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Wow, you have really drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid, haven't you? Have you looked at the national debt lately?

US national debt rises $2 trillion under Trump in just 2 years.

> [Citation Needed]

Basically Everything Trump Said About the Economy Was a Lie
President Trump’s repeated claim: 'The greatest economy in the history of our country'
Trump’s Tax Cuts: The Rich Get Richer

> Recessions are a thing of the past now.

It's far more likely that our current policies will eventually lead to complete economic collapse, but party on.

Pfft. Chinese donations go to Democrats (along with their spies, apparently) so they're the Good Guys.

Its funny you post this in support of the supplement industry who more than pharmaceutical companies fund & lobby politicians to maintain their ability to peddle snake oil with no evidence of efficacy. On the other hand actual medicine is subject to rigorous testing to both ensure safety and efficacy.

If you want to complain about the pharmaceutical you should be complaining about the trend lately for predatory pricing and massive price increases.

The pharmaceutical industry is guilty on all counts. But that's off-topic for this discussion, which is the pharmaceutical industry's stranglehold on advertiser-supported media.

But since you went there, let's point out that it's so disingenuous of you to claim that I'm supporting the supplement industry (I did not), that they lobby more than pharmaceutical companies (laughably wrong), AND defend the pharmaceutical company's supposedly "rigorous testing" that I can only conclude you are employed by or shilling for those pharmaceutical companies.

Pharmaceutical contributions VS. Supplement manufacturers. Also, Drug lobby second to NONE

As far as that "rigorous testing"? Yea, it turns out, pharmaceutical companies are fond of only publishing clinical trials that have positive results, while failing to publish trials that show no efficacy or bad side-effects.

"They" never asked for government's protection of the monopoly.

Sure man, and this book was never written.

Your beloved FDR forced it upon "them".

With what, a time machine, to go back in time and force AT&T's monopoly into existence? Anti-trust action against AT&T began while FDR was still Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Sorry man, some of us have access to more history than your preferred narrative. We don't all get textbooks from the DOC.

Unfortunately, that process is slow and remains reversible — thanks to government.

It's not my local government's fault that AT&T stopped them from building high speed internet. No wait, it's not. At least blame STATE and FEDERAL government, not local.

Sorry mi, as usual, your moronic argumentation is falsehood-ridden, and easily exposed as a fraud. I guess the only thing I can say is...thank you for being a troll.

No, it isn't. You are flat out lying.

Here is an earlier article from the EFF that was carried on Slashdot titled More Than 40 ISPs Across the Country Tell Chairman Pai to NOT Repeal Network Neutrality

Here's one showing who is really supporting the repeal of net neutrality -- with the bulk of all lobbying money ($572 million) being spent by just four companies: AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

The simple truth is the big telecom companies want to have the benefits of common carrier legal protection, without the limitations. They ALREADY have the rights, and abilities, to provide quality of service based on type of traffic. There is NOTHING stopping them from prioritizing VoIP traffic over e-mail because of the real-time nature of the service.

That is what they try and claim they can't do, but that isn't what they really want.

What they want is the ability to shape traffic based on DESTINATION. That is, Comcast will prioritize *THEIR* VoIP traffic but not competitors, like Vonage, unless they pay a premium for it.

That immediately sets up a protection-like racket where major ISPs can force non-ISP content providers to pay extra or their traffic gets degraded.

They've already tried to do this with Netflix and Vonage, to name a couple.

Net neutrality requires that any QoS or throttling that is done for bandwidth management be done UNIFORMLY, and not selectively.

What the hell, more links just because it is so easy:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21376597/ns/technology_and_science-internet/t/comcast-blocks-some-internet-traffic/

https://www.wired.com/2014/05/google-fiber-netflix/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-improve-its-streaming-1393175346

https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/28/5662580/netflix-signs-traffic-deal-with-verizon

How about Comcast astroturfing the FCC with bot-generated comments attacking net neutrality?

Comcast injecting packets to slow or disable traffic? Sure!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast#Net_neutrality

Hey, how about Municipal Broadband? Guess who opposes it tooth-and-nail even in areas they have no presence in? That's right, the Big ISPs.

