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Goldman Sachs alumni also found at World Bank and IMF, as well as at least ten people in the Obama Administration (probably even more than that).

GS doesn't have a statistically impossible earnings record with HFT because they are smart, it's called cheating..cheating...cheating....what they have always excelled at. Didn't anyone read Matt Taibbi's outstanding article in the Rolling Stone mag the other month? Geez, they have their hardware positioned exactly right to make a killing -- no brains involved -- plus they own all the frigging exchanges (via a series of holding companies, 'natch). You others here, catch a clue, doods....

PayPal, Comcast, Microsoft, Verizon, and the U.S. government are merging to be the meanest company ever.

You'll be charged to kill Iraqis even though you can't find Iraq on the map. Everything the merged company will do will have some element of dishonesty and abuse.

The EULA will say that you agree to be attacked by mosquitos.

Your money will become increasingly worthless, using a technique called The Great American Bubble Machine.

Good artists borrow; great artists steal. It's cliched because it's the absolute truth.

What a load of garbage. Do us all a favor, if you will. Please cite a few examples of where the following great artists stole:

Picasso
Shakespeare
Monet
Beethoven
Da Vinci
Michaelangelo

etc etc

You can, of course, sue to get your Tasty Monies...Hope your ego can hold up to that notion.

What is your problem? I'm sorry if it bothers you that there are artists who would like to be able to derive some sort of income from creating and sharing music. Perhaps it's some jealousy on your part, perhaps your father was a musician who paid more attention to his instrument than you, or perhaps you're just a jerk...who knows? Your argument just doesn't hold up at all, and furthermore, its arrogance is quite astounding. You seem to feel that you (or others) has some inherent 'right' to do whatever the heck they want with anyone else's work. I would ask that you apply this same formula to what you do for your income and see what you think about it. Imagine someone gets to put your hours on their timecard and get paid for them as well as you (meanwhile you were the one who did the work). Wouldn't feel too good would it?

Trent Reznor wasn't cool with Johnny Cash performing Hurt. Doesn't matter now, does it?

You are mistaken. Seems Trent was fine with it, and more importantly he was asked first. That's the point that you, and a lot of others, tend to miss. This isn't about trying to stick it to anyone, and it isn't about trying to hit the lottery for one song. It's about not allowing others to decide what will or won't be done with something I've created. I resent the implication that my efforts should benefit someone else unless I agree to the terms.

By some measures, the U.S. government is the most corrupt in the world. For example, this Rolling Stone article about the extreme financial corruption in the U.S.: The Great American Bubble Machine. (The full article is in the paper edition, available at any library.)

The U.S. government spends more money on surveillance and war than any country in the history of the world. That taxpayer money partly helps those who want corruption to profit, and hurts U.S. taxpayers, and the entire world. For just one example, see the book, House of Bush, House of Saud.

The U.S. government has invaded or bombed 25 countries since the 2nd world war. Most or all of the interference was for profit. Quote: '... although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites'. The dictators pay the corrupters. In Iraq, those who control the U.S. government want control over the oil, and don't care how many people they kill. In Afghanistan, the corrupters want to build an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a port where the oil can be delivered.

The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its people in prison than any country ever in the history of the world, over 6 times higher than in Europe, for example. Wikipedia quote: Approximately one in every 18 men in the United States is behind bars or being monitored.

U.S. citizens don't want to believe that their government is as corrupt as it is, even though the recent financial corruption has made many of them poor.

Will the corrupters of the U.S. get control of Canada, too?

By some measures, the U.S. government is the most corrupt in the world. For example, this Rolling Stone article: The Great American Bubble Machine. (The full article is in the paper edition, available at any library.)

The U.S. government spends more money on surveillance and war than any country in the history of the world. That taxpayer money partly helps those who want corruption to profit, and hurts U.S. taxpayers, and the entire world. For just one example, see the book: House of Bush, House of Saud

The U.S. government has invaded or bombed 25 countries since the 2nd world war. Most or all of the interference was for profit. Quote: '... although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites' The dictators pay the corrupters. In Iraq, the U.S. government wanted control over the oil, and didn't care how many people it killed. In Afghanistan, the corrupters want to build an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a port where the oil can be delivered.

