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I'm not sure how you can claim Obama is such a leftie. He sure wasn't "left" on FISA, or abortion

O RLY?

In 2001, B. Hussein Obama argued against (and voted "present" on) a bill before the Illinois state senate that would have banned the practice of some abortion mills of leaving the occasional survivors to die instead of providing proper medical care for them. Three months later, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously in favor of a nearly-identical bill...even such pro-abortion forces as Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer voted for this common-sense, humane measure.

At a Planned Parenthood event about a year ago, B. Hussein Obama promised the crowd that one of the first things he would do if elected is roll back the few restrictions on abortion that we have. Partial-birth abortion? The practice that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) denounced as indistinguishable from infanticide would be relegalized. Informed consent? Laws whose only aim is a truly informed choice would be stricken from the books. Parental notification? Let's say that the punk down the street gets your daughter pregnant and then slips her a few hundred bucks for an abortion. If B. Hussein Obama had his way, the laws that would keep you informed about your kid's medical care would be wiped away.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who are "pro-abortion." Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter is a far cry from jumping for joy each time a poor girl in a terrible situation walks into a clinic.

Well in general, it's not different than classifying people who are anti-abortion as being anti-choice or against women's rights in general. That said, in the more narrow cases, I find partial birth abortions and the practice of allowing failed abortion, live-born babies to just die so horrific and inhumane that I don't think it unfair at all to classify someone in favor of those as pro-abortion. I get the slippery slope argument but there is a bright damn line and once a child is outside of the womb & born, it's clearly infanticide.

Is there any way we can look through a telescope from Earth and see the flag on the moon?

Well, our esteemed Houston (Democrat) Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee suggested that the Mars Pathfinder could do that for us.

But I guess then they'd claim Pathfinder was fake.

So that you have a chance to hear more than one side of the issue:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjNjYTNjMTVkNmVhMmYxN2JkMWZhMzYzMGNjNzY4ZDE=

Since no serious intellectual exclusively considers one side of an issue or debate. I strongly recommend reading Andrew McCarthy's excellent NRO article: Getting FISA Wrong ... Again. McCarthy, a long time critic of FISA law, takes issue with Chief Judge Walker's recent conclusion. Here's a small teaser:

It is on this score that Chief Judge Walker's opinion is weakest. He is very long on demonstrating the obvious, undeniable and unremarkable: In FISA, Congress intended to remove all residual presidential authority to conduct electronic surveillance outside statutory restrictions. The judge is woefully short, though, on the only issue that really matters: whether, regardless of their intentions, our lawmakers had the power to do that.

From his republican values Washington derived his abhorrence of kingship, even for himself. The writer Garry Wills called him "a virtuoso of resignations." He gave up power not once but twice - at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon, and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington.

Give the last word to Washington's great adversary, King George III. The king asked his American painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence. West replied, "They say he will return to his farm."

"If he does that," the incredulous monarch said, "he will be the greatest man in the world."

The posting headline is misleading: the article author has written a book attempting to debunk global warming. This is not a scientific consensus, but one man pushing a contrary position. Check it out, and make your own evaluation:

The Deniers

Lawrence Solomon is author of a new book from the new Richard Vigilante Books. The book is The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud *And those who are too fearful to do so. And that about tells you everything you need to know. In The Deniers, Solomon focuses on profiling the scientists Al Gore conveniently doesn't engage. In the run-up to the hottest holiday of the year, Earth Day, he took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.

Foot in mouth?

You mean like these?

...seem to be based on green power and big unions. Nothing to do with capitalism...

So it's the image that would be illegal as well as the act.

It is already the case that images, rather than abuse, are the target. (See also here.) This apparently would just add "as a federal crime!" and "on the Internet!" to the business model of locking people in cages for having unclean thoughts.