Net Neutrality is by far and away in the best interests of both consumers and small ISPs.

So where do these ISPs hope to get a return on the ''investment'' in lobbying ? Answer: charging their customers more to access certain services; or having some services pay to get fast access to their customers. Either way this will not be to the advantage of those who the ISPs provide a connection to the Internet.

Oh, and they take action against competition.

Registration tampering has been a standard tactic for decades. Sometimes they hide behind a facade- like Voter ID.
  Sometimes they don't even try, like the "felon purge" across several key swing states in 2000 and 2004 where the GOP had control. They ordered their staffers to purge the voter registration rolls of ex-felons in states that ex felons have the right to vote. Worse, they purged people in their state who had felonies from other states which cannot prevent you the right to vote in another state. A state can only withhold the vote from someone that committed a felony IN THAT STATE.
And in Colorado and Florida they purged anyone who had a name like someone with a felony somewhere- so if John Smith had a felony in PA, they purged ALL John Smiths registered in their state. (Though after the fact they determined that somehow this only happened to black-sounding names. John Smith was safe, but David Brown was not.) Colorado lost over 190,000 eligible registered voters by that method alone. Democrat voter turnout was unusually low those two election cycles. Maybe coincidence, maybe not.

And it is still happening today, though some checks have been put in place to slow the damage.
https://www.publicintegrity.or...

The worse part of the whole mess was the complete indifference of the people.

Obama did to right.

The Obama administration regularly faked the visitor's logs, by editing out anyone they didn't want to admit was meeting with the President or White House staff. Or just not bothering to record hundreds of guests. Or by recording the names of people that didn't actually show up, but were cleared to do so. Or by holding meetings 'off site' so they wouldn't show up in the logs.

In other words, the Obama Administration's policy was to distribute flat out falsehoods, rather than transparency. Hiding everything isn't better, but don't dare pretend "Obama did it right".

Responsible management, union regulations, and OSHA largely make that impossible in the United States.

Even more bullshit detected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Georgia_sugar_refinery_explosion https://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/05/29/8957/unchecked-dust-explosions-kill-injure-hundreds-workers

That tells me that Democrats are having a much harder time selling their message than Republicans. Maybe they need to re-think their message?

There are more interesting depths to plumb here as well. Trump won spending only $285 million. If that wasn't reality it would be pure crazy talk. That's a 1995 presidential campaign budget.

Hillary spent $609 million. The bulk of that was large donors; banks, IT companies and other corporate interests. Hillary took full advantage of the state of campaign finance post Citizen's United.

It is the best example in a long list of good examples that our recently obviated campaign finance laws are pointless. When you're dealing with pairs of establishment candidates campaign financing might be significant around the margins, but who really cares? All your going to get is more establishment regardless of the outcome. When you're dealing with an outsider, however, and that outsider has any appeal at all, they can overcome very large finance deficits just fine.

This article indicates that Clinton almost invariably spent less than Sanders on TV ads: https://www.publicintegrity.or... isn't the only form of spending, but it is a big one.

It is worth reminding people that Clinton won the popular vote by several million votes. The popular vote total is here: http://www.realclearpolitics.c...!

I disagree with your belief that it is corrupt for an organisation to try to control who runs under its banner. The caucuses that Sanders did so well in are predicated on the belief that the engaged, core-members of the party should be able to decide what the party does; the superdelegates that Sanders urged to switch votes are based on the same premise.

Clinton won the popular vote and the superdelegate (elite vote) and therefore won the nomination. Now if Sanders had convinced the superdelegates to switch to him, and thereby overruled the popular vote, you may have a case that Sanders victory was illegitimate.

However, if this happened, I would not hesitate to "reward" Sanders in the general election because many of my policy preferences jibe with Sanders' and because Trump is—as the lady said—deplorable.

I had a look at your link. I guess you didn't want people to do that, hence you didn't (or can't) make it an actual link with an anchor tag. But yeah. I looked at your link and you're lying.

For anyone who cares, this is the list of donors.

Better source, including examples of deaths due to inaccurate cell-phone 911 location:

http://www.publicintegrity.org...

Doesn't always work that way

Smart people are doing a very good job weighing the various interests in networking and putting together compromises that meet most of them. Those dinosaurs are doing a very good job of providing tremendous bandwidth at low cost to 99% of America's 130m households.

