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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/02/why-you-cant-buy-new-car-online

I run iFixit. We started writing our own repair manuals because of this very issue way back in 2003. Slashdot has run stories about us on a number of occasions.

Apple has been very aggressively protecting their copyright on service manuals pretty much since the dawn of the internet. Heres an example of them going after Something Awful. Many of the sites theyve gone after have ceased to exist.

Since then, with the help of tens of thousands of incredible repair technicians around the world (including many redditors), we have built the largest free repair manual. Because we write them ourselves, the manufacturers cant shut us down. The community has written over 6,000 manuals, and you can download and reproduce any of them to your hearts content. We even post all of our manuals on bittorrent and the internet archive so they are guaranteed to be free forever.

Heres our Toshiba laptop service manual. Weve made progress on half a dozen laptops so far, with more on the way. Not nearly as comprehensive as what timix had, but its a start.

Toshiba is not an outlier here--they represent the status quo. Many manufacturers havent gotten around to issuing these C&D letters, but its perfectly within their right. Any site hosting manufacturer service manuals without permission is at risk of a shutdown like this at any time.

Thats why what we do at iFixit is so important. The world needs to know how to fix these products. Repair is critical for the environment. Repair helps bridge the digital divide by keeping the secondhand electronics market alive. And electronics repair represents hundreds of thousands of jobs in the United States alone.

We cannot rely on the good will of manufacturers. Yes, many of them have looked the other way and ignored sites like timixs, but that is unlikely to continue. We have three options:

1. Create a free and open alternative to the manufacturers service manuals (thats what were doing at iFixit).
2. Pressure the manufacturers to waive copyright to their manuals so that we can reproduce them. Dell, HP, and Lenovo are the best targets for this because they already provide manuals online. (I am involved in discussions with some OEMs to make this happen. The more public support we have, the more success well have.)
3. Legislate. The auto manufacturers refused to provide independent shops with the information they needed, so they banded together and just passed Right to Repair legislation in Massachusetts last week. There's no reason we can't do the same.

Its easy to say, "shame on Toshiba" and move on with your life. But this is not unique to Toshiba. No cell phone manufacturer makes their service manuals available. In fact, outside of the heavy equipment industry (where customers demand it) and the automotive industry (where legislation requires it), its the rare manufacturer that does not use copyright to prevent publicat

I am curious, do you believe Romney is not capable of helping the middle class and improving the economy solely because has always been rich?

Trying to identify with the middle class (as Romney appeared to attempt to do with the 'ugly car' remark) was disingenuous. In addition, the man made some bones by slicing and dicing companies and outsourcing jobs. Why should Joe Bob average trust this guy again? In addition, some people called him a "flip flopper".. I call him a blatant liar. Then again, they're all liars.

And don't even go the 'competitiveness' route.. we're competing with countries that have no respect for their people, and who will quite literally liquidate them for gain. Somehow it's okay that a woman goes blind in China at the age of 30 after soldering keyboards all day long so that we may buy them for seven dollars, but it's not okay to fly to Cuba.

As far as "getting tough" with China, I doubt that either Romney or Obama has the balls to call them on currency issues.

Given that this is a national election, it's politic to pander to the undecided voters, not the base. Didn't you get the memo?

The alternate theory is that the election turns on getting your base to show up and vote while actively discouraging the other guy's base from voting. So in that kind of environment, you'd pander to the frothing morons in your party, and disenfranchise the other party's voters by:
- passing laws requiring them to travel hundreds of miles and pay a fee to get an ID needed to vote,
- putting up billboards in neighborhoods that tend to vote for the other guy reminding them that attempted voter fraud will result in 3 years of jail time, or
- organizing groups of volunteers to stand around the precincts where these voters (who all seem to be a particular color, for some reason) are likely to be and challenge anyone they think is fraudulent.

Of course, to actually do any of those things would be un-American, so I'm sure no major political group would do that.

Translation: You're mad that the ARRA actually built things, rather than just handing out money to a handful of lucky Americans.