The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its people in prison than any country ever in the history of the world, over 6 times higher than in Europe, for example. Wikipedia quote: Approximately one in every 18 men in the United States is behind bars or being monitored.

U.S. citizens don't want to believe that their government is as corrupt as it is, even though the recent financial corruption has made many of them poor.

If the corrupters have success in Canada, they will only want more. The problem is MUCH bigger than most people think.

"Meanwhile, Sony is feeling the pain as well; the company sold 500,000 fewer PS3 consoles than in the previous quarter, and PSP sales saw an even bigger drop. Interestingly, Sony also revealed that the manufacturing cost of the PS3 has now dropped 70% since it was released."

That's just weird. I suppose that everyone who wants a PS3 has bought one. Similarly, I notice Ford has not sold many Model T cars recently.

Poor Sony, not selling as many, but making more money, because the cost has dropped to one-third.

Here's a similar story. Housing prices in the U.S. did not continue going up indefinitely. If they had, Goldman Sachs would have made more money.

"That is technological improvement, so there's no really any reason why technologically made or improved food would be more riskier."

Of course, the welfare and quality of life of the animals that make up our food is of no concern to you? Or the effect on the environment? Just that the food is not "risky" to your health?

I'm not a vegetarian, but frankly, the shit that we're doing to our animals to mass produce meat cheaply is disgusting.

And define "risky", because from here I'm sitting, there are a large number of direct and indirect risks we suffer thanks to mechanisation and industrialisation of our food supply. Environmental destruction, such as poisoning our water supply, the earth, and the air. Increased risks of diseases, too. IMO, things like swine flu are direct results of the mechanisation and industrialisation of our food process.

It is no coincidence that La Gloria (which is suspected of being ground zero for Swine Flu) just happened to have a huge hog farm operated by Granjas Carroll (50% owned by Smithfield Foods). Their hog operations generate lagoons of waste stuffed with antibiotics, ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates, heavy metals - all sorts of shit that isn't shit.

Slashdot won't let me C&P the URL properly, so combine it together: http://www.rollingstone.com/ /politics/story/12840743 /porks_dirty_secret_ the_nations_top_ hog_producer_is_ also_one_of_ americas_worst_polluters

"In North Carolina alone [Smithfield's lagoons of waste] have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act - the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of Smithfield's annual sales."

It's not just our meat, either. Chlorine being used to wash "ready to eat" foods? Growth hormones, antibiotics and all sorts of shit in milk? What about pesticides? Just recently saw a report that suggests the cocktail of pesticides could be behind Colony Collapse Disorder. Carcinogenic ingredients being added to food?

Again, IMO, the incidents of cancer that we're seeing these days are directly linked with what we're doing to our food supply.

Technology's a great thing, except when it gets in the hands of greedy, unethical bastards who couldn't give a shit except to their bottom line.

Yes, no questions were answered.

"high-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in profits last year"

Many of those trades took money from the guy who comes home at night and trades for his 401K. With every winner in the stock market, there is a loser, and it is big banks like Goldman Sachs that are usually winners.

I suspect that talking about "market liquidity" is just avoiding the issue: The U.S. financial system is corrupt.

Actually, in the American model, the taxes are a subsidy for Goldman Sachs.

The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

If you don't like cap and trade, then what would you suggest should replace it?

A direct CO2 tax.

There's no need for all this pussyfooting around with setting up an artificial market to please the everything-must-be-a-market fetishists -- and enable the corporations to collect the revenues instead of the people. It's all intended to be Goldman Sachs's next bubble, anyway.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print

There is a long article in Rolling Stone [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine] magazine this month, The Great American Bubble Machine, alleging that banks control the U.S. government and that Goldman Sachs is one of the leaders of the corruption. Anyone wanting to know more about how the financial corruption of the U.S. government is operated should read the article. The article alleges that Goldman Sachs will use any manipulation whatsoever to get money.

I've only skimmed the article and watched one video, but AFAIK the oil price was high for good reason--we'd finally reached the point where demand pushes the price up very steeply--because the Saudis literally couldn't get the stuff out of the ground fast enough. For 6-12 months before the crash in October there were repeated attempts by Bush Jr. to get the Saudis to increase output, and they claimed they really couldn't, but about 6 months before the crash they upped output by as much as they could, about 25%. All figures and dates are off the top of my head and probably wildly off, but the picture is roughly correct. We effectively hit an oil crisis 12 months before the meltdown.

