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The scale of censorship is much smaller. The US has minor problems with censorship. The US has not, for example, blocked major news sites. Nor has it blocked Wikipedia and made its own version that the government likes. The comparison is simply not accurate.

Smaller? Maybe, certainly softer. Instead of outright censorship, they engage in manipulation. Deny access to the battlefield for all but embedded reporters who see everything from the perspective of the soldiers in their unit but never get a chance to spend more than a few minutes talking to the "enemy" and then almost never in an open situation. Similarly control access to other sources of news like interviews with high ranking officials so that you only get the interview if you only pitch'em slowballs. There is also the hiring of private individuals to promote the government's point of view.

So no, technically its not censorship under the absolute strictest definition of the word, but the goals are exactly the same and the means are just as, if not even more, underhanded.

Sorry, guy, but anyone who believes that: (a) this is a "downturn" and, (b) "innovations" will come out of this, is truly on some type of mind-altering drug, or has been existing in a cave for the previous years.

We are living through a possibly unique situation where Capitalism is dead. Our so-called NEWS might not have been covering reality (what with 5 corporations controlling the majority of our censored news in the USA, at least - globally it's around 6 major corps.), but reality is taking place regardless.....

> The real problem is that liberals can't own up to the fact that rest of > the cable news clique panders to their political sensibilities. Do you define "liberals" to mean people who want only Pentagon operatives to analyze foreign conflicts on TV? The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/21/pulitzer/ Pentagon military analyst program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_program http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pentagon_military_analyst_program Y'gotta love the United States, where Barack Obama is considered a socialist and corporate media is considered liberal.

* If I buy an original potatoe at a store and I reproduce it and share copies with my friends, why isn't that called theft? Making that initial potatoe available can potentially cost the store thousands in lost potatoe sales.

Monsanto has already done this with farmers using some of their seeds. Monsanto has even gone after farmers who don't use Monsanto seed, but get cross-pollinated from crops that do use the engineered seed.

And BTW...toss out the "Dan Quayle does Spelling" book. It's 'potato' :) (had to toss that one in there)

Dude, check the numbers.

Amount of coal the U.S. burned in 2007: 1,145.6 x 10^6 tons

Total mass of Earth's atmosphere: 1.135 x 10^16 tons

Assuming (a) pure carbon, and (b) it all stays in the atmosphere, this represents 0.00002% of atmospheric mass, a trivial amount. (By comparison, China uses 1900 x 10^6 tons of coal each year, much more than the U.S.) Previous numbers are 2006 figures, according to wikipedia. 2008 production amounts are found here, and show China producing twice that of the United States. I didn't bother to check what India is using.

Now, I agree that dumping all this stuff into the atmosphere is a bad idea, a terrible open-ended experiment. But chasing a poor scientific theory (AGW) with worse data ('200 Pyramids of coal') is even worse. Blaming a single country is worse still. Let science do its job- none of the problems are hard- and lets fix the problem instead of running back to the stone age. Energy consumption is not the problem; efficient and clean energy production is.

So, lets get back to the beer and other yummy yeasty foods.

Do you know who the Heartland are?

Microsoft is one of 59 members of the Association for Competitive Technology
[1]. The only victim here is the readership of Slashdot. There is a concerted campaign here to slate Microsoft regardless of any basis in reality.

Wikileaks claims the president of the ACT has strong ties to Microsoft, but only provides the ironically named, unsourced open-access Wiki, SourceWatch[2], as evidence for this latest smear campaign.

This is not the work of Microsoft. This lobbying was perpetrated by the software industry in general. People round here fail to see, for reasons unbeknown to me, that Microsoft is not exceptionally evil as corporations go.

"if an email is deleted before the backup process runs there will be no backup"

Have they subpoenaed SMARTech Corporation for the backups for this email server which would have copies of any emails that passed through it. Backups are maintained (usually on tape) as part of routine maintenance, to be used in the event of a hardware failure. The tapes are rotated until they near end-of-life and then stored somewhere off-site. To claim there are no records is disingenuous in the extreme.