Did you pull that 99% figure out of your ass? Here are those "smart people" at work:

http://www.publicintegrity.org...

Nobody is lining up to give poor people professional baseball teams, or choice executive positions at energy companies. Nor does a poor working stiff who just finished a hard day of running pipes or installing drywall open his motel door in the middle of the night to see women looking to have sex with him.

So is opportunity just getting what you want?? Or is it having a specific income level??

It's not being willfully obtuse as to how this country, and capitalism in general, actually works.

That threads not as slender as you think it is:

http://www.publicintegrity.org...

Supports: Conservative candidates

Location: Washington, D.C.

Founded: April 10, 2012

Website: americancommitment.org

Social media: Facebook page, Twitter profile, YouTube channel

Finances: Not available

IRS Form 990 filing: Not available

Principals:

Phil Kerpen (president, founder): Kerpen is the former policy and legislative strategist at Americans for Prosperity and previously worked at Club for Growth. He is chairman of the Internet Freedom Coalition and a Fox News opinion columnist.
Profile:

American Commitment was founded in April 2012 by former Americans for Prosperity strategist Phil Kerpen. The group’s website says it is dedicated to individual freedom, limited government and economic growth. It has generally supported Republican candidates running for federal office.

Americans for Prosperity is known as a Koch-brothers-backed, politically active nonprofit, but Kerpen denies American Commitment is linked to Americans for Prosperity. When asked by the Washington Post if billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch were funding American Commitment, Kerpen would not answer, saying only that he takes the privacy of all American Commitment donors very seriously.

In mid-July, Kerpen said the nonprofit had raised $7 million. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, American Commitment is not legally required to publicly disclose its donors. But the Center for Responsive Politics discovered that the group had received a $1.6 million grant in 2011 for "general support" from another nonprofit, the Arizona-based Center to Protect Patient Rights.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, American Commitment spent nearly $2 million on ads that expressly advocated for the election or defeat of federal candidates in the 2012 election. That includes $1.4 million spent in Arizona's U.S. Senate race on ads supporting Republican Jeff Flake or opposing Democrat Richard Carmona.

Many of American Commitment’s ads have avoided federal disclosure because they do not explicitly advocate for or against a candidate, and because the ads aired more than 30 days before a primary or 60 days before the general election.

For instance, between June 28 and July 10, American Commitment aired seven different television ads in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and North Dakota, all opposing Democratic candidates. Another series of ads opposed the farm bill and its food stamp provisions criticizing three House Republicans: Steve King of Iowa, Frank Lucas of Okahoma and Vicky Hartzler of Missouri.

The group also made large ad buys over the summer in Florida, where it spent $1.1 million opposing Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, according to the Orlando Sentinel, and in Ohio, where it spent $1.2 million opposing Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, according to the Washington Post.

American Commitment also runs NoMandateTax.com, which opposes the Affordable Care Act, KeystoneXLNow.com, which supports the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, and WarOnCoal.com, which opposes President Barack Obama’s efforts to decrease hazardous emissions from coal-fired plants.

They also operate ALECpetition.com, which urges people to “reject anti-ALEC bullying.” The American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, is a partially Koch-backed, unofficial lobbying outfit that is run by mostly Republican state lawmakers and corporations that work together to write and promote “model legislation” that often makes it into the nation’s statehouses.

ALEC’s tax-exempt status has come under scrutiny for having written some of the most contentious legislation in the country, including voter ID bills, anti-union bills and stand-your-ground gun rights bills. The Center for Public Integrity has been tracking AL

Actually solyndra looked solid to both public and private investors.

We can actually look at the evidence.

From that story are a number of cited warning signs: mediocre bond ratings, higher manufacturing costs than its competitors, bad reports from their auditor (who cited problems going back well before the Solyndra loan was finalized), and canceling their IPO.

As for the conspiracy theories: no. Wasn't a handout. Wasn't a payoff. Those are long debunked myths.

It was just awfully convenient funding for all the parties involved - except the public. Coincidences happen all the time.

I thought that was an interesting question!

http://www.publicintegrity.org...