The oil price lost 75% during the crash, and I believe that's because the Demand/Supply curve was so steep, when demand dropped during the economic meltdown, the Oil price dropped by an accelerated amount. I believe Matt Taibbi (RS writer) is trying to show that this drop was caused by GS going bankrupt and no longer being able to rip off the market. It is naive to believe that GS couldn't still game the market after they went bankrupt if they were before they went bankrupt.

I have no idea whether there are speculator limiting rules in the US and world commodity markets, and have no idea whether Goldman Sachs got around those limits quietly. The fact that oil went "through 27 stages of ownership" before going to the gas pump means nothing frankly. That ownership of oil is wrapped in a complex series of financial products doesn't change anything. His article probably goes on to show that that's how GS got around commodity trading rules, but...

I get the feeling that this is all conspiracy theory bullshit.

He also said that GS was making stacks of cash by "grossly overreporting the value of Tech stocks," malevolently tricking the investing public into handing over their cash for trash. It's well known that all Tech stock is overpriced, and for good reason, people are willing to take a bigger gamble on Tech stock, we're in the Tech Age after all. Again, I feel this is just bullshit.

Sorry for not RTFA fully, but the Rolling Stone article is off topic anyway.

There is a long article in Rolling Stone magazine this month, The Great American Bubble Machine, alleging that banks control the U.S. government and that Goldman Sachs is one of the leaders of the corruption. Anyone wanting to know more about how the financial corruption of the U.S. government is operated should read the article. The article alleges that Goldman Sachs will use any manipulation whatsoever to get money.

This Slashdot comment, The Investment Banking cohorts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are the **huge** winners, discusses some of the issues. The Slashdot comment links to the Rolling Stone article, but that copy of the article has been removed.

According to the Rolling Stone article, Goldman Sachs makes money mostly through corruption, not investment insight. Your tax money may be their profit: Goldman Sachs takes $12B Bailout, Hands out $14B Bonuses. (The article lists British pounds, the Digg article lists dollars.)

The corruption is not new. For example, see the May 13, 2002 article in Business Week, How Corrupt Is Wall Street? New revelations have investors baying for blood, and the scandal is widening Quote: "Consider Enron, which has paid $323 million to Wall Street in underwriting fees since 1986, according to Thomson. Goldman, Sachs & Co. (GS ) pocketed $69 million of that..." Enron, of course, went bankrupt when it was discovered the company was dishonest.

Beginning in 2002, Warren Buffett began very publicly calling derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction". That particular part of the corruption was caused by the removal of laws designed to prevent fraud, at the beginning of George W. Bush's first term. Nothing was done to reinstate the laws, and that's why we are suffering now. Why was nothing done? Numerous articles say the corruption was allowed to happen because Goldman Sachs people control the U.S. government's Federal Reserve Bank. To give a small indication of the level of corruption, the "Federal Reserve Bank" is not federal, there is nothing in reserve, and it is not a bank.

There is a pretty good expose up on Rolling Stone describing the nefarious behavior of Goldman Sachs. They are in general what you expect out of Wall Street types, greedy and unscrupulous but very good at what they do. Unfortunately what they are good at is creating devastation in their wake so they can take home multimillion dollar bonuses every year, and completely controlling our government so they can get away with it.

Based on the Rolling Stones article I was able to reverse engineer the core Goldman Sachs trading algorithm:

#include
int main( int argc, const char* argv[] )
{
pump();
dump();
}

The Jungle, published 1906. Boss Hog, published 2006. The meat industry is still grotesque.

Care to elaborate a bit on the world without IP laws? How will musicians, writers, movie studios, news organizations, software companies etc even approach covering the costs of producing their work if the first person who buys it can make infinite number of copies and share them with the whole world?

