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Now it seems those closely detailed stories were largely bunk. Last week it was revealed that a formal review by the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative agency, "had found no damage to the offices of the White House's East or West Wings or EOB" and that Bush's own representatives had reported "there is no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by the employees of the Clinton administration."

Source.

Maybe I'm wrong and the president waits to inauguration day to really reveal his evil plans.

Now you've done it! Just couldn't keep your mouth shut for one and a half more hours could you? No matter, your little prognostication will not affect the outcome.

Bush hasn't been found guilty either.

But we know he's guilty. The law says X (warrantless wiretapping) and Y (torture) are crimes, and Bush has admitted to X and Y.

I'm not sure what of, but there has to be something on the statute books, right?

Yup, and it's possible that under a treaty signed by Reagan, we're even legally obligated to prosecute torturers.

This article is bunk, and its implications are false. For the real story on NSA wiretapping, you should check Glenn Greenwald and others before giving too much credence to this one reporter's less than sure grasp of the issue. See http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/15/fisa/index.html (you might need to go through the salon ad to get to Greenwald's article).

For the truth about this ruling and what it means I suggest you read Glenn Greenwald who actually knows what he is talking about rather than repeating right wing talking points and spin...
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/15/fisa/index.html

See the commentary here: Anonymous Liberal, here talkleft and here: Glenn Greenwald (see update II).

1.- It's always easier to filter the entire pipe.
2.- Questioning the filter clearly indicates you must be a pedophile. Or a terrorist.

Or both. ... Somehow. .... Maybe you strap kiddy porn to your bombs, or something.

Everyone knows those who question the filter are conspiring to plant porn bombs in public places.

While descriptions of porn bombs are vague, palistinian terror groups are known to construct similar devices consisting of a cylinder of C4 wrapped in several inches of hustler magazines.

And he will probably never be held accountable for his unprecedented crimes, domestic and foreign. Nixon got away with his - and they were significant.

Meanwhile he just handed out little tiaras of encouragement - Medals of Freedom, an insult to every past and future recipient - to his two disgusting buddies in war crime: Johnny Howard of Australia and Tony Blair of the UK.

Meanwhile, the murder of innocents goes on, in the name of the US, using American made weapons, every day...

Is it voluntary or compliant?

Funny how there was no income tax until 1913, and now they want to tax some "Imaginary Property" ??

How 'bout we focus on the real problems such as Social Insecurity being broke (I.O.U.S.A.), becoming poor in order to receive benefits, or the outright theft by Haliburton, instead of worrying about virtual ones.

End the bullshit - one simple tax law: 10% of any income. No fucking loopholes. Plain and simple that doesn't requires thousands of wasted pages.

I can't wait when money disappears in the 25th century and people learn to put TRUE stock in something that only increases in value -- themselves -- instead of artificial things.

--
"The more corrupt a republic, the more numerous its laws." -- 56 - 117 AD

To quote from Ask The Pilot:

"As for fuel consumption, let's look first at a short trip, from New York to Boston and back again. This flight is slightly under an hour in each direction. A typical aircraft on such a route, an Airbus A320, will consume somewhere around 10,000 pounds or 1,500 gallons of jet fuel over the course of the round trip. Assuming 140 passengers, that's 71 pounds of fuel, or just over 10 gallons per person. A lone occupant making the same trip by car would consume twice those amounts."

I'm assuming that Mr. Smith as a professional airline pilot has got his numbers right. So where's your backup for your "insanely inefficient" claim?

I agree with you that the physical infrastructure should be taken care of before the digital infrastructure.

Here's a little article about tradeoffs between investing in infrastructure for privately-owned cars, public transport, electricity grid, information infrastructure, etc. A pertinent fact from the article is that "Obama has set a six-week deadline for getting his economic recovery plan passed." If that is true, a lot of decisions will be made very quickly.

Obama's announcement of Dawn Johnsen to run the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC, the office from which John Yoo "legalized" torture) is the best encouragement so far that Obama is reforming the uncurbed powers Bush/Cheney took for the White House. Also Leon Panetta for CIA and Eric Holder for Attorney General. I'd most prefer to see Joe Biden make his #1 job removing all the extra powers from his VP office, but I don't have such high hopes for Biden. Which is why Bush/Cheney's powergrabs were so dangerous: they're as permanent as their successive holders want them to be.