The Center for Public Integrity found compensation for leaders of the 10 largest unions ranged from $173,000 at the United Auto Workers to $618,000 at the Laborersâ(TM) International Union of North America and almost $480,000 for the president of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees. The latter is the target of GOP governors in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Kansas.

Wowsers! $618,000 dollars a year!!!

---

Productivity improvements via robotics and automation are destroying jobs quickly now--- and the pace is increasing. As you would suspect, these industries do not employ nearly as many people as they replace.

The only solution I can see is to lower the "full time" work week AND to stop abuse of the "exempt" status. Unless a person founded/owns the business or directly manages at least three other people who they make hiring/firing/promotion/salary decisions for- they should not be classified as "exempt" and any work they do over 45 hours a week should qualify for overtime. Any work past 55 hours a week should qualify for double time.

The 40 hour work week and overtime was created to tighten up employment in the first time. Lowering the work week and removing the abuse of the "exempt" status is a logical next step.

Because within 25 year- if you don't, you are looking at a minimum of 20% unemployment- even if you have a degree with good grades.

Out of a statistically valid sample size of 23% of seized weapons in Mexico over half (and as many as 87%) came from America alone.

Less (but still many) filter through to South America. You're right others come from Africa (the Russian, Israeli and Balkans weapons tend to pass through Africa as their transit point) but that's also exactly what I said and they're the ones that are much easier to stop with concerted international effort. There's little point even wasting time with that though when there's such a hassle free source from the north.

There's a reason that the likes of the NRA and gun companies have such a massive amount of power in the US - they're major businesses, massive global exporters of arms. Even many of the AK variants come through the US so it's a mistake just to assume that it's a Russian origin design that the US is excluded from the picture:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2011/02/03/2158/romanian-weapons-modified-us-become-scourge-mexican-drug-war

Raising children well can take about as much time as most adults can put into it. Our US society is currently suffering for too much parental time put into work and then other distractions. and not enough time spent with kids. The same goes for the effort reuired to maintain social relations with freidns and neighbors. That is historically way most human adults spent most of their time -- raising kids and being social. For reference on a hunter/gatherer lifestyle:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

I readily agree that people need a sense of "agency" -- that they are accomplishing things to make their life better. But whether that needs to be withing a structured system of economics we call "work" entailing bosses and customers and "wage slavery" is a different question (even if most of us practically have few other short-term alternatives to work).
http://www.whywork.org/

Related to you point, many people like playing a hunter/gatherer in an abundant Minecraft world a lot. Yet, maybe part of that is indeed because of the abundance and the possibilities? Yet, in US society, many people are arbitrarily shut out from all the abundance. This kind of stuff (or the need for it) is just wrong in such a wealthy society:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2009/08/07/6958/appalachian-fairgrounds-charity-tries-fill-gaps-health-care
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/22/demographic-shift-puts-american-dream-out-reach/

If "welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency", then:
A. Why do rich people tend to give their children lots of expensive things including Ivy League educations, good cars, condos, trust funds, and so on?
B. Would you turn down a million dollar cash gift?
C. Do monthly "Social Security" payments to any citizen in the USA over age 65 cause enormous distress to the elderly?

If you think about these three questions, you may find a missing piece of the puzzle of a picture of the future.

However, your point about the cost of living going down is indeed true and needs to be kept in mind. On the other hand, decreasing costs also generally implies less money going to fewer people. But the marketplace only "hears" the needs of those with cash. If you have zero money, then you can't afford a place to sleep or put your stuff. And further, automation tends to concentrate wealth (at least initially).
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

Productivity has doubled or triples over the last few decades in the USA, but real wages for most workers have remained flat (granted, health insurance benefits have increased, but it is not clear people are that much healthier for that). That is a political issue about fairness as well as power.

I'd agree humans want interaction with other humans (generally), but whether that is best in the context of payments (as opposed to gifts or family and friend interactions) is another question. For example, I prefer to have my wife cut my hair than to go to a barber or hair salon.

Another thing to consider is that perhaps all humans have some claim on some of the fruits of the commons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

BTW, on NYC homeless:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/28/131028fa_fact_frazier?currentPage=all

It sounds there like the "means testing" and uncertainty and constant changes create much

~ newly freed pervs ~

Not all SOs are perverts.