There are many models, but here's one: Consider that on a given $16 CD at Walmart, the artist is getting about $1.60. In a country without copyright, a CD price would be based on the cost to manufacture, advertise and sell a CD. Since anyone could do it, I can guarantee you it won't be $14.40/CD, probably more like a couple dollars. Implement a $1.60 sales tax on music sales that goes directly to the artist and you have $4 CDs where the artist gets funded and music is much more accessible. This model works even better with pharmaceuticals (patents). Of course there are lots of problems with taxation. Of course, this model *does not* make the majority of the population copyright criminals. That's a significant step right there.

> I used to think that all drugs were bad, and all that stuff.

Someone should of told the US Dept of Agriculture :)
"Hemp for Victory"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne9UF-pFhJY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jokV8xlJTNE

This rather an interesting anatomy on the whole failed drug war. Using peer pressure to stop gang violence in Section 7 is rather interesting...
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs/print

Read these two articles.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=8350
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743 (use the print view)
If you don't want to read them, the keyword is 'Smithfield Foods'.

No shit indeed!

That was my first thought, too.

Just as the majority seem to have an appetite for garbage television, and garbage music, they also have an appetite for garbage Youtube videos.

Yes, I'm being pompous, condescending and arrogant. Got a problem with it?

Garbage television? You mean this?

Garbage Music? Like this?

If so, then Yes! I do have an appetite for Garbage.

I think Colber[t] actually pronounces his name as ColberT in private. This is based on me catching him one time on air saying ColberT when there was no comic reason for him to do so.

Some Evidence suggests otherwise.

This Slashdot story was posted by a Slashdot editor who calls himself "Souls kill". The story was suggested to Slashdot by someone who calls himself "Head Dunce". A dunce is "a person regarded as stupid". (Please note, I'm not suggesting that the Slashdot editor "kills souls", he is suggesting that. I'm not calling the person who wrote the story a dunce, he is calling himself that.)

The Slashdot story links to an article in Forbes Magazine. Will Forbes and other "financial" publications continue to pretend to offer useful financial advice when they did NOTHING to stop the corruption of big U.S. banks taking on debt 20 to 60 times their assets?

The Forbes article was written by someone named "Ruthie".

The "takeover" talk appears to be completely fraud, in my opinion:

1) Citigroup is not thinking of buying Red Hat. Yes, the Slashdot story suggests that, but the stories to which Slashdot links don't suggest that.

2) Citigroup has been extraordinarily destructive; it helped cause the present job loss throughout the United States. The article implies that Citigroup has a lot of Red Hat stock and is trying to manipulate the price.

3) The Slashdot story links to a Reuters story that says, "Linux software maker Red Hat Inc (RHT.N) reported profit ahead of Street projections on Wednesday , helped by cost cuts and a stock buyback, sending shares up 8 percent." Someone is apparently manipulating the price of Red Hat stock, because "22 cents vs Street view 20 cents" is certainly not news that should cause people to value Red Hat stock so highly that the shares go up 8 per cent.

4) The Reuters story only says that some un-named people on "the Street" predicted something, and Red Hat did a tiny bit better. Remember that "the Street" is responsible for the present job loss throughout the United States. They are, in my opinion, vicious crooks, who stole from and are stealing from the taxpayers because corrupt politicians believe they are "too big to fail".

If you aren't a full time stock investor with plenty of inside information, you should not be buying stocks. Those with little experience just lost 40% of their money!

We deserve better leaders than "Souls kill", "Head Dunce", Forbes, Ruthie, Citigroup, "the Street", and politicians manipulated by those who don't know any better way to make money than by paying to corrupt their own government.

Surely, if the world's finance "experts" really understood economics, they wouldn't have positioned their companies for the collapses they recently saw. Or did AIG's best and brightest know they were setting their company up for catastrophe?

Rolling Stone had an article in the latest issue titled AIG: The Big Takeover. Here's a small excerpt from it.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history -- some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

It is truly an amazing article and the presents the clearest picture I've seen of how this came about. I suggest everyone read it.

>>(The truth about AIG and Congress.) http://www.foxnews..../

Hm, I think the "truth" according to Glenn Beck is missing a few chapters.