Maybe that has something to do with that region of Pakistan harboring the people who murdered almost 3,000 Americans?

Using that line of reasoning, is it reasoning?, the US should then be attacking Saudi Arabia. Most of the 911 hijackers were Saudis.

Kyoto is a flawed treaty. It will cripple the economy of the developed World while giving a license to pollute to the developing World (China/India). Why the hell should we cripple our economy if they aren't going to be on board with solving the problem?

Though I didn't want to see a President Gross, er Gore, I voted against Bush by selecting Gore on the ballot because of Kyoto. Having said that, after President Bush came out against Kyoto something he said provoked me to do some research. I didn't know it before but Kyoto did not have limits on GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions on either China or India. And both countries are building a lot of coal fired power plants. So from one perspective Bush was right, however he still could have encouraged or pushed businesses to cut emissions and develop renewable energy sources. What does he do? He instead tries to relax emission regulations, so power plants can emit more pollution.

You remove more and more of the basic rights of your own citizens.

Citation?

Warrentless wiretaps and searches as well as the PATRIOT Act.

Falcon

This, from http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/business/2008/12/31/D95E5EIG1_viacom_time_warner_cable/index.html [salon.com] (and AP Wire, probably):

Time Warner Chief Executive Glenn Britt on Wednesday had called Viacom's demand for a 12 percent increase in fees -- an extra $39 million on top of the estimated $300 million it pays Viacom annually -- extortion and outrageous given the recession. Viacom countered that the requested increase amounted to an extra $2.76 annually per subscriber.

Details of the deal were not immediately available.

Viacom had argued that Americans spend a fifth of their TV time watching Viacom shows but its fees made up less than 2.5 percent of the Time Warner cable bill.

Spokeswoman Kelly McAndrew said that despite ranking high in the ratings, Viacom's cable networks' average daily license fee was 65 percent lower than that of networks run by The Walt Disney Co., News Corp.'s Fox, Time Warner Inc.'s Turner Broadcasting System and Discovery Communications Inc.

Analyst Michael Nathanson with Bernstein Research said Viacom's channels had been "underpriced relative to their peers."

Perhaps this is payback for the democratic staffers that popped the "W" keys off of keyboards at the White House during Clinton's last days in office.

Sigh. The myth strikes again...

Public Opinion in Iran and America on Key International Issues, page 10 (Attacks on civilians).

The polled question was: "Some people think that bombing and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are
sometimes justified while others think that this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that such attacks are often justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified"

The response is that 11% of Iranians felt that such attacks were often/sometimes justified, whilst 24% of Americans thought the same. The same poll in Pakistan showed that 15% thought the same.

The PEW Report Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, page 91, contains the same question asked of Muslims in Europe and the Middle East.

There is more discussion of these results and the media furore surrounding them on Salon.

Feel free to ignore it and read the original research papers.

If you had linked to them, I would have. Since you didn't, I call bullshit.

Instead of calling bullshit, you could have just searched for them yourself. The links weren't particularly hard to find.

which is good because SUV sales are on the rise again! and hybrid sales are down.

That's because we have the attention span of a gnat on meth.

This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide. What happens to that million dollars? They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager. That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person. That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released. The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.) So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties. The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable. The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records. All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band. Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company. If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record. Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero! How much does the record company make? They grossed $11 million.

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html

The world can be far-fetched sometimes.

My current favourite is the far-fetched and still unexplained (good luck gettng Israel to own up to this one):

Israeli Art Student Mystery, when at the beginning of 2001, the American DEA were flooded by large numbers of fake Israeli art students.

They were Israeli but not really students, some carried classified information on USA agents and locations, some had large denominations of cash or evidence of having moved large denominations around (up to $180,000 over a couple of months in one case), many stayed in areas that were later found to be spots for the Arab terrorists of 9/11.

It is a bizarre case, and nobody has any idea why Israel did it. You should read the story - it's fascinating :)

...the RIAA will keep on ripping off artists and producing bland, over-compressed, payola-driven crap instead of music.

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

http://www.beforethemusicdies.com/

http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html

Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis

"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.

That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever -- $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.

And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled "Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction," held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.

There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal [of displacing annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels,] without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs.