Take a leak in an alley when you're 15? You can get on the list.

Get a little drunk at a football game your freshman year and decide to streak across the field? You can get on the list.

When folks like the Koch brothers are found to directly affect local politics across the entire nation, donating millions to sway election decisions, it becomes simple fact rather than fear.

Fear itself is not a bad thing, but Irrational fear is. Frightened people are easily controlled. Although your argument might appear to put my statement in the same class, it only appears that way. For example, death panels were widely used to scare people when health care reform was begin drafted. The simple facts are quite different with specific text preventing the fed from denying any type of medical care or 'rationing'. This would be an irrational fear. In my statement, I indicated that big money is pulling the strings. The fact that these political organizations must often disclose their donors, and those donors happen to be folks like the Koch brothers, puts the statement into fact, rather than irrational fear.

http://philanthropy.com/article/Koch-Brothers-Influence/140227/

Their donations are public record. They spend millions to sway elections towards business friendly politicians. They aren't the only ones. Does this follow the same category that implied the president was friendly towards the 9/11 Terrorists that killed thousands of Americans, that Death Panels would be used to let the Fed decide who lives and who dies, etc. The above fear mongering had no basis in fact. Even worse, it was peddled by both news outlets, and directly from the mouths of representatives of the government itself. Pailin and her anti-immunization rant is a good example of fear based rhetoric with no basis in fact.

The following examples are reports, obtained from public disclosures of donations by various political groups, some loosely defined 'charities', etc.

http://www.lung.org/associations/states/california/for-the-media/inthenews/study-tobacco-money.html
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/05/01/12591/gun-lobbys-money-and-power-still-holds-sway-over-congress
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/11/local/la-me-special-interests-20100712

Are they in the same category?

1). Any *blueprint* was never any further away than

1) FOAF network analysis
2) a signal splitter
3) the power to force your nation's providers to cooperate
4) a data warehouse
5) analysts.
6)??????
7) profit !

I *really* don't think many nations needed the U.S. to tell them that.

So the *blueprint* point is totally false- the NSA did not provide a much needed but missing blueprint to anyone for any purpose

2) What nefarious thing has the NSA or US government ever done with this knowledge? Name one thing. As I see it, the US with all this data collection and the apparent restraint *to do nothing* with it, makes the US a provably good steward of the internet, almost better than we could have hoped for, given men and their nature.

I totally agree a despotic regime could emerge and would leverage this database in the process. I actually actively fear a Cheney or a Gonzales or a Rumsfeld or a Pipes or a Wolfowitz getting a hold of this kind of power.

That's why it's very important - VERY IMPORTANT- for the presumed demographic of slashdot to vote. b We're what keep the REAL fascists at bay.

I also think we need a provable, physical way (encryption / partial keys held by a number of judges? dunno..) to prevent the kind of leveraging of the chain of command that would permit neocons from gaining access to this database in the dark and use it against his political enemies

(I'll link to the specific thing the neocons did that has me so concerned at the bottom of this post)

Without the chain of command, we're fucked; it is a totally necessary part of any military.. But the chain of command + read/write access to this database means the power to potentially destroy who you want, in any way you want, for any reason you want and to distort reality itself to the intelligence community in any way you want. This represents a non-trivial, even existential and decidedly non-theoretical threat to our nation.

\http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B

and for those familiar with it, go to Criticisms section .

Cheney literally re-assembled Team-B in the run up to the Iraq war. scroll to: " team b sweeps the series "

http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/JPubs/TeamBqjs.pdf

That's why we also need to go easy on Snowden and Manning. Here's my reasoning, it's pretty simple - they're young and idealistic and didn't mean to harm America - and that matters.
Not that many people can know or can get their minds around the full,ugly picture of all the trade-offs that reality forces on you. Those tradeoffs are analyzed, decided upon, get institutionalized, and finally become structural, procedural.

Later, some regular guy working in the system looks at the fleshy details of what those trade-offs entail, and it appears callous and horrifying. They're just going to react out of a surfeit of humanity.