The truth is, we're far more deeply screwed than most people have realized yet.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/

Enjoy,

--jrd

From my POV, I really want C, and equally don't want A or B for various reasons (and I highly suspect most A or B voters feel almost the same but elect to hold their nose and pick A or B and then fall back on the "wishful thinking, this time will be different, lucy will really hold the football for charlie brown *this time*" theory, which seems rather pointless in this day and age given all the verifiable data that historical hindsight provides us now to look at)

  It matters naught to me which of A or B gets in, as either will pick my pocket and infringe on some liberty, and between them they pick both pockets and infringe all liberties over time, with the trends always headed towards more thievery and more liberty infringing. (current example, old admin, R, billionaire bailouts for corporate casino gamblers who stiffed each other and millions of innocent "investors" with total made up looney tunes alleged "products", now the new administration, D, the big change! billionaire bailouts for corporate casino gamblers. Both administrations packed with insider casino gamblers, put in charge of the real economy. There's no practical diff I can see.)

    Like I said, they, given their criminal priorities, have a facade of some big difference, which is on which pocket to start at, or which liberty to infringe on some list they have, but eventually they'll get around to all of them. So I'll stick with C (or D or E or...) and advocate other folks do the same.

Ya, it sucks rubber donkey dong, obviously dealing with the political soup nazi system we have (to keep with the restaurant analogy o_0 ), but my conscious is clear that I haven't voted for some cretin/political gang who will take not only my loot and freedom, but YOUR loot and freedom (and yours, and yours, and yours, and them folks over there, too), which is just as important to me. Certainly I have my priorities and issues, but chances are they aren't exactly the same as yours, but overall, if we don't look out for each others well being..well...there ya go, we don't. We sink. Buh bye, nice civilization while we had it.

      History books are all full of failed empires and civilizations, and they mostly croak from massive greed and the lust for power over other humans, the loss of looking out for your neighbor (even if you and he differ on any number of things), the ceasing of caring for the weaker and more innocent, having megalomaniacs as leaders and criminal gangs trying to pass as official government. Corruption, rot, decay..entropy rules I guess...

How bad is it, how bad can it get? Can't say other than since I have been politically aware and paying some attention (more or less a half century now) it has steadily gone downhill across all the fronts. Not steady, it has spikes of occasional and temporary outbreaks of common sense and honesty and fairness and justice, but it falls under that old saying one step forward, two steps back.

  IF we don't do things differently, and get back to the original idea of the individual is the sovereign and government is our employee and not our lord and master and trans national corporations are NOT the government NOR some unelected perpetual class of neo-royal aristocratic rulers (I thought we had that sorted out in the 1700s as a bad idea..) and only are made/kept legal when they follow our social contract of being of benefit to society (the other part of the original corporate charter idea besides "make profits" that the pirates and looters always have collective amnesia over)..then we are screwed. It could and probably will get fairly ugly, history teaches us that as well.

So my bottom line is..I won't vote for them fellers or that sort of system, it is binary for me, yes, no, there is no "maybe, if.." there that has any credible validity.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/5

AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

and so on.

The whole article is actually well written and is a informative read.

No. According to this article only 20% of the CDS contracts being written were actually insurance on securities one of the parties owned. i.e. buying fire insurance on your own house.

The other 80% were speculation on someone else's securities. i.e. buying fire insurance on Dresden, 1944. So it goes.

The Office of Thrift Supervision was supervising AIG. Sure you want to trust their model? http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print

There was a great article in Rolling Stone today that lays out exactly what has happened at AIG in terms most people can understand. It makes my blood boil!

This is part of the Gates Foundation's system of high-risk, high-reward research: take the smartest people you know, ask them to come up with crazy ideas, and see if any of them work. This one did. And though Lowell Wood gets credit for the initial idea, the laser scientists "...teamed with an entomologist with a Ph.D in mosquito behavior and other experts."

Lowell Wood is known for coming up with creative solutions to big problems - he might be a little crazy, but it's the kind of crazy we need to make sure we keep on trying new ideas.

Lars probably realized that the sound quality on his 'official' cd was crap, and he'd heard that the pirated version of the internet was of much better quality than they sold to their fans. http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2008/10/01/metallica-faces-criticism-over-sound-quality-of-death-magnetic/

It happened to Bush in his 2004 re-election campaign when he was asked by the "Orleans" to stop playing their 1976 hit "Still the One".