"if an email is deleted before the backup process runs there will be no backup"

Have they subpoenaed SMARTech Corporation for the backups for this email server which would have copies of any emails that passed through it. Backups are maintained (usually on tape) as part of routine maintenance, to be used in the event of a hardware failure. The tapes are rotated until they near end-of-life and then stored somewhere off-site. To claim there are no records is disingenuous in the extreme.

Years ago studies declared open source a security risk.

Since when did risible falsehood and fallacy filled rants written by swivel-eyed ideologues count as 'studies'?

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ken_Brown

I am down with everything you wrote (yes including the 2nd amendment defense) expect lumping in global warming as a non problem. Engaging in global warming denial does nothing to help your case. This is what the peer reviewed journal Science has to say about models predicting anthropogenic climate change:

"IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9)."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

The deniers meanwhile all end being dunded by fossil fuel industry sources:

A study published in the journal Environmental Politics finds that 92 per cent of 141 English-language environmentally âoeskepticalâ books, most published since 1992, are linked to conservative âoethink tanks.â The authors conclude that the environmental skepticism of such organizations âoeis a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.â

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/C25/

See also:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_change_skeptics

Yes 20yrs ago it was an interesting idea based on the observation that dust from deserts fertilizes the oceans (eg: 40M tons of dust is transported by wind from N. Africa all the way to the Amazon each year, so the Atlantic ocean already recieves a nice dusting in the summer. The results from dumping iron dust have been inconclusive at best, but even if it did work as well as the promoters claim the problem would then be scale and distribution.

The simplest answer given by the overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked at the problem (including Lovelock), is to cut back emmissions from ~10Gt/yr to ~3Gt/yr as fast or faster than we built them up, in otherwords moderate our current uncontrolled experiment in geo-engineering as rapidly as possible. However to some people the idea of emmission controls amounts to social-engineering and an economic acpocalypse, thus we get the political bullshit, half-truths, think tanks, and psuedo-skeptics that have accompanied any discussion of climate over the last couple of decades.

Yes 20yrs ago it was an interesting idea based on the observation that dust from deserts fertilizes the oceans (eg: 40M tons of dust is transported by wind from N. Africa all the way to the Amazon each year, so the Atlantic ocean already recieves a nice dusting in the summer. The results from dumping iron dust have been inconclusive at best, but even if it did work as well as the promoters claim the problem would then be scale and distribution.

The simplest answer given by the overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked at the problem (including Lovelock), is to cut back emmissions from ~10Gt/yr to ~3Gt/yr as fast or faster than we built them up, in otherwords moderate our current uncontrolled experiment in geo-engineering as rapidly as possible. However to some people the idea of emmission controls amounts to social-engineering and an economic acpocalypse, thus we get the political bullshit, half-truths, think tanks, and psuedo-skeptics that have accompanied any discussion of climate over the last couple of decades.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mike_Connell

It is enough for me to know that he had ties to the DCI group. The Birma-Microsoft-Exxon astroturf guys.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mike_Connell

It is enough for me to know that he had ties to the DCI group. The Birma-Microsoft-Exxon astroturf guys.

Read his Sourcewatch article and think about his ties with the DCI group.

Here is another one.

I didn't see Mike a lot in the past year as everyone just hunkered down on the roles for the McCain campaign. Mike did take time out of his day to give me a call when in the summer I was a little worried about what was going to happen post election. Win or as we did, lose, everything was coming to the end and I had so many other pressures at the time that I was ready to pack it in. Mike got on the phone and with his reassuring voice told me everything would be OK and it was hard not to believe him.

They also have a donation website ready for his family.