Do we really want to punish those people to the hilt and over time , through word of mouth reputation, actually prevent people of good conscience from joining up ? Read Antigone- it's no way to run a nation.

Obama's Executive Order is a good start.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/10/15/11473/obama-order-protects-intelligence-community-whistleblowers

Republican hate it but there has has has to be some place they can go "out" of a system they think is breaking the law and into the light, because that's the psychology that's motivating them to do this in the first place. "They're doing this in the dark. " No one knows what's going on" Holy shit!".

IMHO the military has to publicly differentiate between acts of espionage and acts like these and gauge its public and prosecutorial reaction accordingly. What is reality telling you? This is how people are now. This goes to the core of what this generation is. Even the military has to chan

What laws have the Kochs demonstrably violated?

Trading with Iran.

For starters, and there's more if you look.

They should be swinging from lampposts right next to the one Bloomberg is swinging from, maybe across from the ones Jamie Dimon and Don Blankenship are strung up from.

The main problems will be really fat crows and running out of lamp posts.

Actually you pay my doctor.

Green is new the buzzword for hiding payments to political allies.

http://dev.publicintegrity.org/2011/10/20/7152/energys-risky-1-billion-bet-two-politically-connected-electric-car-builders

As in, Fisker is connect to an Al Gore group and Tesla is connected to Google leaders who are major fund raisers for ......

So just like Solyndra, none of this was about viability, this was all about who is connected to whom, follow the money. It is nothing more than politics as usual

The Obama administration's web sites for promoting transparency in government were around $34 Million just to keep them running.

You are right, but some of the money goes to Halliburton and one has to wonder why..

Government dollars are for difficult projects that improve our lives, like trillion dollar wars, multi million dollar arms sales to future enemies we'll fight in trillion dollar wars, and so forth.

Easy things like cancer research that carry zero benefit for the population at large should be privately owned forever by unaccountable tyrannies. Not only do we spend billions of dollars on erectile dysfunction research and marketing instead of cancer, but the drug companies also get to spend two to four times more money for marketing than research, which results in lots of awesome TV commercials.

It's a win-win!

I'm sorry, I haven't seen any "incontrovertible facts" indicating that Bush said things that he knew at the time to be false.

Then you simply haven't looked.

No reasonable person could look at that assertion and consider you to be anything but a left-wing nutjob.

Bin Laden: ~3000 innocent civilians killed for political purposes
Bush: 50,000-500,000 innocent civilians killed for political purposes

How partisan do you have to be to be unable to see which one is worse?

Two failed wars, a terrorist attack, the failure to capture, prosecute and imprison most of the culprits involved (far more were in the planning than were on the planes), Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo Bay, USA-PATRIOT Act, yeah, he did such a FINE JOB THERE BUDDY, NO ONE WILL EVER LOOK BACK AND CALL THAT PRESIDENT A BUFFOON, NOSIRREEBOB! /sarcasm

For your reading pleasure, http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/broken_government/articles/full_list/

Recommended to me by several of the 98% of historians who view Bush's presidency as a complete and utter failure.

The black market will always exist to exploit differences in taxation policy between national and international markets. But that is not an acknowledgement that the $100 tax would have failed - taxes are only meant to manage externalities in the legitimate market, because obviously the black market doesn't pay taxes. In this case, if every person switched supply source to the black market, then consumption in the legitimate market would indeed have fallen as expected. Taxes regulate the legal market, law enforcement regulates the illegal market. As I said, the argument isn't really about "sin taxes", it's about who pays for the externalities.

The cigarette import scams, the largest being Montenegro's cigarette smuggling trade run by the legitimate government to finance the nation, cost the EU hundreds of millions of Euros every year in lost taxes. However, if the cigarettes had been taxed at manufacture source, rather than being marked for export and therefore 0% tax, the scam wouldn't have been possible.

You could argue that in this case, the black market would begin to grow it's own tobacco in illegal farming operations akin to cannabis cultivation now. That would only happen if the tax were substantially higher than the associated costs of running illegal tobacco farms - even with the high taxes on cigarettes in EU nations, there are no illegal farming operations - so far this has only happened when the product is completely prohibited like cannabis. There are also high taxes on distilled alcohol, and yet there are no illegal distilleries operating on a commercial basis. The legitimate market, even with the inefficiency of tax, is more economically viable than the black market. Obviously there is a point where this would no longer be true, but we are not at that point yet (indeed, alcohol by measures of affordability has actually become many times cheaper over the last few decades).