Sure, we could have just bought 2.4M spoons, and had every new "worker" go out, find an empty plot of ground, and spend their hours digging holes and filling them back in.

But if you want to actually build stuff, you gotta buy some actual backhoes. You've got to buy cement, and lumber, and steel, and nails, and wiring. The value of the things that actually got built by those jobs has to be accounted for.

And let's not forget that $288B of the ARRA's price tag actually did exactly what you're suggesting: handed money back to people in the form of tax credits. This was Obama trying to make the bill "bipartisan", giving the Republicans some of what they said they wanted. Result? Zero Republican votes in the House, two-and-a-half in the Senate.*

Obama's own economists told him that these tax breaks would have little stimulus effect, but the Republicans demanded that they be included in a bill that they had no intention of voting for anyhow.

There's also a lot of other "just give money to people" provisions, like unemployment benefits, food stamps, WIC, TANF, etc. These transfer programs incur very low overhead. There's $80B in direct giveaways under "aid to low-income workers, unemployed, and retirees," the aforementioned $288B given away in tax credits, and a couple of other nickely-dimey programs that amount to handing deficit money to people in the hopes that they spend it.

Given that the ARRA basically followed your source's "hand out money" plan for about half its budget, by The Weekly Standard's reasoning, the other $400B spent on scientific research, weatherizing buildings, energy efficiency, upgrading the electrical grid, building roads, and a laundry list of other things... all that may as well have been flushed down the toilet.

The point is, the ARRA did so much more than just put people to work. It invested in scientific research, improved the energy efficiency of homes and businesses, modernized health care records and information services, sent young men and women to college, and a bunch of other things that will pay long-term dividends.

* I'm counting Arlen Specter's vote as half a vote, because he switched to the Democratic party a few months later.

Nope. Working as a corporate raider for Bain Capital was sufficient.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/bain-capital-mitt-romney-outsourcing-china-global-tech

http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/12/how-mitt-romney-invested-millions-in-outsourcing/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/romneys-bain-capital-invested-in-companies-that-moved-jobs-overseas/2012/06/21/gJQAsD9ptV_story.html

The global warming law has not actually passed into law and will probably die in committee, but here's an article about it: North Carolina wishes away climate change.

The thing that kills the bill won't necessarily be the climate change denial aspect (that part is popular in NC's legislature), but that it is basically legislating fraud. The guys want to sell coastline that will be underwater in a couple of decades and don't want potential buyers to know that.

Haven't dug through the details to figure out who's more believable, but here are some criticisms of the study.

So how did a nation with such cultural depth, such delightful people, so much going for them go so far off the track.

The U.S. helped a bit. All through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the U,.S. worked with military dictators and religious extremists, seeing them as a way to counter Soviet influence. Democratic movements that probably would have made better long-term friends were usually seen as too socialistic, and thus pawns of the Soviets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/01/cold-war-holy-warrior

In most places, the American-sponsored dictatorships were eventually overthrown by more democratic groups. But in the middle east, the religious extremists had strong cultural roots, and have been gradually replacing the military dictatorships. Iran was just the first to go that way,

The most ironic case is Iraq, were the U.S. actually decided that overthrowing the dictator was a necessary part of the "War on Terror", which is essentially a war against the same Islamic extremists we used to support against the Soviets. The stupidity of this was that the Iraqi dictatorship was a secular entity that was the only thing keeping the Islamic extremists out of power. Thus a war that was justified by the danger of Islamic extremists will probably have the effect of creating another theocracy for them to dominate.

We're just too clever for our own good, sometimes.

You must be joking....

Patent 915 is the pinch-to-zoom patent that Samsung was found to have violated.

It most certainly is not:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2012/07/915patent.pdf

Patent 7,812,826 looks far more like pinch to zoom:

http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/apple-ptz-patent.pdf

See also:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/08/hold-maybe-apple-doesnt-own-pinch-zoom-after-all

and

http://techpinions.com/pinch-to-zoom-and-rounded-rectangles-what-the-jury-didnt-say/9465

It's frustrating to see so many commenters and articles getting this wrong.

