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once you have the government choosing what people can and can't see on the internet

This wouldn't be advertised as "Internet access". It would be advertised as a tool to find a job or a better job.

(also, Drudge report? srs?)

Just the headlines from the Report and Retort, not the article bodies, to provide some minimal level of awareness of current events.

Incidentally, I really like this approach. They give every homeless person a home and a social worker, so they can learn to do better. The problem with welfare in America isn't that it's trying to help people; the problem with welfare in America is it's too stuck, doing things that don't help, and not researching what would work better.

It would be no great surprise if voting on this bill went along the same lines as the congressional vote on reining in "the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 'no' voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 'yes' voters."

In particular,

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is married to Richard C. Blum, who was substantially invested in URS Corp, which owns EG&G, a leading government technical provider that has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in security-related contracts. Feinstein never abstained from voting when it affected her husband’s wallet and Blum made $100 million when he sold his shares, as investigative reporter Peter Byrne exposed in his 2007 series the “Feinstein Files.”

( http://www.indypendent.org/2013/07/16/nsa-follows-you-we-follow-money )

See also:

• NSA Defenders Protecting Their Own Wallets,
• Feinstein: 700k From NSA Affiliates Since 2007 PRISM Launch
• Big campaign donations from contractors doing secret work for NSA,
• .. etc.

Good luck firing them, though.

It isn't "potential abuse of power", when it is being reported AFTER THE FACT!

It does not matter, when it is reported. What makes it a potential abuse of power is that — unlike, for example, the IRS' power to grant or deny tax-exempt status, or the Labor Department's power to conduct audits — it has not been abused yet.

Seriously, all NZ has to do is point a few of those major headlines out, and say "No thank you USA. We would be happy to assist you, LEGALLY, in any LEGAL investigation you may have, but the requests you send us must obey OUR soveriegn rights and laws.

Yes, and the US could say in return: "Ok, guys, you follow your laws to your hearts' content. But if we pick up evidence of somebody planning to release VX in Invercargill Art Gallery tomorrow, we will only inform you of it, if we obtained that information legally. And we'll use Royal Mail to deliver the notice to you — just in case."

For better or worse, governments are judged by their results, not means. I don't like it — it lets the Executive get away with too much, but that's a fact of life — the Boston Marathon bombing, likely, did more damage to Obama's Administration (despite the press' sympathies lying solidly with the Nobel Peace Prize winner), than NSA snooping on suspected terrorists damaged to Bush's Administration (despite the press being duly suspicious of government at the time). It is not limitless — NSA snooping on all of us is more damaging still, but the public can be quite forgiving of the means — as long as there are results.

heatedly whispering among themselves asking each other how they can break the law!

I'm not a cop and generally don't like them, but I do understand, how infuriating and frustrating it must feel to see a rapist or murderer walk free, because the arresting officer fumbled his Miranda-rights or some such. Don't you? Or when, indeed, some vital information passed by a friendly country can not be acted upon, because it did not arrive by "legal" channels...

That was 2010 numbers. In 2011 GM retook the lead after Toyota had a bunch of sudden acceleration bad press. In fact, 2011 was GM's record year for sales. 2012 isn't done yet, so we don't know who will win this year.

Furthermore, the victim was not shot, but stabbed, and his name was "Pedro Roleta". In your grand failed game of equivocation, "stab a hispanic thief running away with your property" is the same as "shoot an unarmed black guy who has committed no crime". YOU LOSE.

What racist cartoons? Let's see them. Put up or SHUT UP.

Are you looking for a Democrat's "Macaca Moment?" Sorry, but that's reserved for Republicans. Conservatives just seem to use the racist words like "darkie" and "jigaboo" out of habit. And everyone here knows it and sees it, but you.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just said that she always thought that Roe v Wade was about not having growth in "populations that we don't want to have too many of."

Really? How much would you bet that if I used the Google, Ginsburg said NOTHING OF THE SORT and your statement is just because you and other conservatives can't read and/or love to quote out of context.

In other words, I'm calling you a liar. You liar.

Now let's check.

More context on the remarks:

Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don't know why this hasn't been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn't really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong. (emphasis added)

JUSTICE GINSBURG: The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.

Q: Does that mean getting rid of the test the court imposed, in which it allows states to impose restrictions on abortion like a waiting period that are not deemed an "undue burden" to a woman's reproductive freedom?

That's from a conservative site: http://www.drudge.com/news/122942/ginsburg-abortion-reduced-undesired

And yes, it proves you're a liar.