Of those listed, I'm a little familiar with the Center for Public Integrity, and find their research leans toward facts rather than opinions and meaningless left-right distinctions. Check it out for yourself though, skim through the topics and if you're open minded could even read an article. If you have already internalized certain core values, you'll look at the list and say it's leftist propaganda. It's funny though, since your post makes use of a rhetorical trick ("25 people to blame"), you're probably not much interested in deeply analyzing and critiquing propaganda no matter what its source.

If you let the Power Line company lobbyists influence the FCC through gifts, meals, and post-FCC jobs, you're going to have problems: http://projects.publicintegrity.org/telecom/report.aspx?aid=62.

They OWN the state regulators and will almost certainly end up owning the FCC with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats running Congress.

Except telecoms and cablecos give both parties a lot. Phone companies gave politicians "more than $6 million (63 percent to Republicans)".

Falcon

maybe I'm looking in the wrong places :)

Try these:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/

http://www.propublica.org/

hey c'mon, that's not fair...

everyone knows Deborah Tate gets at least some of her talking points from Clear Channel.

Tate (Clear Channel) on the XM/Sirius merger:

Such a gross ownership disparity creates such a lopsided competitive advantage for a single company that it utterly distorts the marketplace.

Tate (Clear Channel) on expanding their network of more than 1200 terrestrial radio stations:

the FCC should be focusing its attention on how to ensure the continued vitality of free radio by moving forward on its review of reasonable relaxation of the local ownership rules.

Translation:
satellite radio monopoly = bad!
terrestrial radio monopoly = good!

Iraq may have been involved with 9/11, though maybe not.

Well, the bipartisan 9/11 commission said, "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." [emphasis mine] And in case you think that was just politicized or the analysis incompetent, the Washington Post reported, "In testimony before the commission, CIA and FBI officials said they agreed with the staff report's assessment of the abortive relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. A CIA counterterrorism analyst who testified using the pseudonym Ted Davis said, 'We're in full agreement with the staff statement,' which he said did 'an excellent job' of representing the agency's current understanding of the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship." Finally, even President Bush has said, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks." So, essentially, the President, Congress, the CIA, and the FBI don't think there was a connection.

They were tied to the '93 WTC attack

Again, the experts disagree. As one article puts it, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack."

the '95 OKC attack

Given McVeigh's ideology, this doesn't even make much sense. Also, remember, he fought against the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Again, the investigation into the attack did not turn up such a link, and the only claims I can find for such a link are right in the run up to the most recent Iraq War (and not particularly credible).

But somehow, Clinton looks like a saint and Bush made it all up.

Saint BJ? Leaving aside irrelevant comparisons to Clinton, the fact is that the Bush administration made many false and misleading statements about Iraq in the run up to war. People who want to deny that try to focus on the question of whether Iraq was a threat, but that is not what they lied about. Many governments believed there was some level of threat from Iraq, but the lies from the Bush administration came in the details and the claimed level of certainty. They presented tenuous or already discredited (within the intelligence community) claims as solid. They had reason to believe some things based upon circumstantial evidence, but in describing them they used phrases like "no doubt," which you can find in the transcripts of interviews with multiple administration officials. Given that few outside the administration had access to classified intelligence, and only the administration had the ability to release (declassify) information, there was very little way for anyone to expose these falsehoods. All the false and misleading statements are way too numerous to list, but thankfully someone has gone to the trouble to catalog them.

When a public servant is in that position of power and trust and something as important as going to war is on the line, we the people must demand honesty and cannot tolerate that sort of deception. You can have a different opinion about th

Saddam wanted Iran to think he still had WMDs for his own security. No credible person disputes that. No matter how many times you retards repeat it,

So, Saddam was able to simply lie about WMDs and cause the US to waste hundreds of billions of dollars as a result?
He may have lost the battle, but damn! did he win that war.

George W. Bush never blamed 9/11 on Iraq.