Robert F Kennedy, Jr

Here's news for you: sometimes weird investments pay off in radically unforeseeable ways. If you're the kind of jackass who dismissed the idea because we already had vacuum tubes, then you're the same kind who thinks modern R&D is a waste of money.

Yes, but the truth is, all that money that M$ has been spending HAS pretty much been a waste. Their search engine still sucks, their software interfaces are still "clicky" and often counter-intuitive, they do their best to hide many of their "innovations" (MS Bob, anyone?) and the results of their research are often simply laughable.

Say what you want to, but for some reason, all the money being spent is being spent on "innovations" with little potential to change much of anything, and are usually a half-baked extension of already obvious trends.

Seriously. Name *anything* that they've spent the big buxorz on that has been particularly revolutionary. This 10,000th patent is par for the course. A table that attaches data to objects placed on it. Wo0t!

As an investor myself, I don't mind paying for long-term investment, but this is just stupid. There's something basically lacking in this R&D culture. It's neither "pure" (think Bell Labs during the 70's) nor "product oriented" (think Apple, today) but rather a hideous mix somewhere in the middle.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who helped create Al-Qaeda while under Zbigniew Brzezinski in Carter's Administration. He was very much involved in the Iran-Contra affair. This was enough to stop him from being DCI in 1991, but now it's perfectly fine.

Attorney General Eric holder wrote a brief to the SCOTUS on the DC gun ban and said that there is no individual right to own gun. He was apart of the Clinton Administrations Justice Department when Clinton pardoned all of his cocaine trafficking buddies.

Rahm Emanuel is crazy, a duel citizen of Israel and the U.S. and while in charge of who to give money to in the 2006 election cycle decided to acitvely shun anti-war candidates.

That's just a start.

Their now elderly original fan base is dying off, and their work is not the sort that will excite many new fans.

So unexciting in fact that they aren't about to create a custom version of Rock Band around the Beetles.

Oh wait, they are.

I should have posted this the first time - the Dixie Chicks actually reaped great economic returns from that so-called "boycott"

Despite the controversy -- or perhaps because of it -- the Chicks continued to prove their commercial viability, selling almost six million copies of Home and mounting the top-grossing country tour of 2003. Now, as they prepare to reenter the spotlight, some speculate that the group might be poised to shun the industry that shunned them.
Rolling Stone

It would seem pretty strange for them to complain about a boycott hurting their careers when in fact they were the most successful act in Country that year, now wouldn't it?

I want electronic voting because I don't believe in humans to perform so many calculations accurately and without inputting their bias. As Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." Why is there so much trouble creating a reliable voting machine? There are much more complicated issues that computers and technology have solved, but we can't solve this one? Voting machines are unreliable and untrusted because the people who are making them are untrustworthy and partisan.

True: "I've always felt that the poor security and poor implementation on the voting machines is intentional to allow for the possibility of fraud..."

Articles and a free movie about the the unprecedented organized vote fraud:

Rolling Stone magazine has an article about vote stealing in 2008: Block the Vote: Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president? That article is also available as a PDF file.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law has another article: Voter Suppression Incidents 2008. A PDF is available.

See the free online movie Stealing America: Vote By Vote. The evidence presented in the movie shows that both of the previous presidential elections were stolen. The evidence is that the corrupters plan to steal the 2008 election, too. We will know in a few days.

Neither of the articles mentioned discusses how votes are stolen using computer fraud. Slashdot has run 17 stories in 2007 and 2008 about computer vote fraud and electronic voting, listed here in reverse order by date. Note that the evidence in the Slashdot stories also is that the last two presidential elections were stolen:

West Virginia Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes.
Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit
How To Spot E-Vote Tampering?
Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected
The Cost of Electronic Voting
Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic?
Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad
All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
Judge Voids Un-Auditable California Election
Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling
A Flawed US Election Reform Bill
House To Vote On Paper Trail and OSS Voting Bill
U.S. To Certify Labs For Testing E-Voting Machines
U.S. Bars Lab From Testing E-Voting Machines

Ah, the myth of McCain.

Yes, he was badly out-slimed by Bush/Rove in 2000. Yes, he does have a habit of departing the text and saying things that aren't in the talking points. Yes he has a history of indulging the press with unprecedented access and massive charm.

Those things don't make him honorable now or 8 years ago.