You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right

Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis

"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.

That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever -- $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.

And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled "Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction," held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.

There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal [of displacing annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels,] without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs.

You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right

Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis

"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.

That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever -- $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.

And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled "Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction," held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.

There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal [of displacing annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels,] without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs.

You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right

Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis

"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.

That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever -- $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.

And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled "Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction," held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.

There is enough marginal, unused agricultural land in the United States to generate the biomass necessary to reach the one-third goal [of displacing annual American gasoline consumption with biofuels,] without displacing food production, said Steven Chu, the Nobel physics prize winner who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the laws of thermodynamics won't need to be broken -- there is more than enough energy hitting the earth every day as sunlight to supply all of humanity's energy needs.

You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right

Salon has a story today on Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis:

"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio...:

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.

If bountyquest couldn't get enough high quality prior art submissions by offering 10k, what makes IBM think they'll get better submissions without offering anything? Bountyquest's failure to bust the 1-click patent was quite telling of its patent-busting power. Salon.com's postmortem explained "BountyQuest tried to overcome the inability to build momentum [from a few big patent busts] by cold-calling patent lawyers and trying to sell them on the idea of running a contest for one of their cases [b]ut few have proved willing to bite." "There just didn't appear to be a market for its service." O'Reilly (one of the sponsors of the project) said in his postmortem of the project, "the patent mess is a thorny thicket that doesn't lend itself well to penetration by amateurs."

Apart from paying less to hunters and charging less to clients, how is IBM addressing these problems?

The great right-wing fraud to repudiate George W. Bush. Sorry, but movement conservatism has been proven to have no clothes. The problem conservatives have with Bush isn't that he's not a conservative, but that he's unpopular. Another problem they dodge is the fact that if Bush actually had succeeded in accomplishing more conservative goals (privatizing Social Security, banning abortion, eliminating Medicare and Medicade) he would be even more unpopular with the American public than he is now.

I have to say, that us that did vote for Bush were fooled into thinking he was a conservative

No, you got exactly what you voted for. And any ignorance you can claim in 2000 was more than dispelled by 2004 - everyone knew he was an incompetent warmongering Constitution trampling jackass, as opposed to merely an incompetent jackass.

Movement conservatism is much like Communism - it can never fail, it can only be failed. Or, as Digby noted:

"Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.

George W. Bush will not achieve a place in the Republican pantheon. Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal.)

and Atrios:

The interesting paradox is, as I've written before, that they'll dump Bush and transfer the cult onto the next Daddy figure that comes along.

The next Daddy Figure was Fred Thompson, but he had more important things to do in the primary (taking a nap).

Those who voted for Bush (and more importantly, those who re-elected him) own a large part of this mess.

Anyone wanna bet that Obama won't do a damn thing about these obvious attempts to spy on American citizens?

Why would he? I am sure it is a great idea now that he will be President and the Democrats have a majority in congress:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/04/feinstein/

Exactly. The main problem the civil aviation in the USA has isn't a lack of airspace, but clogged airport aprons.

Parick Smith, the salon.com airline captain columnist, has just written about it again.

Nice commentabout the usefulness of opening military corridors for civil aviation around thanksgiving:
"It will have roughly the same effect as, say, organizing a group prayer or rubbing a plastic airplane for good luck."

âoeThe real question,â Mr. Rose said, âoeis how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?â

Arguably, when the record industry lost their stranglehold on the various ways that the public could be introduced to new acts, their marketing and launch management value creation was significantly reduced. Furthermore, competing in the much larger pool of availble unlimited digital stock, one would naturally expect prices to compete downward.

Also, the number of ways in which the record industry payout structure has been unfairly skewed towards the record labels is well documented. One would expect this to gradually tip downwards back to a more reasonable medium.

In the grand scheme of things, a decent recording can be made at a 10,000 dollar studio, pressed at one of any number of professional CD producers, and distributed by any number of available distributers. Add in a 1,000 dollar HD video camera for youtube promotion, and you have a comparable music system powered by the creator's time. That's a highly efficient alternative that didn't exist ten years ago.

Assuming our cultural music needs are being met, a 25% drop in overall spending on music could easily be because we have become 25% more efficient.