O'really? Perhaps you are right. He never outright blamed 9/11 on Iraq, but he sure as shit intimated it on a frequent basis, making at least 28 false statements about Iraq's links to al qaeda. But at least he has plausible deniability - it wasn't his fault the public heard "al qaeda" and thought "9/11" no, no, no, no!

The risk of Iraq engaging in a terrorist attack was very real and the scale could have been huge with state sponsorship.

Eh? Just where the hell did you get that from? Because it sure as shit don't follow from anything else ya said.

They won't listen. Remember that these are the hardcore 30% that keep approving of Bush's job. Even though he and his administration have been lying and distorting the truth for some time now. They won't read the links that show his illegal activities such as unprecedented overturning of the EPA.

These same people would vote for Bush again. With all the evidence out there, it makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Hmm, another person who didn't read the link. Bush discarded the information given to him by the intelligence community and made up his own. Here's that link again: 935. I can't help you if you're not willing to read it.

Being in the miority during those years might ahve ahd something to do with it, as well as trusting what the Bush Administration had said about WMDs.

At that time, it wasn't unreasonable to believe the Bush Administration. Of course, now that we know they were wrong, they should be tried and convicted of treason.

There, made it true for ya and removed the political rhetoric.

Other simulated reporters were duped into spreading "believable but misleading" information that confused the public and financial markets, according to the government's documents.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both.

Nice to know that they were simulating a plausible scenario...

Other simulated reporters were duped into spreading "believable but misleading" information that confused the public and financial markets, according to the government's documents.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both.

Nice to know that they were simulating a plausible scenario...

The poster's may not have been verbatim charges against Monsanto, but read here, here, here, here, here and here. And if that's not enough, add this and this.

Let's not forget Terminator Seeds, Agent Orange and Bovine Growth Hormone. Sure, it could all be hyperbolic, paranoid, general left-wing nutiness, but I think there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.

First- sorry they modded you as troll.

Second- while I agree corporations have basically bought our government. I disagree that it is not about classism.

http://www.mediamouse.org/briefs/061604new_2.php

The wealth of Senators reflects both the Senate's long tradition as a body of elite members of society as well as growing inequality in the United States, especially between those who hold power and those who do not. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the income gap is the widest it has been in 75 years.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/13/senators .finances/

These "top 40" were worth, collectively, $626 million.

Many senators are worth MORE than the Hilton's who are famous for being wealthy.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=190
Overall, the average net worth of the top 100 members of the Bush administration was somewhere between $3.7 million and nearly $12 million.

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/taxonomy/term/54 7?page=1
Based on just the minimums the members reported, the Center for Responsive Politics calculated that the average House member had a net worth of $2.4 million.

House members had a median net worth of $385,000. (a fairer number since there are a few extremely wealthy congressmen).
---

Our government is now staffed by the wealthy and run for the wealthy. The laws they pass are expectedly passed to benefit people like themselves. There have been numerous anecdotal stories showing how completely out of touch they are with difficulties and troubles of the typical citizen.

So Microsoft http://publicintegrity.org/lobby/profile.aspx?act= clients&year=2003&cl=L002186 and Apple http://publicintegrity.org/lobby/profile.aspx?act= clients&year=2003&cl=L000538 have some of the bigger IT lobbying efforts around, and FCC bureaucrats don't know the difference between their ass and 2 holes in the ground.
What is the news ?

So Microsoft http://publicintegrity.org/lobby/profile.aspx?act= clients&year=2003&cl=L002186 and Apple http://publicintegrity.org/lobby/profile.aspx?act= clients&year=2003&cl=L000538 have some of the bigger IT lobbying efforts around, and FCC bureaucrats don't know the difference between their ass and 2 holes in the ground.
What is the news ?

A lot of replies are jumping on the line in the summary that says "the FCC thinks giving the CPI the data will give a competitive advantage to the other broadband companies." But of course the linked article didn't say that; it said "the agency has refused to turn it over on the grounds that it could give a competitive advantage to other companies." Which is still a bit of a stretch from what the FCC actually said in their response.

They did cite exemption rule 4 as others have posted.

I'm not defending the FCC, by any means, but let's not be misled by a Slashdot summary that might not quite be correct.