A couple articles to consider: http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9365

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain

MOD PARENT UP! It's infantile to believe that the U.S. government can spend money on people. The U.S. government HAS NO MONEY, it is DEEPLY in debt. The U.S. government has no money.

It amazes me how little most U.S. citizens know about their government, and how little they care. It appears to me that the U.S. government is corrupt in may ways, not just in starting a war to help make weapons and oil investors rich, and to act out anger. Read House of Bush, House of Saud. Bush and his friends and associates sell U.S. government power to those who pay the most. Saudis have paid them 1.4 Billion dollars, so the Saudis got EXACTLY what they wanted: Higher oil prices, the U.S. taxpayer paid for defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein, and a weaker United States.

Politics is certainly not a primary interest of mine, but I educate myself about what's happening. Here's just ONE area of corruption, the unprecedented, organized vote fraud:

Rolling Stone magazine has an article about vote stealing in 2008: Block the Vote: Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president? That article is also available as a PDF file.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law has another article: Voter Suppression Incidents 2008. A PDF is available.

Neither of those articles discuss how votes are stolen using computer fraud. Slashdot has run 17 stories in 2007 and 2008 about computer vote fraud and electronic voting, listed here in reverse order by date. Note that the evidence is that the last two presidential elections were stolen:

West Virginia Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes.
Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit
How To Spot E-Vote Tampering?
Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected
The Cost of Electronic Voting
Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic?
Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad
All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
Judge Voids Un-Auditable California Election
Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling
A Flawed US Election Reform Bill
House To Vote On Paper Trail and OSS Voting Bill
U.S. To Certify Labs

It amazes me how little most U.S. citizens know about their government, and how little they care. Politics is certainly not a primary interest of mine, but I educate myself about what's happening.

Rolling Stone magazine has an article about vote stealing in 2008: Block the Vote: Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president? That article is also available as a PDF file.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law has another article: Voter Suppression Incidents 2008. A PDF is available.

Neither of those articles discuss how votes are stolen using computer fraud. Slashdot has run 17 stories in 2007 and 2008 about computer vote fraud and electronic voting, listed here in reverse order by date:

West Virginia Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes.
Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit
How To Spot E-Vote Tampering?
Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected
The Cost of Electronic Voting
Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic?
Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad
All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
Judge Voids Un-Auditable California Election
Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling
A Flawed US Election Reform Bill
House To Vote On Paper Trail and OSS Voting Bill
U.S. To Certify Labs For Testing E-Voting Machines
U.S. Bars Lab From Testing E-Voting Machines

And this is somehow worse than electing a man who will say and do anything to be elected - including putting a woman with absolutely no business being a VP candidate within a heartbeat of the Presidency?

VS putting a man with absolutely no business being a P candidate in the Presidency? Why, yes?

We just came out of a Republican Presidency who had absolutely no checks placed on him. Things have swung so far to the "Right", a swing back towards center can only help.

Except that things won't "swing back". A Republican Presidency with no checks will not be fixed by a Democratic Presidency with no checks. We'll just have MORE government run amok, it will just run over us in another direction.

Putting the make-believe maverick at the helm of a Democratic congress will just deadlock the government when we need action.

History has shown that a so-called deadlocked government is when the country prospers the most. "Deadlocked government" is just newspeak for a government that is checked and balanced. The necessary still gets done.

And this is somehow worse than electing a man who will say and do anything to be elected - including putting a woman with absolutely no business being a VP candidate within a heartbeat of the Presidency?

We just came out of a Republican Presidency who had absolutely no checks placed on him. Things have swung so far to the "Right", a swing back towards center can only help.

Putting the make-believe maverick at the helm of a Democratic congress will just deadlock the government when we need action.

Real Americans can take a look around, and say "I've seen worse." and rebuild. If you're not interested in that, move.

Except there has never been worse fascism in America, so of course, you'd be nothing but a liar were you to claim that you'd seen worse here.

"Seeing worse" doesn't mean "seeing worse fascism".

"Seeing worse" also doesn't mean "seeing worse here".

I think you're arguing against what you wish he'd said.

the original post WAS ABOUT FACISM

It's done. Stick a fork in it.

Do yourself a favour: GET THE FUCK OUT NOW.