I wish that were true. In Maryland over 10% of blacks will vote republican over the gay marriage issue. Maybe not more then 20% but it could be enough to make a difference in other states. Black preachers are pushing hard on this one, some of them with money from the Republican party. In Maryland Obama will win but in swing states like Pennsylvania the republicans may win by less then 1%. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/08/nom-newest-anti-gay-marriage-front-man-william-owens

Re-focusing on the main topic of my original post, how is (or was at the dot-com time) paying $60-$70K a year for a person to write HTML, just plain HTML not an "unsustainable bubble."?

If wages had kept pace with productivity, then the median household income would be about $92,000 a year. (It's currently around $50,000.)

So, no, these wages being paid in the 1990s were not out of line. It's the wages that everyone else is being paid that are far too low. Based on productivity improvements over the years, the minimum wage should be about $19-$20 an hour. If the guy flipping burgers was getting paid $38,000-$40,000 a year as he should be, then $60K-$70K a year for HTML doesn't sound too unreasonable any more.

Most Americans have no idea just how badly we're getting screwed by the system.

Clearly you've never heard of the Brogrammer. Yeap, the guy in that pic is me. Usually I have three. Suck it, bitch.

The fact checker (it was either the Washington Post or Politifact) claimed he was off by miles, but that was because the person doing the fact checking knew nothing about how Congress makes budgets. For example, the Department of Veteran's Affairs is a separate budget item from the Department of Defense, but to claim that this is really a separate cost from 'defense spending' is ignorant

^^^^^This. The "official" number bandied about is ~600 billion dollars, but the real number is more than twice that much. They make it look smaller by, as you point out, excluding things like the VA from defense spending. Ditto for the GI Bill, interest on past military spending, Fatherland Security, military aid to countries like Israel, the Department of Energy managing our nuclear weapons, etc etc.....

The Real US National Security Budget: 1.2 Trillion

First, neither the National Review nor Mother Jones seem to think TARP has actually been paid back.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/242731/did-tarp-money-really-get-paid-back-kevin-d-williamson
http://www.motherjones.com/bailout/2009/06/big-bank-bamboozle

Second, TARP itself was only a part of the bailout, estimates on total money given to the banks by the Federal Reserve run as high as $29 trillion.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/45674390/The_Size_of_the_Bank_Bailout_29_Trillion

So, yes, it does help to "read and understand the news instead of merely believing what you wish were true". You should try it sometime.

What do you expect Amazon to do? Give a free full ride to anyone who asks? In order to stay in business, amazon must turn a profit, and in order to do that, it must maintain a level of productive throughput at an affordable price.

Yes. So what Amazon should do is to lobby for a law that regulates this type of work. If everyone who does retail has to treat their packbots in the same way, there is no advantage in mistreating them, and the race to the bottom is stopped. Competition can then move to something else.

That's a no-brainer, really. That is the way it works in civilized countries. This, however, is what happens in uncivilized countries.

I think what most people would "expect Amazon to do" would be to act a bit more humane, even if the prices were slightly higher (even by US$5 or $10 for inexpensive items). I would recommend everyone considering responding similar to how you have to read this story by a reporter who worked there to find out what the working conditions on a daily basis were actually like:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

I hope that after reading the story, you too would agree that less gruelling working conditions would be more ideal overall even if it meant slightly higher prices. I surely can't be the only one who feels comfortable paying a bit more for something knowing that the people getting my order together aren't being treated like dogshit.

It's inferred that this warehouse was Amazon but never confirmed http://www.motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2011/09/amazon-warehouse-heat-shipping. There is always a price for free shipping and low prices. Just because you cannot or do not want to see it, does not mean it isn't there. Now, I need to go order that Rob Zombie Voodoo Doll.

You're welcome. What the fuck is REPUTABLE? Someone who you have personally dealt with? Someone everyone can trust? No such person exists universally, nice Straw Man.