Man hating feminists have Sweden fairly well sewn up. Men bought into the radical feminist line there and they have paid for it. Now Swedish men are scapegoated for all manner of ills and, in many ways, it's too late for them to object to their treatment now. If I lived there I would leave as soon as I was able. The whole country will likely be under sharia law within my lifetime anyway, so there's no sense I can see in any self respecting man sticking around in a country like that. Who would want to live in a country where teachers force little boys to wear dresses at school:

http://www.estatevaults.com/bol/archives/2007/05/31/when_boys_are_f.html

Or what man would want to live in a country where major politicians believe that all men should be forced to pay a man tax due to the presumption that all men are guilty in some way for the crimes of every other man:

http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200602220826.asp

This is what hard core radfems are really all about. They preach equality when they're in front of an audience but, deep down, they hate men and want men to live in a subordinated way - if at all.

Anecdotes don't beat data. The Harvard study was flawed. It may be that 50% are medical triggered, but if your debts for medical expenses are vastly swamped by other debts, you can't rightly claim medical expenses are the cause. Only 27% of bankruptcies had unpaid medical expenses exceeding $1000, and only 28.3% self identified as medically caused. It sounds like your case in particular was medically caused, but that is an exception, not the rule.

"Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value.

Wrong on all counts, but the 1st Amendment does provide protections for free speech not available in many other countries, so I hope we see this particular instance of tort abuse smacked down hard.

BTW - trackers still have it on PirateBay and elsewhere in hi-def.

http://www.nationalreview.com/document/document073001.shtml

Anytime a Judge uses the words "most amateurish pleadings", "bumbling", or "a pig is still a pig" to describe the efforts of the attorneys, it's going to be a bad day for someone. Or in this case, both someones.

"Now, alas, the Court must return to grownup land." - priceless! We need more people as judges with a biting sense of humor (and the nerve to use it liberally!) like this!

-- Ravensfire

[Barack Obama said], "many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed."

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts.

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States ... for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens.

Does he really believe this? If so, he's crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. ... Senator Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by "reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDs." But maybe he wouldn't have to quite so much "reaching out" to do and maybe there wouldn't be quite so many black Americans "suffering from HIV/AIDs" if the likes of Wright weren't peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.

Nonetheless, last week, Barack Obama told America: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

What is the plain meaning of that sentence? That the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the established cultural discourse in African-American life and thus must command our respect?

[Obama] promoted a false equivalence. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother," he continued. ... She does then, in her own flawed way, represent a post-racial America. But what of her equivalent (as Obama's speech had it)? Is Jeremiah Wright a "typical black person"? One would hope not.

The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank -- for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth? It is Barack Obama's choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment -- to claim that, given America's history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright's generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn't that -- what's the word? -- racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.

Original op-ed here:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjExNzMwYzMyMjk0MDY4YzlhOTIwM2YzYWYzNGIyNjU=

Yay America!

BTW, it's funny because it's real.

The idea of a Lessig run gets some love on the National Review Online.

"Diplomatic visas"?

No, just ordinary nonimmigrant visas, for example an "F-1 student visa" for Hani Hanjoor.

"Background checks"?

No background checks needed - just the consular officers doing their jobs, like actually reading the forms.

"Clinton Administration"?

Well, in the technical sense that all state department employees are part of the administration, but if you have any proof that the applications got to Washington I'd like to hear it.

When I think of the blood I've sweated filling out those fucking forms it pisses me off (and been refused once, having to explain to some stupid consular officer that although I did lurve the USA I didn't actually want to live there).

"There's a reason we separate military and the police: one fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people.
When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
-Commander Adama
  Battlestar Galactica
"Water" (Season 1, Episode 2)

Google, so easy anyone can do it!

Search terms: clinton economics

Clinton Economics

Enjoy.

My content from the financial perspective of DRM.. and pretty much why they're done for.

___
What alternatives do we have?

Our body of law gives rights to the creators and their protected ability of being the one to approve copies. Regardless of whether we agree or now with this, that is our situation.

Now, we take this to the "digital domain". Those older creators want, no.. need these protections as they see in the non-internet world. The only real way to "guarantee" this is by digital restrictions. The best way I think of this is that of a akin to a capability system and the copyright maintainer has an account on your machine.