My own interest in the retrocomputing scene is the old 8 bit systems, and for those, it's very practical to play with them. The best thing about the old 8 bits is that they are fun.

KidBasic, a.k.a. Basic-256 might interest you.
http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/index.html

And if the kids had been exposed to violent images like a war that has killed a million people far from removing the kids from the room we'd have a fund raising drive to support the glorious war crime committing troops, right?

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/13/winter_soldier/

Where the fuck are our priorities?

Considering our society is committing war crimes and the economy is going down the drain I think the kiddies seeing a titty is the least of our worries. They are doing to learn where babies come from at some point, why are we so hung about that?

http://books.google.com/books?id=-A-7d-2VpwcC&pg=PA122&lpg=PA122&dq=Europe+nude+advertising&source=web&ots=Q9pqfc6bGy&sig=TMqCxpzJk3sOB5TXsvPNz9UH91M&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result

Americans need to grow up and get our priorities straight or we will continue to fall behind Europe and Asia and become a laughing stock country, no longer famous for tech but for puritan religious fanatics much like Iran.

Which commentators, pundits and so on? Left wing, right wing, balanced?

Right wing, mostly. See the links below.

If you actually had evidence of this, it would be a huge story.

Indeed, it has been big news when evidence came to light concerning the programs under which the Bush Administration, including the DoD, was paying pundits and news analysts to promote administration programs, or otherwise buying the news.

But you don't.

If GP didn't (which I suspect is not the case), the web certainly does, including evidence directly from the horse's mouth at the DoD link above.

So you're nothing but a mindless droning troll.

I would be careful throwing around insults like that, especially when you clearly don't know much about the subject and are just assuming that the person to whom you are responding to is wrong because of your own ignorance.

If she scared you THIS year,wait until they they run her for president in 2012. Sheeeee's back! EEEK! Seriously,if there was any doubt in anyone's mind that they ran out the Barry Goldwater conservatives and the party is now run by the crazies,then Palin in 2012 should do it. As a former "Reagan Democrat" I wouldn't vote for these Neocon loonies if my life depended on it. And what happened to the conserve part of conservative,anyway? But go down to about halfway on the link I placed to see the ultra right wingers just gushing about how wonderful and a "true conservative" Sarah Palin is. Damned scary.

Nothing new - it's like any other traditional mining method.

Step #1: "That laptop is mine".
Step #2: ???
Step #3: Profit!

Seriously though - what is done to discarded laptops and other electronics is similar to mining.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/10/ewaste/

Conservatism! Where not wanting to set civilians on fire is tantamount to defending the regimes they live under! Where moral outrage at tortures so vile that we executed people for performing them fifty years ago is enough to make one a shrill, out-of-touch dirty fucking hippie in our newer, more enlightened age!

Then again, half of the under-thirty americans can't point out the USA on the map

If by half, you mean six percent. And, hell, even the fake number floating around was twenty percent, less than half of the one you pulled out of your Cheeto-stained ass. Damn.

Remember, folks, conservatism means never having to check your facts.

http://dir.salon.com/story/comics/tomo/2004/03/01/tomo/print.html

Your kind has a long and proud tradition.

You're apparently a libertarian. Good on you. If you want to live in a place where the government doesn't take the fruits of your labors, there are plenty of government-free zones around the world. They also tend to be Mad Max-esque nightmares that everyone is desperately trying to escape from, but I'm sure that's a fantastic chance for you to prove that your individual right to bear arms will outgun the local mafia. Bon voyage!

On a slightly less sarcastic note, I find it fucking hilarious that the difference between rugged individualism and the heavy yoke of baleful commie servitude is a four point six percent rise in the marginal tax rate. Oh, hell, I'll just let Ruben Bolling mock you.

Finally, it's funny-sad-but mostly funny that taxes are whined about when they're paid, not when the expenses are incurred. If you have a problem with our finances, your beef is with the guys who just pissed roughly a trillion bucks away halfway 'round the world, not with the killjoy who points out that we all have to pay for that mess now.