But anyway, here are a bunch of more reports of this with SOURCES, if you don't think the Wikipedia article is correct. As far as them being REPUTABLE, that's open to opinion. Any random asshole YOU quote from won't be REPUTABLE to me. So there.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine

http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/30/technology/election_diebold/

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Diebold_Election_Systems

Your ears must hurt from having your fingers "rammed" in them so hard. You're welcome.

I'm not one of those idiots who whines and bitches about how someone makes more money than other people and how they should somehow give it all back to them or something. However, it's strange thinking that I've worked here for fifteen years and the biggest purchase of my life is my $200k house that I'll be paying off until I die . . . while my boss/CEO is buying fighter jets, billion dollar yachts, appearing in Iron Man 2, buying massively expensive houses all over the place, and buying a 141sq mile Hawaiian island. It's kind of demoralizing to realize that Larry probably spent more in this one purchase than every single person *combined* in my entire division will earn (after taxes) in three or four life-times. Or as much as I would earn in take-home if I continued working from today until the year 17,000.

I am one of those idiots. Not because we shouldn't award innovation and hard work, but because your boss/CEO is getting richer at your expense. I know that the libertarians around here like to say that free markets lead to meritocracy, but it just isn't the case. Your wages, my wages, and 99% of people on Slashdot have stagnated over the past 30 years. Instead, we are supposed to "earn" money by investing in a house. How has that worked out? Gen X, the generation to which I happen to belong, has lost around 40% of its wealth since the housing bubble burst. But Larry Ellison is buying a Hawaiian island. Where did that money come from? Thin air? Where did our lost wealth go? Thin air? No, of course not. It never existed except as debt on a bank balance sheet. And now that the debt has gone bad, we get to pay to de-leverage banks. The economy is zero sum. We can collectively only increase our wealth by the amount that the economy grows each year. Likewise, when the economy shrinks, we must collectively shed wealth. But somehow Larry gets rich when the economy grows and gets richer when it shrinks. That is the policies of the government actively transferring wealth from you and I to Larry Ellison so that he can buy a f***ing Hawaiian island during a prolonged, global economic contraction that has turned home ownership into Russian roulette for the rest of us. And it will continue like this until perception and reality converge.

Also, WTF does one person need with an entire Hawaiian island? Or a fighter jet? Why do we allow one person to accumulate so much wealth that they have to find new, unnecessary extravagances to blow it on while the rest of us can barely afford to educate our kids? Shouldn't there be some level of comfort that we allow the middle class to achieve before letting people like Larry Ellison skip ludicrous and go straight to plaid? Right now it seems that we have to wait for the benevolent "job creators" to toss some coin our way, but not until there is "more certainty" in the markets. Fortunately for us there are still enough billionaires to buy the White House for someone that understands their plight.

It's probably because of the two quotes:

• "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not"
• "As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Although 'piracy' has been an integral part of Microsoft's marketing and dominance on the desktop, even to the point of actively encouraging it, it's not a fact they want getting a lot of attention. A pirate copy of Windows is M$ second favorite OS. It means, obviously, that competing software is not used. It also means that if they can get their marketing arm, the BSA, in the door, they can probably shake the company down for everything, including servers and thus gain entrance to the server room. M$ used shakedowns against Netware in the 1990's and seems to be using it against Linux now.

If we were allowed to have good teachers they could easily do better than computers, but since we cannot have good teachers in schools bring on the automation I say.

Yes, just fire everybody from the good jobs, so that they can work as packbots. Nice idea. [/sarcasm]

Towns should not be eager to host Amazon warehouses. The jobs they bring in are terrible.

Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but within the last 5 years China has started spending about 1/3 as much as us.

Not unless they've started spending $400 billion a year, officially or unofficially.

Actually, verifiable U.S. numbers are $1.2 trillion.

"Jane's Defence Forecasts in 2012 estimated that China's defense budget would increase from $119.80 billion to $238.20 billion between 2011 and 2015. This would make it larger than the defense budgets of all other major Asian nations combined."

That's about a third of current US military spending.

Wrong. You're off by 2x. At least. Cowboy. Even if China starts spending 200 billion a year, the U.S. is still spending 7 times that.