However, our machines are ours. The geeks amongst us demand that we are able to control our software and hardware. What was unable to do in WinXP, Vista seems to offer the beginning of that capability system with the media companies at the kill switch. And to top it off, Vista has remotely disabling drivers for "holes" that might appear. For those that own a machine, this OS laughs in their face, as if saying "Bring It On!"

And there are many casualties. Those casualties are the Joe and Jane Publics that don't understand this issue close enough, or think that all needs to be done is burn to DVD... just like the iPod to music. When they find out that they are locked with binary garbage that cannot be used for any fair use purpose (backing up owned DVDs is fair usage).

And where are we now? When the users know they are eventually shafted, those that have the know-how will show others where to download the movies and the music they legitimately bought. Once they know they were taken advantage of, any feeling of "theft" (or whatever you call it) will be gone. The media companies had their chance to do their dealings with the public honestly, but have failed.

Just like língchí.. Death by a thousand cuts.

From K5

And just to expand on that, the media guys had their chance to do honest dealings with the public and the artists. They instead thought they could continue on with their little game. They simply cant.

As a last comment, ill give the link and the quote of the starting of the nasty fall of the media empire...

This past week's issue of The Economist has a heart-rending vignette from one of the most ruthlessly capitalist industries on the planet: "In 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. "That was the moment we realized the game was completely up," an EMI exec told the magazine.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWU5ZDk3NGY3OGI4NDY1OTdmNzc2NmEzYjUzZWQxNWE=

The story of Galileo is a tad more complicated than the simplistic version we're used to. I'm no Roman Catholic, but this meme needs to be corrected.

You're right that these people exist, but they're not the same thing as neo-conservatives.

Neo-conservatives are a different breed of right-winger. They typically believe in some flavor of what's been called "National Greatness Conservatism" -- the idea that Americans need a Great Crusade against something (anything, really) to drive them away from petty everyday concerns and towards Big Accomplishments.

Many of the "founding fathers" of neo-conservatism were actually liberals who fell away from that ideology in the 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by what they felt was American liberals' tepid opposition to communism, and found a home in the militant anti-Communist branch of the right wing. The Cold War became their organizing frame, and when Communism disappeared, they decried the nation's turn away from foreign policy, arguing that there were new Great Crusades we should be undertaking instead. They spent the 1990s trying to convince the Clinton Administration to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, for example, without success.

When 9/11 came, they found one they could run with; and since many neocons had risen by then to positions of leadership in the Bush Administration, they successfully pitched a "war on terrorism" as the new cause for National Greatness. The Iraq project that had been their hobby-horse for a decade was taken out of storage and repackaged as "the central front of the war on terror". And the rest is history.

Neo-conservatism has nothing to do with fundamentalist Christianity; in conversation neocons will typically talk down about the fundamentalist wing of their party, seeing them as rubes and hicks. Conversely, fundamentalists feel that the neocons' obsession with foreign policy leads them to ignore domestic social issues that are core to the fundamentalist agenda, like limiting abortion.

The fundamentalists do exist, and they are still strong (watch Mike Huckabee -- a former preacher who has absolutely nothing to say about foreign policy -- in the upcoming primaries if you don't believe me), but they're not the same thing as the neocons. The closest thing to a neocon candidate in 2008 is probably John McCain, who flirted with identifying himself as a "national greatness conservatism" in the past, and who shares their strong foreign policy orientation.

Having anonymous unelected judges meeting in secret, passing secret rulings that rewrite foreign-intelligence law is scary. Congress should have never removed responsibility from our elected representatives by creating FISA. Somehow I don't think that's what the OP had in mind though.

End the Stealth Government

I wouldn't stand by and acquiesce to illegal activities, why should they be allowed to, irrespective of who asked?

Maybe because it isn't illegal? A warrant isn't required for everything done by law enforcement.

Did you really just cite

Reuters
and the Associated Press
as
examples
of
accuracy
in reporting?

Wow, just wow.

presidential elections are a state matter

Rove successfully manipulated public opinion, yes, but he did so with innuendo, lies, and manipulation.