Ginsburg was saying quite plainly that she was opposed to the idea of abortion being used to as a tool to limit minority populations, and she was relieved when the McRae decision (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=448&invol=297) found that Medicaid did NOT have to pay for all types or situations for abortions. At that point she understood that abortion would not be used as a tool of eugenics, which she was relieved about.

This has been a valuable entry in the permanent Internet record of your stupidity.

An upgrade can cost as much as nepotism will allow in a
system that is filled with cronyism and corruption.

What we have is a race to loot as much as can be looted
while the ship has not yet sank beneath the waves.

We have several 100 trillion in derivatives looming in
the distance that damn few will even write about in the media.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/derivatives-are-the-new-ticking-time-bomb

We have The Fed printing 9 Trillion and handing it out, but when
asked where it went they respond "I don't know".

http://www.drudge.com/news/121850/fed-inspector-general-claims-9-trillion

Poof the magic fairies ran off with it and now the american
tax payer is in debt for it even though we forgot to write
it down, aren't you glad we are not your accountant ?

The payroll system could prolly be replaced with a canned solution
by numerous vendors, or an open source one that is already available
could be scaled up with the help of some post grad students.

Like the giant ponzimonium that is about to be unleashed it is
is just another of the many thefts thru corruption that are
running amok.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/20/news/economy/fraud_ponzi.reut/index.htm

We have yet to see this mess really unspool.

Let me know when she joins a Hispanic Superiority club

It's called La Raza, and yes Sotomayor has been a member for 20 years. http://www.drudge.com/news/121501/sonia-sotomayor-raza-member

That's exactly the problem. People "excerpt" the body of the article (change the headline and omit the byline) without reference or attribution in their "blogs" all the time.

That does not appear to be the case with The Drudge Retort (the site being DMCA'd). The site appears to have a link to the original story and a short summary. I am not familiar with the site though so maybe they are talking about a different section.

The problem, some casual readers might think this is a professional news site and not realize its a news & gossip site from a man (Matt Drudge) with right wing view.

If you go over to Drudge.com You can read the Drudge Retort, a counter view from the left side.

I read many blog/news/gossip sites, but I like to know the views of the editors and owners. Would you blindly trust everything you read on the Internet? Most sites are not non-partisan, they lean and have viewpoints which cloud true reporting of the issues.

True non-partisan sites like Factcheck.org and Spinsanity.org have cleared up a some "Sound bites" from both sides. Why can't I get a news channel like this?

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Partisan

However folks fall in the religion fueled debate on homosexuality issues (gay marriage, gay "normalcy", etc) this was a middle-of-the-road ruling from a court that appears that didn't side with either of the agendas being pushed.

Like cyber-squat efforts (registering domains like "pepsi.com" when you're not affiliated with Pepsi at all) overall, this was a targeted effort by someone with an agenda. The intent was to squat their agenda on any internet traffic by "hugging" search criteria and even simple mispellings in a url. Their agenda to do this was clearly spelled out.

I expect the people running Drudge Retort to be nervous over a ruling like this.

The best format I've seen is where a telejournalism entity like PBS' Frontline can devote an entire hour -- or even a week, as in the case of CBS' nineteen-eighty-mumble weeklong series The Defense of America to provide enough content to be more than superficially interesting.

The U.S. cybersquatting law recently passed by the Senate requires that the courts prove you registered a domain "in bad faith."

Bad faith is a tough thing to prove in court.

If you knowingly register a domain because it's the name of a company or a trademark, and route traffic to a competing company or to something like a porn site, you've gone a long way towards proving bad faith.

If you register a domain for the purpose of parody and publish a parody site (as in my own Drudge Retort at http://www.drudge.com), you're on strong legal ground in the U.S. The Senate's cybersquatting law even affirms the use of a domain for the purpose of parody or political comment (such as www.pepsibloodbath.com).

Another way to get yourself in trouble is to register a domain that's identical (or similar) to a company's name or trademark, and contact that company to see if they're interested in buying it. That would look terrible in court -- some domain registrants in the UK lost all of their domains by contacting companies like Virgin to sell domain names they had acquired.

Anyone who is concerned about this legislation in the U.S. should visit the Congress Web site at http://thomas.loc.gov and search for bill number S.1255.RS, the "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999." The bill is fairly limited in the kind of domain use that is being prohibited.

Disclaimer: IANAFOB.

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