I'll admit I'm a bleeding heart liberal political junkie.

on TV I'll be mostly MSNBC & PBS along with Daily Show/Colbert Report, CNN, and Current ( Al Gore's news channel )

on the net:

try DIGG's US Elections 2008 tabs both popular and upcoming.

pollster.com - http://www.pollster.com/ - is a good aggregater of polls it's what the TV guys use

Hufington post updates/changes frequently and has lots of videos http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

a news tab on igoogle with lots of feeds is good to have in another of your firefox tabs ( BBC, newspapers, TV channel websites, tec. )

I like Salon http://www.salon.com/?source=refresh ( I have a long time premium account ) - it updates a lot, but not as fast as huffington

This is a major, important election, I'll be watching on the HD big screen with friends. laptop atop my lap. I'll probably redo my "favotires" settings for the night.

Here's a timely post from of my favorite economics blogs. It actually refers to Adam Smith and "big-L" Liberalism.

How the World Works

Did Fannie and Freddie give out a lot of NINA loans? Honest question. I have no idea and have no idea how to find out. Also, what regulations were proposed and what would they have done if enacted? You're implying that the regulations would have had beneficial effects and that they were rejected by people with foolish or underhanded motives, but it's hard to judge if that's the case or not without knowing what regulations were actually proposed. If you have any links or anything, I'd certainly like to take a look.

What I find disconcerting is the effort (presumably made by those on the right) to pin the blame for this crisis on fannie and freddie alone. Which is why I asked about the NINA loans. After listening to This American Life: Giant Pool of Money, I would tend to think that at least some of the blame ought to go to the system whereby mortgage brokers were looking to make as many loans as possible to sell to others, and so didn't bother to verify income or assets. After all, once they sold the loan, they got their money and didn't have to worry about whether the borrower would default.

Also, see this post by Andrew Leonard in salon, discussing Alan Greenspan's testimony:

The evidence strongly suggests that without *the excess demand from securitizers*, subprime mortgage originizations, undeniably the original source of the crisis, would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far fewer. But subprime mortgages pooled and sold as securities became subject to explosive demand from investors around the world.

Italics mine.

That's right. Alan Greenspan went before Congress and did not, at least in his initial statement, blame Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac or the Community Reinvestment Act or stupid homeowners or fraudulent lenders for the subprime meltdown and the ensuing credit crisis. He blamed the demand for risk from both the banks who would repackage the dodgy loans as exotic securities and the investors whose taste for these hotcakes could not be satisfied.

Again, if you'd provide some links discussing the proposed regulation, I'd be able to determine whether I should have been concerned that useful regulations were being blocked, or whether these proposed regulations were, in fact, designed to stick it to the poor.

Not in the weeks immediately following 9/11. On September 13th, the UN Security Council passed yet another resolution against Iraq, even though Iraq hadn't done anything new, but members of the council were drawing conclusions because Saddam publicly praised the terrorists.

I'm just curious, which resolution are we talking about? This site lists all U.N. Security Council resolutions against Iraq prior to 2004. I don't see anything on September 13, except one drafted in 1990 regarding foodstuffs.

Perhaps this link doesn't have everything, but it seems comprehensive.

Many suggested the security council was immediately ready to approve military action against Iraq if the US wanted to pursue it.

Many? MANY?? Who would this 'many' be? Think tanks? Newspaper Op-Eds? National Security experts?

Your article suggests people were against the war in 2003, which is true. What I'm suggesting is that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, several leaders were vocally drawing links to Iraq, even though they had no proof.

Cool, I agree with this. Several "leaders" were drawing links to Iraq and they were wrong because they had zero proof.

The sentiments changed greatly because we pursued diplomacy instead of immediately charging in on trumped up charges when support was higher.

We pursued diplomacy? When? As far as I can recall, the U.S. kicked out the weapons inspectors in 2003 before the bombs dropped, because they weren't finding anything. The fact that they were on the verge of announcing that there were no WMD's in Iraq scared the crap out of the Bush administration, as it destroyed any case they had for war. This is further shown when the Bush administration changed their reasoning for war, going from finding WMD's to "ridding the world of a tyrant."

Also, while the 9/11 Panel, President Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz have publicly denied or questioned that there was any link between Iraq and 9/11, Dick Cheney is still TO THIS DAY spreading this lie in some shape or form.

The Bush Administration tried their hardest to make it seem like they exhausted all of their options, but in reality, they sent in a group of weapons inspectors, Saddam let them in, they couldn't find anything, and so Bush immediately called them ineffective and declared war.

