a hiring freeze**...Including mine, Ball State University

It's *****ALL BULLSHIT POLITICS******

Maybe if the US govt focused on where the $4Trillion+ that is "missing" from the defense budget went over the past decade there might be money for research... oh, wait, nah, that'll never happen.

Money, Money, Money.....That's the way it is.

yes for sure, but there's much more to identify, b/c if you "follow the money" it leads to some interesting places...

for the government...Most of the research grants come from R&D for a specific project (ex: DARPA, a vaccine) or the NSF (ex: archaeology, astronomy, CS, etc)

the government, at least in the US, is another way of saying "the voters"....the US has had enough people fall for the "Austerity" charade that virtually every public university, including the two that employed me, cut their budgets b/c the **STATE** budget was being cut artificially.

Here's a headline from 2011, "Indiana state government unearths $320 million in unknown tax revenue" http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/09/politics/indiana-missing-money/

2011 is **the same year all State Universities went on a hiring freeze**...Including mine, Ball State University

It's *****ALL BULLSHIT POLITICS******

This story is a total lie.

No, it is the absolute truth. I'm sorry you don't want to accept it. Here is a link to an article that describes exactly what I experienced.
cnn.

This isn't an anti-patent troll bill. It's an anti-small inventor bill. It's designed to make it more expensive to enforce patents. That won't affect Google vs Apple vs Microsoft, etc. It just makes it harder for a little company to enforce a patent against a big one. That was the intention. (The Leahy bill in the Senate isn't that bad, but the Goodlatte bill that just passed the House is awful.)

This bill has been pushed through by a hate campaign against inventors. It's a well-funded campaign, and it's suckered in many people. The money is coming from Google and Facebook, who are hiding behind front organizations such as the Application Developers Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF's effort is funded by Google and Facebook, with $2 million laundered through a clever legal trick.

There are very few real "patent trolls". The EFF has tried to identify every one they can, and they only found 15. They started a campaign to attack "trolled patents" in court and at the USPTO, and and they only found one. There are a few other broad patents being enforced aggressively, notably Ultramercial. That's about it.

Using that thin basis, the "patent troll" problem has been hyped as a major threat. There are hate sites aimed at inventors:

• "Trolling Effects" (EFF) "Trolling Effects is a resource for those who have been targeted by patent trolls. Here you can learn more about these bad actors."
• The American Association of Advertising Agencies: "These are not companies in the traditional sense that employ workers or create, market and distribute products or services; rather, they are legal entities whose sole purpose is to threaten with patent claims and then secure expedient - and lucrative - settlements based on these claims."
• Application Developers Alliance: "Even the worst and least-expensive old patents are used like extortionist sledge hammers."

I used to respect the EFF, but once they took Google's money, they, too, turned to the dark side.

The logic espoused by the quoted idea is the same as saying if police were to start strip searching everyone without cause, it would be reasonable simply because it always happens.

But they already have been doing that:
http://news.yahoo.com/police-turn-routine-traffic-stops-into-cavity-searches-201433510.html
http://www.wnd.com/2013/11/3rd-target-of-body-cavity-searches-comes-forward/
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/06/justice/new-mexico-search-lawsuit/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/troopers-texas-probe-genitals-women-traffic-stops-article-1.1414668

And dont have your dog along:
http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/video?clipId=9513174&autostart=false
http://www.businessinsider.com/police-are-shooting-dogs-2013-7

Seriously people, wake the fuck up. This has happened before, we know where it leads. Technologies getting better though, this time around all the worlds armies my not be able to stop them. Why do we keep letting this happen?