Did you even TRY to verify your facts before you posted that? Or are you seriously believing the official DOD figures of ~$600BN?

And was sized to support 2 wars, both of which are largely over.

Wrong again. One of those wars is largely over - Iraq - but we've merely redeployed those troops in the region in preparation for the next bogus war of choice - Iran. Or to re-invade Iraq if we decide it's "necessary". Then there's the bevy of undeclared drone wars from Africa to Asia.

The military industrial-congressional-contractor-surviellance complex has only ballooned since Bin Laddin's death, not started to recede.

Here is another article from last year that's more in depth: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants

Taxed at an extraordinarily low rate...

Yes and no.

My understanding is that if an employer gives you stock outright as part of your compensation, you must pay federal earned income tax on the fair-market value of the stock as of when they gave it to you, which would be 35% for the last dollar earned by someone in the top tax bracket. You also pay federal capital gains tax on any increase in price since then, up to 35% if you held the stock less than a year, likely 15% if you held it more than a year. (It could be 0% if more than a year and your income is less than a certain amount, but if so you probably don't have any stock anyway.)

You might say the 15% is an extraordinary low rate, but then again, if you were just paid a like amount of cash, you could have used it to buy the stock at its fair-market value and achieved the same overall tax rate anyway. The real trick is to (1) have enough spare money that you don't need this income for at least a year, possibly a lot longer depending on market conditions, and to (2) know what stocks will gain so dramatically that your initial investment seems insignificant. If you can do those things on most of your income, the low tax rate is just the icing on the extraordinarily large cake you can easily afford to have and eat, too...

Of course there are some loopholes, but I think they're only practical for "job-creators" like Mitt Romney, not regular folk like you and me. (And for the record, some of my income was considered long-term capital gains, but apparently not nearly as much as Romney's; my tax rate was much higher.)

All the people he called in about for "acting suspicious" were black kids. One was seven to nine years old by his own estimate.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/trayvon-shooters-911-calls-potholes-piles-trash-black-men
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/23/did-trayvon-shooter-abuse-911.html

His tendency to report blacks has been widely reported. Both Mother Jones and the Daily Beast listened to every 911 call still on record, and most of the ones about people are young black males:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/trayvon-shooters-911-calls-potholes-piles-trash-black-men
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/23/did-trayvon-shooter-abuse-911.html

All the ones that report one or two guys for basically walking around ("being suspicious" in Zimmermanese) are black kids. One is about a seven-year-old.

You should read this. It gives you a clue about what it's like to work for a living. In America.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

Where did you get 5 Trillion? It is 500billion (which is still an incredible amount to claim when you consider the base budget for the department of defense and war activities is 676billion, I was going to throw a dhs document but this terrible source actually does a good job of putting everything into context: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/real-us-national-security-budget-1-trillion .)

Tank Man is a fascinating story. Very few know what happened to him. His fate ranges from the Chinese authorities denying they ever identified him so he was never punished to his being executed right after the famous incident.

Peoples do still revolt, though it more typically occurs because of economic issues than purely civil rights issues. When people are starving, disenfranchised and have nothing left to lose they tend to be less afraid of the consequences of revolution. When people have a job, place to live and food to eat, they generally dont really care if their country is turning to a totalitarian state.

Revolt is typically a horrible thing and it usually ends badly. Revolt is the ultimate collapse in the rule of law, so its paradoxical to resort to revolution to remedy the break down in the rule of law instituted by your government. But when your government no longer adheres to the rule of law what else do you do?

I recently read I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave and discovered a new word, "workampers". They are people who live in RV's and drive from one warehouse to another getting minimum wage temp jobs. These are places like Amazon's warehouses where most of the work force is permenently temporary so they can keep wages to a minimum since there are no raises or seniority among temp workers, and there are no benefits. One wonders if the U.S. is edging towards the place where economic conditions are so bad for so many that one day they will in fact revolt on economic grounds even if they dont care about the loss of their basic civil liberties.

I'll put aside the poetry in your lack of punctuation or capitalization for a second and simply address the poetry in your ignorance of the limited role of federal government, as defined by the Consitituion.

And I'll put aside the condescension and simply address the false conservative dogma.

First, defense is a large contributor to federal spending (24%).

First problem: actual war spending (lets call it what it is) is double the advertized number. Lots of items are left out of the "official" DOD budget yet are obviously defense spending: the VA, the Department of Energy maintaining our nuclear weapon stockpile, DHS, and interest on past wars. The real public price tag on war spending is $1.2 trillion per year.

And this is exactly appropriate.

Second problem: appropriate to spend more than the rest of the world combined? Appropriate more than 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union? Appropriate when you have a greater chance of dying from a fall in your own bathtub than by being killed in a terrorist attack? When we are surrounded by two large, friendly nations, the world's two largest oceans, and haven't faced an invasion in 200 years? Looks like Pete Hoekstra isn't the only one with a malformed sense of proportion. We could lop a zero off our defense spending and have more than enough for actual defense spending to you know, defend us.

That being said, defense spending is steamrolled by the combined total spending in Pensions (22%)

What are military pensions? Military spending.

Healthcare (22%)

What is the VA? Military spending.

and Wellfare (%12), none of which are defined roles of the federal government.

Third and greatest problem: General Welfare. It's in the Constitution.

Twice.

And let's go ahead and skip the rationalizations of how General Welfare is limited, shall we? Because it's listed in the same sentence in Article 1, Section 8 as "Common Defense". Which means that if "General Welfare" is strictly limited, and not at all expansive, then so is Common Defense. As Congress only explicitly grants Congress the power to fund an Army and a Navy, that of course means that huge chunks of our military and intelligence apparatus are flatly unconstitutional.

Like the Air Force.
Like the military portion of the Department of Energy.
Like most of the FBI.
Like most of DHS.
Like NORAD.
Like the CIA.
Like the NSA.
Like any of the other 15 out of 17 intelligence agencies that are not attached to the Army or Navy.

Isn't it amazing how the same conservatives that complain about how Social Security is unconstitutional because it isn't spelled out in the Constitution don't do the same for the equally unconstitutional Air Force or CIA, etc. But no, all that's "entirely appropriate".

but I would ask you to conced that their is equal or greater corruption in the worlds of green energy, public works, law enforcememt, and even welfare.

Why would anyone do that, when your comparisons aren't on the same planet, much less the same page? When was the last time the 'green energy' industry up and "lost" 6 billion dollars in Iraq?

Are you aware that the Justice Dept is supposed to ensure that Congress and the President do not violate the Constituion?

Speaking of civic ignorance, are you aware that the Justice Department is part of the Executive Branch? So the part of the executive branch app

Wind and solar are not anywhere near being able to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Not only are they more than close enough, they've been that way for decades. When are energy demands the greatest? On hot, sunny days, and cold, windy nights.

Then there's the massive subsidization that the oil industry receives in the Department of Defense, as most of our military is deployed in and around the world's gas station: the middle east.

You could cut our war budget in half (while still outspending the rest of the world combined) and use the savings to put up solar panels on every public building in America. Half of $1.2 trillion per year buys you a lot of solar panels and wind towers.

What part of the facts don't you like, anonymous coward?

I know this comment is a day late, but I thought it was a good coincidence that an article popped up in my browser this morning that addresses this. How much federal aid goes to the nonworking poor? That seems a question relevant to your statement "The 50%+ who are in love with government hand-outs and have forgotten how to provide for themselves are dependent."

Well, here's a straightforward answer;

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/how-much-do-we-spend-nonworking-poor

And just to highlight the meat of it;

"The answer: about 10 percent of all federal welfare spending. How did they come up with that? CBPP's methodology uses census data to figure out exactly where program dollars are going, but you can get pretty much the same answer using a simpler, easier-to-understand technique. Step One is to list every federal welfare program. Step Two is to deduct spending on the elderly, blind, and seriously disabled. That's Social Security, Medicare, SSI, and about two-thirds of Medicaid. Step Three is to deduct spending that goes to the working poor. That's unemployment compensation, EITC, and child tax credits. Step Four is to add up the rest. This overstates how much goes to the nonworking poor, since these programs are open to both working and nonworking families, but it gives you a rough idea.

It comes to about $235 billion, the bulk of which is SNAP (formerly food stamps) and about one-third of Medicaid. That's 12 percent of all federal welfare spending and about 6 percent of the whole federal budget. Once you account for the fact that some of these program dollars go to the working poor, you end up with CBPP's estimate of 10 percent, or about 5 percent of the whole federal budget.

Is that too much? I guess you have to decide for yourself. But I'll bet most people think we spend a lot more than 5 percent of the federal budget on this stuff."

There's stuff like the Pentagon's military analyst program. See

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pentagon_military_analyst_program

In fact, media massaging is so pervasive in the political culture that even local pols do it. Check this out:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/scott-walker-john-doe-investigation-explained

That position is actually defensible and makes some sense. But that's not what some teabaggers really want. They want to abolish ALL public education. Here's one link I found with a quick google of "tea party abolish public schools". There's loads more.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/david-harmer-abolish-public-schools

and damage millions of people every year.

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/graphic-day-hospital-infections

I find it hard to consider lawsuits a miniscule part of the problem, have a look at the following link if you disagree. http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/dec10/advocacy2.asp

I would like to highlight the following part in particular.

In a recent Gallup survey, physicians attributed 34 percent of overall healthcare costs to defensive medicine and 21 percent of their practice to be defensive in nature. Specifically, they estimated that 35 percent of diagnostic tests, 29 percent of lab tests, 19 percent of hospitalizations, 14 percent of prescriptions, and 8 percent of surgeries were performed to avoid lawsuits.

Liability reform has been estimated to result in anywhere from a 5 percent to a 34 percent reduction in medical expenditures by reducing defensive medicine practices, with estimates of savings from $54 billion to $650 billion.

I don't know the details about the Texas case in particular, but the very article that gave these numbers mentions Texas and some of the benefits that occurred from the legislative changes. There are other explanations why it wouldn't make a dent in the rate of inflation other than the overall cost being miniscule. It's possible Texas had another area of cost that grew faster than other states and countered the effect. It's also possible that despite the change, doctors didn't change their practice of defensive medicine. Perhaps out of habit, lack of knowledge of the changes, or the changes being too small. I don't know enough to say.

Your criticism of the fraud claim is much more deserved. The examples I gave were small and tended to focus only on the side of the little guy when fraud can also include things such as doctors, hospitals, and the like making fraudulent charges against insurance. I'm sure there are countless ways fraud occurs I haven't even thought of, much less mentioned. Overall though, the matter is far from a joke. The NPR estimated the cost of fraud in the US system at $60 billion to $600 billion a year. http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/08/cost-medical-fraud-could-pay-health-care-reform

All that US prosecutors have to do now is torture the facts until they reveal that your unpopular opinions constitute "material support for terrorism":

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/i-guess-posting-videos-online-can-make-you-terrorist ...you can easily see the Bahrain prosecutors turning "activism" into "terrorism" with a stroke of the pen and a few sad stories of injured policemen at the protests, and the "value of the advertising" of the Facebook page turned into "material support", the way the Bostonian's "free translation for Al-Qaeda" became material support for them.

It's becoming really difficult to find anything these countries do, that we used to be able to look down upon, that they can't now throw into our face.

I will have to read this book; I want to see his methods and analysis section. It's hard to believe that the entrance of evangelicals into politics and their influence is not largely responsible for the rejection of global warming. You have only to consult a political map and a map of denierland to see that where evangelicals have power is the same territory as denierland.

Furthermore, the basic message of evangelicals - that "man's knowledge" is limited and wrong but what appears in the bible written in the Bronze Age by people who had a only pre-scientific understanding of the world available to them is right, directly prepares the ground for denial on ANY scientific matter whatsoever.

There's a direct line to be drawn from the anti-evolution and the "young earth" hypothesis.. err sorry that's "young earth certainty" and the rejection of science generally including the science behind AGW, a rejection with the capacity to deconstruct the basis of civilization despite who changes their minds about what later on or what anyone living through it wants to do about it then.

Sure, libertarian psychopaths like the Koch Brothers and the sociopaths who helped Philip Morris murder hundreds of millions of people (and yet they walk free) are behind the tactics and methods of the denier movement,

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/09/chart-climate-change-spin-cycle

and yes they're funding it also, but it couldn't carry the day if it were not for the millions of evangelicals and the much smaller number of sick dominionists who believe in creationism and self serving narcissistic theories like "the prosperity gospel" (god wants you to be rich!) etc. etc.

This culture of scientific rejectionism is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America and needs to be dealt with like the clear and present danger that it is.

Under what other lethal threat to not just the US's but to civilization itself, would we just stand by and do nothing? Would we do that if al Queda where in control of US politicians and a significant swath of the voting electorate?

The consequences for some events are so bad their eventuality has the power to re-write the rules of engagement, or more precisely, cause society to invoke and apply the existing rules of engagement in a manner which, while legal most people naturally find odious. But the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and it does provide the President - and by implication the direct action of the national security apparatus to its full effect under the Presidents' command - with the power to defend the nation against all enemies foreign and domestic.

Denierism is domestic terrorism in both intent- conspiracy:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/294714-1

and in effect-

http://global-warning.org/main/intelligence/

hundreds of millions dead and starving, billions homeless and wandering across borders, international chaos and lawlessness orders of magnitude larger than we have now, civil strife tending toward national disintegration and economic collapse.

It is an imminent threat to the national security of the United States of America and I call on the President of the United States to take ALL necessary measures to counter, undermine, disable, disband and otherwise stop the collective action of this group of American domestic terrorists using whatsoever force he deems necessary.... and may god have mercy on their souls.

That whole "santorum" google bomb thing certainly will endear his supporters to the left's various gay rights positions...

If you were either honest or informed about the subject you will know that "prostitution" and "sex slavery" are synonymous to these organizations.

Uhhh... no. They're not. But thanks for the ad hominem anyway.

You're making yourself look like a fool. International Justice Mission (the people that Google are working with) is a faith-based religious organization whom, it turns out "rescues" people who don't want to be rescued.

I could go on, but I would obviously be wasting my time. When I observe that people aren't being honest, this is NOT an ad hominem attack, it is merely an observation. The way you argue by contradicting reminds me of talking to Pudge, which is just a waste of time. As a professional journalist you should be ashamed.

For the people who wish to be more informed, I will leave some more references below to further verify my points:

References:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2003/11/thailands-brothel-busters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Justice_Mission

Don't worry with http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/america-getting-domestic-indefinite-military-detention-thanksgiving on the way its all good

The $16 muffins story is nonsense.

I never said anything about racism. Though it's easy to see what's racist about the fetishes for Cain on the one hand (by only 25% of Republicans) and Jindal (who, in Louisiana, is "not Black or Mexican", which is all that counts there - where I lived for several years).

What the post to which I replied said was not "maybe we don't know all there is to know about climate change". That's a statement with which I, and practically all climatologists, to say nothing of just reasonable people, agree. It's you "Conservatives" who say "we don't want to know any more". Like this week, as Rick Perry's Texas government censored the official climate change report because it published data showing Galveston Bay's sealevel is already rising and damaging Texas.

Your "racism" straw man is yet more proof of the savage illogic of the "Conservative" mind. Forcing yourselves into the government and political decisionmaking to interfere with actually running the country whenever possible. Creating the anarchy vacuum into which corporate power shoves itself.

Thanks for strutting. Now let's have another demonstration.

We don't protest the success of the top 1% richest people, we protest the inequality in the division of rewards of success.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

AC, read this http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants
Its the old skill set of "preemption," "prevention," and "disruption"
A massive informant network (rakers) spots "a" lone wolf and an undercover operative is sent in to see what can be done.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/ap-documents-expansion-of-nypd-into-domestic-cia/
The operative will propose a plot, provide explosives and then solve the crime :)