As if the other side never does that? Please.

I take offense at wanting to count votes that blatantly violate election law.

It wasn't "Gore's team", it was "one person on Gore's team".

I would not put it past the current justice dept...

I wouldn't put it past any government sufficiently large enough (in terms of both revenue and power over the people) to do such a thing. History shows that where power exists, it will be used. (I hate to say "abused" because in my belief, the very notion of power itself is abuse.)

The US government has been the most expensive government for quite some time, and obviously the most powerful, with military bases in some 150 countries around the world. Would I be surprised to discover even more corruption on top of the mountains of corruption which already exist? Not in the slightest.

Logically, the more government, the more corruption.

Someone please respond to this post with a verifiable example of a terrorist action that was stopped by using provisions of the Patriot act.

I had heard before that the Patriot Act had more to do with inter-agency cooperation than with anything else, but I don't know how to verify that short of reading the law myself.

Speaking of which, can someone please post a link to an example of an American locked up using Patriot Act provisions? I'm not talking about abuses like the one in the OP, but lockups.

Richard Armitrage should't go to prison though, because he said this.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lesk ly052803.asp
That same month one year after the 9/11 attacks Deputy Secretary Armitage made it clear that this mandate would govern U.S. policy towards Hezbollah: "They have a blood debt to us and ... we're not going to forget it. They're on the list, their time will come."

Best. Threat. Evar.

We wont desparage Italians. How can we when there are Italian heros like Fabrizio Quattrocchi? The Italians may be many things; but they aren't cowards. Even in WWII Italian food remained popular and was never renamed. The "Freedom Fries" is due to the perfidy and cowardice of the French.

Are you having fun? You only left ONE link in the entire thread - "source-s"?
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel040403.as

What "incident"? All I asked you to do was prove that the Littleton Lockheed-Martin plant only produced satellites and/or satellite-launching rockets, thus backing your statement: Michael Moore claimed that a military communications satellite is a fucking weapon of mass destruction. " Have you yet? No. Can I ask the question in any simpler way? No. Put up, or stop wasting our time.

http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel040403.as p

Can you imagine CNN reporting thus: "Today President Bush attempted to link Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein - this is a lie aimed at persuading Americans to support a war for oil/strategic dominance/etc."?

Yes, I can imagine that, because that "Bush lied" about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda is the dominant media meme.

Can you imagine that the whatever links exist between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein was not an invention of President Bush?

"In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."

-U.S. Indictment of Osama Bin Laden, 1998

"National-security adviser Sandy Berger suggested that the U.S. send just one U-2 flight, but the report says Clarke worried that even then, Pakistan's intelligence service would warn bin Laden that the U.S. was preparing for a bombing campaign. "Armed with that knowledge, old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad," Byron Clarke wrote in a February 11, 1999 e-mail to Berger. The report says that another National Security Council staffer also warned that 'Saddam Hussein wanted bin Laden in Baghdad.'"

-"Boogie to Baghdad"

"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers."

-CNN, February 13 1999

And since the title of this thread is "An important debating point," here's a summary for both sides:

http://qando.net/archives/003279.htm

I believe what he's getting at is that you're full of it.

He's welcome to his judgment on that.

You've taken a position that you seem unwilling to defend

I've defended it in kind. He says "it's illegal". I say he's wrong. He offers no arguments but says "it's illegal" again. I could offer some arguments, but it would take some effort. Why should I put forth the effort if he won't?

"No it isn't" is a perfectly adequate retort to "yes it is". They are of equal substance.

Here's a substantive argument: Warrantless searches were legal in the Aldrich Ames case.

See the difference? It cites historical precedent.

(Clearly I'm winning the argument now. If only everyone had access to a search engine, they could make substantive arguments too. I'm sure everyone is convinced and has changed their mind. What a fruitful discussion this is. Let's continue until agreement reaches 100%.)

Without a valid warrant, the search is illegal.

Except in the cases when it isn't. See the Aldrich Ames case for examples of warrantless searches.

Article

While this will be slightly off-topic, I'll attempt to reply to this post.