The country's been insolvent since January.

It's not run under the rule of law as there is no guarantee of habeus corpus.

It invaded another country, unprovoked.

One election was a failure.

And another seems to have been stolen.

and after all of this an eloquent thoughtful (and by world standards) centrist is actually facing significant opposition from a third rate pilot and POW turned right wing hack and his "prom queen" veep choice? What the fuck is wrong with you people?

If you have any sense, get out now, before the border closes, and the country sinks into a blackhole of debt, financial ruin, infrastructural collapse, and fascist tail chasing. Seriously. Just pack your bags and go. If you'e reading this site, it is likely you have skillsets that are desirable all over the world.

And if you think Obama's gonna fix it all, you're fucking dreaming.

RS

Do yourself a favour: GET THE FUCK OUT NOW.

The country's been insolvent since January.

It's not run under the rule of law as there is no guarantee of habeus corpus.

It invaded another country, unprovoked.

One election was a failure.

And another seems to have been stolen.

and after all of this an eloquent thoughtful (and by world standards) centrist is actually facing significant opposition from a third rate pilot and POW turned right wing hack and his "prom queen" veep choice? What the fuck is wrong with you people?

If you have any sense, get out now, before the border closes, and the country sinks into a blackhole of debt, financial ruin, infrastructural collapse, and fascist tail chasing. Seriously. Just pack your bags and go. If you'e reading this site, it is likely you have skillsets that are desirable all over the world.

And if you think Obama's gonna fix it all, you're fucking dreaming.

RS

You dropped the word 'voted' from your sentence the same way GOP agents aim to lose/drop/ignore/prevent millions of Democratic votes in November. The election is already stolen. Why the hell isn't the television media all over this? Hands are dripped red.

--The only mention is the utterly benign ACORN nonsense the Republicans are hollering about, which as it happens, is simply a case of the psychopath blaming the victim for its own crimes.

12-year old mentality pouting bullies whose arguing tactics involve repeating lies loudly, ignoring facts, and disobeying social rules until they are physically restrained. . , these are the people who are determining the future of our world.

I know an old, crusty, mean old German bitch of a woman who is a total misery to be near and who seems to derive her only satisfaction in life from ruining people's days. I just learned this week that she was a card-carrying member of the Hitler Youth when she was a kid. Golly. But that's not the frustrating part. These evil bastards who never had any intention of playing fair in a real, genuine democratic society are the last ones to be punished when dictatorial fascism takes over. Their comfort zone exists within the muted gray-scale of harshness and general misery in all social benchmarks. The average racist inbred moron will probably not be shot or starved by the results of their actions. And if they are starved and mistreated, they will handily blame it on the liberals.

When can we brush aside the nonsense and recognize that some 'adults' are really just learning-disabled assholes, and give them only the limited rights we give to children? Why on earth are we allowing them ANY kind of decision making powers? They have plunged us into idiotic wars and they have plundered the economy and worst of all, they refuse to acknowledge that any of it was their fault. Forehead Tattoos for Retarded Assholes.

-FL

Strawmen? Who's talking strawmen here?

The hard evidence for an anthropogenic (human) cause for the current warming (which has ceased since 1998 for this reason) is lacking.

Soft evidence, on the other hand, includes computer models of the infinitely complex (and thus un-modelable) climate system that have been tweaked to predict three times the observed "forcing" for the total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The human contribution to the total cannot even be accurately measured, but most evidence points to, at the outside, about 5% of the total atmospheric carbon dioxide coming from human sources.

Calling the hard evidence for global cooling a "straw man" while continuing to point at the soft evidence of an anthropogenic cause for climate change labels you an unscientific believer in the religion of Gaia.

Occam's razor suggests that natural climate forcings observed over thousands of years must be given more weight than the puny (and basically unmeasurable) contribution that humans have added to the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide during the current century.

Preventing voters from actually voting to me seems to be a much more serious issue than this nonsense...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote

The USA has 300 million people (5 times the UK population), which changes the dynamics somewhat.

It doesn't seem to me it changes the dynamics at all. Merely the scale.

If it can be done in China it can certainly be done in the US.

I suggest reading the following story at rollingstone.com for some additional reasons not to vote for McCain: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain