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Your example was an amazingly accurate rendition of how the Democratic party steals elections.

The bottom line is that both parties will do anything they can to either get or stay in power. It's shameful on both sides. Anyone claiming that cheating is only occurring on one side or the other is a partisan hack.

(similar to how anyone that claims their party is 100% moral while the other is 0% moral is a partisan hack)

Payola is nothing new. Anyone who is surprised that this is going on was just unaware that the practice has been around as long as radio.

My big question is this ... when is New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer running for a bigger office? He seems to have a knack for getting headlines with high profile cases that get everyone all fired up.

From http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/w ire/sns-ap-clinton-2006,0,1068438.story?coll=sns-a p-nation-headlines
the poll showed state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer continuing to hold a double-digit lead over the three-term governor in a possible matchup for the 2006 gubernatorial campaign.

Just get Opera. For years (as in, since their Windows 3.1 days) they've supported a zoom feature that enlarges text, graphics, and even Flash animations. They also support CSS-based modifications that, with one or two mouse clicks, render a site easily readable by anyone with bad eyes, no tolerance for Comic Sans, and/or people who disagree with the decision to render a page in 7-point grey-on-white text.

Firefox and its army of extension developers will eventually re-implement Opera, but in the meantime the real thing is much better.

Of note, even her husband (the cause of all of this) says that she was not under cover or covert at the time her (rather well-known) identity was observed by reporters and mentioned to Rove. This whole thing is being squawked about (by political opponents) as if exactly the opposite of what really happened happened. And, of course, where were these people when someone like Clinton's former cabinet member and handyman Sandy Berger was stuffing classified documents in his socks while that team was trying to spin the discovery process under way as the 9/11 commission looked into why Al Qeada had such operational latitude in the years prior to the attacks. Point is, all of this "Rove should be fired" stuff is just silly, and so plainly partisan (they hate him - he's very good at his job) that it's rather embarassaing, actually.

And yes - you're right about the huge number of people that spend their days in northern Virginia and elsewhere, doing the most mundane things imaginable. Hell, they don't even get paid all that well.

You have zero creditability talking about "Talking Points" while linking to a site that is named "Talking Points" to refute it. Thanks for playing though!

(BTW, Rove did not know she was undercover. He got the name from Novak: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050715/D8BBQEVO0 .html), Also She was not undercover: http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050715-121257- 9887r.htm and was making no effort to keep her job secret:
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/s ns-ap-cia-leak-rove,0,4798469,print.story?coll=nyc -nationhome-headlines

My point being, the summary is misleading in that it implies Valerie Plame was an undercover agent at the time of her "outing." Her husband, when pressed (cuz it's kinda dopey to complain about bureaucrats being outed...) admits as much.

Relevant quote from article:
Wilson also said "my wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity."

No Spy, No Crime. (Another of those niggling details the press forgets amidst the excitement of their pitchfork-sharpening and torch-lighting...)

Awww...too bad Newsday - a local paper with local reporters disagrees. Heck - I even have an article from before they figured out it was a hijackers ID.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/wtc/ ny-nymain172369721sep17,0,7772460.story

And thats not to mention the 9/11 Commission - whose official report confirms this. But don't worry about it - its a lot easier to have a conspiracy theory when you don't let FACTS get in the way.

Don't you think the press would have a field day if he'd stopped? Asked after the speech whether he would take the subway to City Hall like Bloomberg if elected mayor, the Upper East Side resident hesitated.

In fact, he got stuck last year.

DEAD WRONG!
METRO'S MTA ERROR

The New York edition of Metro was off-track with a story it published yesterday about New York City Transit's plans to launch a computerized system to control subway trains on the L-line. "The story, especially as it was presented in Metro, was inaccurate," NYCT Vice President Paul Fleuranges told amNewYork. "It made it seem like the communications-based train control system was ready to run, but we haven't even started testing."

Fleuranges took issue with Metro's headline: "Robotrains ready to roll; Upgraded, computer-operated L trains take to the MTA's rails this month."

"It won't be this month," Fleuranges said. "It might not even be next month. It could be June before we start running in shadow mode." Metro was the only citywide daily in New York to run the fallacious story in its print edition.

- Overall crime decreased 5.8% in all five boroughs, while the national average drop was 0.5%

- Most of the crime reduction came from a huge decrease in property crimes, such as auto thefts; violent crime was down by 6.9% in NYC, compared to a 6.5% decrease in cities over 9 million, while NYC's property crime decreased 5.4%, with other 9M+ cities experiencing just a 1% drop.

- NYC's police force is the largest (37,000 members) and has the most cops per capita (one officer per every 215 residents), at a cost of $5 billion a year.

This might turn out to be a great show. But really, there's already a glut of legal shows on television (The Practice, Judging Amy, JAG, etc.), and using a gimmick like setting it in the future won't attract me to it.

Is there any chance it will offer a decent treatment of the issues Open Source advocates worry about today? If he's so positive, could he possibly know anything about software patents to say nothing of SCO?

Don't expect it to even come close to issues important to us nerds.

There's just something lacking in a show that focuses on such riveting legal issues as "should a player with a super-accurate bionic eye be allowed to play professional baseball?" Really, this is an actual plot line that will be in "Century City."

The guy was drunk, damnit!

(SCNR)

The article quotes the statistic of New York City's murder rate at 2500 per eight million residents per year. I don't know how old those "stats" are, but they must be way damn outdated, because current stats are about a quarter of that.

Twisting Skyscraper to Replace NY's WTC

"The entire project, with a memorial to the 2,752 victims at its center, was estimated to cost up to $12 billion over the next decade, officials said. It also includes six other office buildings and a transportation hub to be designed by renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava."

I bet this will wind up costing $50-100 billion, if not more, before it is over, and all sorts of false "patriotism" and "sending a message" and "empathy" will be used to hide blatant corruption and favoritism. I find this whole sham "memorial" project to be thoroughly disgusting.

Here is the start of the corruption and favoritism - The Port Authority will occupy 1/3 of the building!

WTC Tower Design Unveiled

WTF! why does some government bureacracy rate the most expensive and fancy location in NYC?

Not so fast! Tokens were discontinued for subway rides earlier this year, and all forms of cash payments (read: coins) are to be discontinued for bus rides soon.
This, unfortunately, leaves the MetroCard as the only available option. (And aside from the privacy issues, there's the issue of not being able to board a bus without buying a MetroCard at a _subway_ stop. How logical is that?)

StocDred says, "Heck, our founding fathers couldn't even fathom the high-powered, super-accurate, full-automatic weapons of today

This is exactly to the point. They held weapons of equal power to the government. Today private citizens with, say, shoulder launched stinger missles would be insane. (Don't like your business competition? Shoot the company plane down.) This is a far cry from a dueling pistol.

The scope of weapon power has increased to the point where armed overthrow of the government is a joke (there is a great AC post about this above) - but that is exactly what the founders intended.

They specifically state that to be the only reason the right to bear arms is protected. That gone, we should not have that right, so sayeth the founders.

We have decided to keep the weapons, anyhow. We have the highest murder rate in the world (per person). Go figure.

The number of weapons in the US is staggering. Any plan to significantly reduce the ammount of weapons (beyond, say, buy back programs which are effective, yet limited) would be herculean in scope. Yet even modest proposals are rejected.

Right now Republicans are tyring to push through a bill to destroy all the "Brady bill" data within 72 hours. (Brady bill info: the info you must give to buy a gun outside of a gun show, in the US, at the moment. Given for a background check to ensure you are not mentally ill or have felony convictions). This at a time national security is at it's highest (arguably) since the end of the second world war.

This illustrates how ingraned the "right to bear arms" is in America. Even though it is totally tangential to the intent of the founders, and apparently extremely detremental to the public, the current right to run out and buy a gun (say, a hand gun, easily concealed) will remain unfettered for the forseable future.

Violent video games, on the other hand, are in serious danger of being banned. See, for example, this.

Simple, logical yet tough solutions exist and are not implemented. Example:

Jonny accidentally shoots Jimmy with Jonny's Dad's gun, Jonny's Dad's should be lookin at multiple years in prison. Still wanna have a gun? Sure, go ahead just be certain your kids can't get it, or if they can that it isn't loaded and they can't load it.

Sounds reasonable, sounds not too hard, buy a master lock, lets say.

Yet every year about 4000 children die from gunfire, and about 20,000 are injured in the USA. See thisfor an example with citations. And of those 20,000, about 4,000 are accidental injuries.

Okay, so people try to lock up guns and keep them away from children, but about 4,000 times per year it doesn't work. Still want to risk jail time for owning a gun? It would be your call. Remember, you kid is a kid for a long time (the statistics use 20 years but let's say 15) so during that time interval 60,000 kids will get shot accidentally with guns and (assuming few repeats) that is loads of families effected, perhaps about 1% overall. Statistically, you kid is about 10 times more likely to get shot if you own a gun than if not. I'm sure you can see where this leads. But like I said, be my guest but my kids aren't going to be playing with your kids (at your house) if you keep guns in the house, and I know about it.

Amazing how the Republicans who, nominally, favor personal responsibility cannot inact a law punishing parents for gross neglegence in keeping firearms away from their kids.

And, of course, the Democrats who propose stronger and stronger gun control laws find those efforts thwarted.

I personally don't care which road you follow. Pick one. Follow both. I don't care. Both parties have, at least nominally, some solution to this.

During the

Looks like the headline-grabbers like Pataki and Bloomberg, amongst others, now have little to say about their quick denouncements of Canada for the whole power mess. Interesting that this is the same reaction pattern for the current Canadian internet pharmacy spat, where FDA commissioners are now publicly alleging Canadian drugs to be unsafe. Is 'mouth off first and ask questions later' now an official US political strategy?

Mirror just in case that server (which seems piddly) gets /.'ed...

But didn't Piddly just raise $2M for good causes?

Oh wait, different charity...

Some snippets from the articles (the judge's last quote, which I put in bold, is especially amusing):

"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," Chin said. "This is an easy case. The case is wholly without merit both factually and legally." He added, "Parody is a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment. The keystone to parody is imitation. Mr. Franken is clearly mocking Fox."

"Is it really likely someone is going to be confused as to whether Fox News or Bill O'Reilly is endorsing this book?" the judge asked.

Fox's lawyer, Dori Ann Hanswirth, responded, "It is likely consumers could believe that." She added, "There's no real message that this is a book of humor or political satire. It's a deadly serious cover and it's using the Fox News trademark."

Presumably, Hanswirth said all of this with a straight face. I wasn't in the room, however, so I'm not sure if she pulled it off.

Chin seemed to find Fox News' case irritating. "There is no likelihood of confusion. It is highly unlikely consumers are going to be misled into believing that Fox or O'Reilly are sponsors" of the book. "I don't know if Fox is arguing that its consumers are less sophisticated than people who would buy the book.", he added dryly.