Haliburton has been receiving no-bid contracts for some time now, even during the Clinton administration.
The reason for these was fairly simple: they had the most amount of resources available to get on the job quickly, and they were (arguably) among the most experienced in the field.
This has been mentioned a number of times, but you can read more details about it here (yes, it's the National Review, but this is just one of the places where you will find this information).

However, you will notice that back during the Clinton administration, there was (relatively) less scrutiny of the administration, specifically because of the (apparent) media bias.
You cannot deny that with the exception of the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton was (and to some extent, still is) the media's darling. Very rarely you would hear a report that was very critical of the Clinton administration, and even today, I don't recall anything nearly as bad as what some of the things that have been on CNN/NBC/CBS/etc about Bush.

Nowadays, everyone in the mainstream media venues seems to have an ax to grind with the administration (except for Fox News, which is as right-wing as they probably come), so you will see a lot more reports sensationalizing things which have literally been taking place for well over a decade.

I think maybe you forgot a quote. One that really tells us what this is about.

French President Jacques Chirac and saluting Kyoto as a "genuine instrument of global governance,"

I orginialy saw it here

My suspicion is that you would want to detonate the bomb some distance above the asteroid; the heat would cause the surface of the asteroid to vaporize, and the gas jetted from the surface would shove the asteroid off course.

Empty space varies as R-cubed, and the spherical effects tend to degrade as 1 over R-squared.

It doesn't take much of an R to make that asteroid look like a tiny, insignificant needle in the vast, overwhelming haystack of empty space.

Cf Derbyshire's critique of Whedon & the "nest of Reavers".

Sure, space is exciting and romantic, but it's a bloody enormous waste of money.

Sure, space is exciting and romantic, but it's a bloody enormous waste of money.

people like you trolling a debate they know nothing about would make me ashamed to be an American (if I was one). Here's a hint: this story is talking about adult stem cells, which has no significance at all in regard to the current political/moral question of embryonic stem cells.

Actually, they are completely relevant to the moral/political question of embryonic stem cells, in so far as embryonic stem cell opponents have been using these adult stem cells to have their cake and eat it too.

Specifically, they've been tying the hands of researchers due to their religious beliefs and then shielding themselves from criticism by claiming "oh, we don't need embryonic cells anyway, because adult stem cells are just as good." Here is one example.

I grew up in San Francisco, but attended college in Alabama. As you might imagine, it took some time to get used to the degree of conservatism in the south east.

That's right children, it's always the conservatives who want censorship, and leftists who respect freedom of speech.

Keep people from realizing the tyranny inherent to both of the dominant ideologies, and soon everyone will be upstanding citizens.

Brazil's ethanol conversion occurred over a period of decades as its authoritarian government nationalized energy companies, mandated ethanol-fueled cars, banned diesel fuel -- and provided a staggering $1.20 per gallon government tax subsidy.

Just because "you can sue anyone anytime", that doesn't mean your lawsuit will last more than thirty seconds in the courtroom. If you're a big enough loon, a judge may even (in theory) make a sua sponte summary motion to dismiss with prejudce, grant it, and let you find an appelate judge to irritate. (In practice, they almost always just look favorably on any vaguely plausible motion to dismiss the defense makes... hoping opposing counsel is any more coherent.)

Additionally, you are not only a troll, but one too lazy to even find a vaguely logical YRO post to specifically link.

A more useful summary of the Hamdi saga can be found at:

Hamdi to be sent to Saudi Arabia, renouncing US citizenship

Hamdi Returned to Saudi Arabia

A discussion of the Hamdi ruling: Harmful Rulings - Enemy combatants and an irresponsible Court.

As for lawyers and national security: Sheik's U.S. Lawyer Convicted Of Aiding Terrorist Activity .

Actually, it appears to be conservatives who are most upset about this. http://slashdot.org/~mdsolar/journal/160016, posted more than two hours prior to the parent, links to a National Review article on the subject. I'll relink here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDUxMzM5NmNiM jFkMThhMjgzZjhmMDkyZGVmYzBhZjk