You better hope they have good luck. They're fighting for YOUR right to privacy and more importantly, that the law should be upheld. Even my conservative friends claim they believe firstly that the law is inviolate, so this is hardly even a partisan issue.

EVERY American should be indignant that their rights have been, and continue to be, illegally violated, with impunity. I'm even starting to feel sorry for y'all.

Miss the memo?

Warrantless surveillance of American domestic communications has been going on for years.

Not only has it been comprehensively abused (to exactly nobody's surprise), the spying infrastructure has no legal reason to exist.

That sinister sound you hear is Nixon laughing at you, wearing a Dick Cheney mask.

Miss the memo?

Warrantless surveillance of American domestic communications has been going on for years.

Not only has it been comprehensively abused (to exactly nobody's surprise), the spying infrastructure has no legal reason to exist.

That sinister sound you hear is Nixon laughing at you, wearing a Dick Cheney mask.

I guess they are mistaken: Did Sarah Palin make rape victims pay...?

Your link at best does nothing to dispel the rumour.

Fine, so Palin didn't push the policy personally... it was instead done by Charlie Fannon, her handpicked appointee.

Given that she appointed him and was his superior, it's at least plausible that she provided some direction on this issue. And your factcheck link provides no evidence demonstrating she did not intervene.

Almost all of the coverage of Palin has been negative

Well, that's what happens when you report the facts on Republicans. Otherwise you end up with "balanced" coverage, like how the Washington Post calls states with a 13.8% Obama lead a "battleground state" yet a state where McCain has a 2.2% lead "leans Republican".

most coverage of Obama has been positive

This talking point was debunked months ago. Obama received fawning media coverage, yes - ask anyone who supported Edwards in the primaries - but only until he passed Hillary Clinton. Since then the media coverage of Obama has been constantly negative, because the media loves a horse race and loves trashing Democrats.

The facts are NOT unfair in themselves (there's plenty of legitimate complaints to make of her) it's that there's been no other reporting at all.

Fixed that up a bit for you.

What hypothetical question did she pose to the head librarian in Wasilla?

You don't ask about banning books three times if you don't want to ban books. That fact thing again.

What job did Palin hold between being mayor of Wasilla and becoming governor, and why did she quit? I would bet that the majority of average news consumers can answer the first question, while not one in 10 can answer the second

And how many voters know that Obama was head of the Harvard Law review vs how many know who Rev. Wright is?

despite the fact that the answer to the second question is the most significant political story about Palin explaining the foundation of her popularity and subsequent political success in Alaska, and that it is at least as revealing of her character and motivations as the first.

That she was a rat fleeing a sinking ship? Her record as mayor and governor proves that far from being a corruption fighter, she epitomizes corruption. She's just like Newt Gengrich, who forced Jim Wright to resign as Speaker of the House over Wright's book deal, only to have his own shady book deal when he was speaker, plus a bushel of other ethics violations.

Reporting on an opponents criticisms, and making criticisms yourself are somewhat different things.

Reporting on an opponents criticisms, and making criticisms yourself are somewhat different things.

No, it's called blatant double standards. Like how the media obsessed over Rev. Wright for two months, yet ignored John "the Catholic Church is the Great Whore" Hagee until he said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to Israel. Just imagine the response if one of Obama's daughters was 17, unmarried and pregnant.

On those occasions where reporting negative stories about Obama has become unavoidable they've largely been written in the form of an apologia. Witness the NYtimes story on his associations with Ayers. Somehow I doubt Palin would have gotten the same "inconsequential crossed paths" treatment if an abortion clinic bomber had hosted a fundraiser for her and served with her on a charitable board.

Because they should be, because this "associations" game is crap, and the Republicans who play it are firing howitzers in a big glass house:

"My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand."

This was former revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Underground days, right? Imagine what Sarah Palin is going to do with this incendiary quote as she tears into Barack Obama this week.

Only one problem. The quote is from Joe Vogler, the raging anti-American who founded the Alaska Independence Party. Inconveniently for Palin, that's the very same secessionist party that her husband, To

Not quite sure why one of the most informative posts in this thread, by an AC as it happens, has been modded as flamebait.

I'll repost the link since it's been buried:

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/index.html

At the moment, Opus is in the animal shelter, so my guess is that he'll be euthanized.