It sounds more like forced suicide, Sourcewatch:

We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations

Just look at his SourceWatch article:

On September 17, 2008, a Republican election whistleblower and data security expert named Stephen Spoonamore filed a sworn affidavit filed in federal court in the above voter fraud case in which he stated that Mike Connell "agrees that the electronic voting systems in the US are not secure" and that Connell had told Spoonamore in 2007 "that he (Connell) is afraid some of the more ruthless partisans of the GOP may have exploited systems he in part worked on for this purpose." Spoonamore further explained that "Mr. Connell builds front end applications, user interfaces and web sites." Spoonamore said, "I believe however he knows who is doing that [election rigging] work, and has likely turned a blind eye to this activity. Mr. Connell is a devout Catholic. He has admitted to me that in his zeal to 'save the unborn' he may have helped others who have compromised elections. He was clearly uncomfortable when I asked directly about Ohio 2004."

The other point was more a vague feeling I got that the questions were pushing an agenda.

Of course they are. The sponsoring organization is a right-wing policy paper mill. Here's some background on ISI.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intercollegiate_Studies_Institute
http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=177
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercollegiate_Studies_Institute
http://www.mediatransparency.org/conservativephilanthropy.php?conservativePhilanthropyPageID=11

Here's where junkscience.com comes from:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steve_Milloy

Ha ha ah ha ha ha ah ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_in_Media

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Accuracy_in_Media

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/25/173/40630

Because it's widely known that Walter Cronkite was a Soviet dupe, and Richard Mellon Scaife and Joe McCarthy are/were upstanding heroic Americans.

And yet... they ARE.

Hmm, a study from an organization primarily funded by conservative concerns finds a liberal bias in the media. Why am I not surprised?

"Media Transparency documents that between 1986 and 2005 CMPA received 55 grants totaling $2,960,916 (unadjusted for inflation).[6] The data reveals that the overwhelming proportion of CMPA's funding comes from conservative foundations."

http://twittervotereport.com/ http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Election_Protection_Wiki http://tinyurl.com/699ehc http://tinyurl.com/55rorb

"If that ain't a bank of sorts, what is?"

1. An agency mandated to have a US citizen leading it, it's purpose is to hide the identity of predatory lenders who blackmail impoverished governments via their tresuries. Largely financed by the industrial/military complex to keep the oil flowing to the military/industrial complex.

2. An agency that used the Bretton Woods system to rebuild western Europe, and has gone on to bring democracy, wealth and good govanance to much of S.America, S.E Asia, and Eastern Europe.

I have heard "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and suspect both definitions are correct at one time or another.

[snip]

Interesting link on the voter registration fraud. I knew about a lot of his bad connections, but that one's even worse than most.

Note that basically every site that talks about how bad ACORN is is a site with a known conservative bent. No, I haven't read every site out there, and I don't plan to. I found information on many sites by checking SourceWatch, a site that shows the ties that various online and print news outlets have. They do note that they're a progressive organization, so at least they're being honest. Of course, they also use facts and don't really seem to put much opinion in their synopses. They also cite sources, which lets you check for yourself.

Any site that tells you what to think is probably not worth your time. Sites that don't tell you where they got their information, or what they did with it, are likewise useless or borderline useless.

You realize the politics involved in the enforcement of this law? The collusion between the Clinton administration and race-baiters like Acorn and Rainbow Coalition? Read The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities to see what really went on with CRA and then tell me it was a harmless, fairly-enforced policy. PLEASE, IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS ARTICLE.

City Journal
    is published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy research

The Manhattan Institute (MI) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.[1]

The CRA is but one of the problems I listed. Like Freddie and Fannie's effects on credit and the housing bubble? While the GOP attempted to reign in the FM's, Dems said "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" to.

Ah, yet another quote from the WSJ's "opinion" column, which is the print equivalent of the sean hannity show.

You realize, of course, that a good portion of our current crisis [wikipedia.org] is caused by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, introduced by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), which in 1999 repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act, opening up "competition" among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. Which in turn lead to our current set of mega-institutions that are so large and intertwined they can't be allowed to fail?

Wrong wrong wrong! That "deregulation" actually helped mitigate the crisis by allowing prudently managed banks like Wells Fargo to diversify their portfolios and products in other areas (like mutual funds, etc) besides home loans. Had they not been able to do so, the bailout would have been a lot bigger. Wamu was stupid, but some banks took advantage of the law.

I'm sorry, but you can keep praying.. in your dreams.. that freeing corporate agents (who are otherwise completely free of liability) from regulation will result in anything but abuse and malfeasance.

I would suggest this article by Stiglitz, a nobel winning economist (disclaimer: and, author of about 50% of the texts through which I earned my economics degree).
this article is also instructive.

No, McCain is too liberal and statist on too many issues, and too pandering for me. I am a Reagan Republican.

Read my sig, read the articles I quoted from someone else who is eminently competent, then realize you drank the cool-aid of the corporate fat-cat lobby hook, line, and sinker.

We did the "reaganomics" thing.

The first time it led to depression.
The second time it led to massive recession.
The third time it led to the greatest across-the-board consolidation (and related consumer abuse) in a century, a "jobless recovery" thanks to offshoring, and eventually our fine credit crisis.

I blame democrats for not pushing hard enough against it.

You realize the politics involved in the enforcement of this law? The collusion between the Clinton administration and race-baiters like Acorn and Rainbow Coalition? Read The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities to see what really went on with CRA and then tell me it was a harmless, fairly-enforced policy. PLEASE, IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS ARTICLE.

City Journal
    is published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy research

The Manhattan Institute (MI) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.[1]

The CRA is but one of the problems I listed. Like Freddie and Fannie's effects on credit and the housing bubble? While the GOP attempted to reign in the FM's, Dems said "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" to.

Ah, yet another quote from the WSJ's "opinion" column, which is the print equivalent of the sean hannity show.

You realize, of course, that a good portion of our current crisis [wikipedia.org] is caused by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, introduced by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), which in 1999 repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act, opening up "competition" among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. Which in turn lead to our current set of mega-institutions that are so large and intertwined they can't be allowed to fail?

Wrong wrong wrong! That "deregulation" actually helped mitigate the crisis by allowing prudently managed banks like Wells Fargo to diversify their portfolios and products in other areas (like mutual funds, etc) besides home loans. Had they not been able to do so, the bailout would have been a lot bigger. Wamu was stupid, but some banks took advantage of the law.

I'm sorry, but you can keep praying.. in your dreams.. that freeing corporate agents (who are otherwise completely free of liability) from regulation will result in anything but abuse and malfeasance.

I would suggest this article by Stiglitz, a nobel winning economist (disclaimer: and, author of about 50% of the texts through which I earned my economics degree).
this article is also instructive.

No, McCain is too liberal and statist on too many issues, and too pandering for me. I am a Reagan Republican.

Read my sig, read the articles I quoted from someone else who is eminently competent, then realize you drank the cool-aid of the corporate fat-cat lobby hook, line, and sinker.

We did the "reaganomics" thing.

The first time it led to depression.
The second time it led to massive recession.
The third time it led to the greatest across-the-board consolidation (and related consumer abuse) in a century, a "jobless recovery" thanks to offshoring, and eventually our fine credit crisis.

I blame democrats for not pushing hard enough against it.

sourcewatch says this guy follows the austrian school of economics in trying to justify anarcho-capitalist (makes reaganite policies look tame) policies.

Unfortunately, the austrian school is heterodoxical, and has no statistical basis.

Instead it's based on "self-evident axioms".
One of these axioms in wikipedia "humans take conscious actions toward chosen goals", rather ignores problems like cognitive dissonance, incomplete information, etc.

I particularly like this quote from wikipedia:
" critics of the Austrian school contend that its methods consists of post-hoc analysis and do not generate testable implications, and so fails falsifiability.[2][3]"

It's on shaky ground, having more in line with the intelligent design movement than the chicago school and related statistically based economic theory on which central banks worldwide act.

I would trust their views on the great depression as much as I trust an intelligent design textbook.

source watch report on the american thinker.

American Thinker (AT) is a conservative daily internet publication. According to it website, American Thinker presents a "thoughtful exploration of issues of importance to Americans." [1]
There is ample evidence to support the notion that AT serves as part of the right wing's echo chamber.

In the meanwhile, I'm unable to find a 2005 Vote on S.190 ... and that's in line with the Bloomberg editorial you linked which states that the measure was opposed in committee, which means it's hard to infer a position for any Democrat (or Republican) who wasn't on the banking/finance committee at the time.

A side note on that -- it's actually pretty hard to imagine exactly how this could have been killed in committee by Democrats alone. Republicans were in control of the 109th Congress/Senate 55-45, and it looks as if fhey were in control of the Finance/Banking committee 11-10. There may be procedural tactics I'm not familiar with that would enable them to kill something, or there might have been a few Republicans in opposition, but without knowing this, something doesn't add up about the takeaway story that the lack of FM/FM regulation is all the Democrat's fault.

WOW are you an astroturfer!

Registrant:
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
      140 West Main Street
      P.O. Box 568
      Midland, MI 48640
      US

      Domain Name: MACKINAC.ORG

Here is the wikipedia entry for this "accurate and unbiased source"

The Mackinac Center for Policy Research is the largest conservative state-level policy think tank in the nation. It was established by the state's leading conservative activists to promote conservative free market, pro-business policies. Reflected by its board of directors and those funding its operations, the Center works to advance its policy objectives primarily though its publications, but has an increasing physical presence throughout the state. The Mackinac Center has moved beyond Michigan by hosting think tank schools that have lead to the franchising of its operations in nearly every state and 37 other countries

Congrats, you just linked to the central hub from which places like fox news and hannity glean their ever so accurate "information".

I'll believe the KKK's history on race relations before I believe a word they say.

we're still an incredibly free and wealth country, and the vast majority of people are annoyed but still content.

Although I do agree some of what you said, I strongly disagree with the part which I quoted.

It appears that you are confusing individual freedoms with civil liberties .

Individual freedom is the ability to get in your car at 3 a.m. and drive 3 blocks to the convenience store to buy an unhealthy snack, to pick what you want to eat for dinner at the grocery store, to choose which movie you want to see with a friend, to stay in bed all day, etc. Yes, as a society we generally do have a great deal of individual freedom.

Civil liberties by contrast, are much different. Civil liberties are things such as your right to not have your property seized or searched without a court order, your right to vote, your right to petition the government, your right to peacefully assemble to protest the government, etc. ...and the all important Habeas corpus, your right to petition the government for unlawful imprisonment, which by the way, we did not have until just recently when it was restored by a Federal appeals court.

It is of civil liberties which we are speaking when we say that a society is free. When it comes to civil liberties in the United States, we are far from "free" to do as the Constitution allows.

Some examples:

The Protect America Act, The Real ID Act, The Patriot Act, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, The Military Commissions Act, Free Speech Zones, Unconstitutional Wiretapping, etc. provide overwhelming evidence that we are in fact very far from being a free society.

"a free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate." -- Thomas Jefferson

"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage." -- Bruce Barton (1886-1967)

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." -- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

CLICK IT!
"There has never been a more urgent need to preserve fundamental privacy protections and our system of checks and balances than the need we face today, as illegal government spying, provisions of the Patriot Act and government-sponsored torture programs transcend the bounds of law and our most treasured values in the name of national security." -- ACLU

MORE QUOTES:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposit

we're still an incredibly free and wealth country, and the vast majority of people are annoyed but still content.

Although I do agree some of what you said, I strongly disagree with the part which I quoted.

It appears that you are confusing individual freedoms with civil liberties .

Individual freedom is the ability to get in your car at 3 a.m. and drive 3 blocks to the convenience store to buy an unhealthy snack, to pick what you want to eat for dinner at the grocery store, to choose which movie you want to see with a friend, to stay in bed all day, etc. Yes, as a society we generally do have a great deal of individual freedom.

Civil liberties by contrast, are much different. Civil liberties are things such as your right to not have your property seized or searched without a court order, your right to vote, your right to petition the government, your right to peacefully assemble to protest the government, etc. ...and the all important Habeas corpus, your right to petition the government for unlawful imprisonment, which by the way, we did not have until just recently when it was restored by a Federal appeals court.

It is of civil liberties which we are speaking when we say that a society is free. When it comes to civil liberties in the United States, we are far from "free" to do as the Constitution allows.

Some examples:

The Protect America Act, The Real ID Act, The Patriot Act, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, The Military Commissions Act, Free Speech Zones, Unconstitutional Wiretapping, etc. provide overwhelming evidence that we are in fact very far from being a free society.

"a free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate." -- Thomas Jefferson

"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage." -- Bruce Barton (1886-1967)

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." -- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

CLICK IT!
"There has never been a more urgent need to preserve fundamental privacy protections and our system of checks and balances than the need we face today, as illegal government spying, provisions of the Patriot Act and government-sponsored torture programs transcend the bounds of law and our most treasured values in the name of national security." -- ACLU

MORE QUOTES:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposit

we're still an incredibly free and wealth country, and the vast majority of people are annoyed but still content.

Although I do agree some of what you said, I strongly disagree with the part which I quoted.

It appears that you are confusing individual freedoms with civil liberties .

Individual freedom is the ability to get in your car at 3 a.m. and drive 3 blocks to the convenience store to buy an unhealthy snack, to pick what you want to eat for dinner at the grocery store, to choose which movie you want to see with a friend, to stay in bed all day, etc. Yes, as a society we generally do have a great deal of individual freedom.

Civil liberties by contrast, are much different. Civil liberties are things such as your right to not have your property seized or searched without a court order, your right to vote, your right to petition the government, your right to peacefully assemble to protest the government, etc. ...and the all important Habeas corpus, your right to petition the government for unlawful imprisonment, which by the way, we did not have until just recently when it was restored by a Federal appeals court.

It is of civil liberties which we are speaking when we say that a society is free. When it comes to civil liberties in the United States, we are far from "free" to do as the Constitution allows.

Some examples:

The Protect America Act, The Real ID Act, The Patriot Act, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, The Military Commissions Act, Free Speech Zones, Unconstitutional Wiretapping, etc. provide overwhelming evidence that we are in fact very far from being a free society.

"a free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate." -- Thomas Jefferson

"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage." -- Bruce Barton (1886-1967)

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." -- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

CLICK IT!
"There has never been a more urgent need to preserve fundamental privacy protections and our system of checks and balances than the need we face today, as illegal government spying, provisions of the Patriot Act and government-sponsored torture programs transcend the bounds of law and our most treasured values in the name of national security." -- ACLU

MORE QUOTES:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposit

Negative: "You raised a lot of eyebrows on this trip saying, even knowing what you know now, you still would not have supported the surge. People may be scratching their heads and saying, 'why'(TM)?" Katie Couric, CBS

To me, if you believe that is an example of negative coverage then you have a liberal bias.

No. It is factually impossible to validly conclude, based on the presented evidence, that that demonstrated any sort of bias.

Bias means treating two sides on an inequal basis.

One of the most common forms of bias is to project the opposite bias into neutral information, a very effective method to dismiss that information and reinforce one's one position without even noticing it happening.

You clearly disliked the results of the study. You clearly searched it looking to find liberal bias in it, to discredit it. You then presented a rather extended chain of logic twisting the quotation into an insult to the IQ of any Obama opponent. You then jumped to the entirely unsupported conclusion that that was evidence of bias - the baseless assumption that Obama-comments and McCain-comments were being categorized according to inequal standards.

The direct meaning of the quote is to dispute the validity of Obama's position and to dispute the reasonableness/validity of reasoning. And like almost any statement it can be further interpreted and colored in a variety of ways by anyone according to their individual bias and inclinations. There is absolutely nothing unreasonable about using that sort of direct-level standard for evaluation. In fact I find it difficult to imagine any different standard that would work. Interpreting beyond that direct level of the statements is far to creative a process and involves drawing to many conclusions to allow any consistant objective categorisation.

There is absolutely nothing biased about that example or biased about that standard, if McCain's comments are categorized according to that same standard.

And while I do not have the full list of hours of comments about each candidate and the categorizations for all of them to compare them, here is their Research Methodology page. They establish explicit rules and procedures by which material shall be categorized, analysts are subjected to 150-to-200 hours of training. Furthermore multiple people must be able to independently reach the same categorizations for the same content with a high degree of accuracy in order to establish that the results are objectively consistent valid and unbiased.

So according to all that it sounds like they are following proper scientific procedures. It would be bias itself to dismiss the results as bias absent some other concrete basis to substantiate the bias allegation.

Now if I'm going to stand by the report and defend it, I figure I damn well better look into who is actually behind the study and whether they are in fact as nonpartisan they they claim and as reliable as their scientific methodology appears to indicate.

Well, to be honest I was a bit surprized at what I found on further digging. You were right to be skeptical about about potential bias from organizations claiming to be non-partisan and publishing research research on political topic.

Here's what I found:
The seed money for the center was solicited by the Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and friends. Nearly all of their funding comes from a very small group of right-wing foundations that fund a variety of right-wing organizations and right-wing causes.

So to any extent that they are failing to live up to their stated unbiased scientific procedures, such a failure would be OVERWHELMINGLY inclined to go in the direction of conservative bias.

Whoops. You'd have been better off if you hadn't pushed me to go investigate their partisan status. Chuckle.

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You've been outed already.

You've been outed already.

can be found here and here.

If it is a theory, then we can apply this idea called "scientific method" and develop a testable hypothesis, and then... Wait, the flat earth idea has been shown to be false: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth and Earth is an oblate spheroid. "Round" could be interpreted as like a circle and two-dimensional, just those flat-earth people want you to think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth These flat earth "alchemists" are just like those who claim that human activities could never affect the climate http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_change_skeptics, there are endless oil supplies on earth for human consumption, http://economics.about.com/cs/macroeconomics/a/run_out_of_oil.htm, HIV does not cause AIDS http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aids/not/abstract.htm, and the only way to study whales is to kill them and sell the meat in the supermarket http://www.icrwhale.org/QandAjapanresearch.htm. Aaahhh these fucking assholes.

Pretty picture but no visible backing information.

Also, I believe that there are some reasons not to trust that site. I can't, however, remember the details off the top of my head. Since there's no justification visible for the graph, I don't need any grounds to distrust them.

Isn't that site owned by a Republican think-tank? (Heritage Foundation ) If so, then they are hardly an unprejudiced source of information. (I should check, but presumably somebody knows.)

If he votes against this bill, he loses far more votes in the middle of America (both the literal and political middle) than he's going to lose from the left (and the coasts) by voting FOR the bill.

I don't buy this at all.

I think people really overestimate public concern about terrorism. The general impression I've gotten based on day to day interactions and recent news coverage is that Americans are getting sick of the politics of fear of the past eight years, and polling confirms this.

At the same time you're probably underestimating the backlash from left in response to this vote. Either way, it's significant enough to merrit serious media coverage. Notice the number of articles this past week commenting on the backlash against obama from his former supporters, often with titles such as Obama's surveillance vote spurs blogging backlash.

Lastly, the assumption that the vote only alienates the left is bogus. Allow me to point you to this article documenting the results of a study conducted by a slightly right-leaning polling agency (the mellman group). Here's an excerpt to wet your appetite,

Voters overwhelmingly oppose key elements of the Bush Administrationâ(TM)s FISA agenda--voters oppose warrantless wiretaps, oppose blanket warrants, and oppose amnesty for telecommunication companies that may have broken the law. Large majorities across almost every demographic subgroup of American voters oppose all three of these proposals. Moreover, voters do not trust President Bush either on protecting the country from terrorism or on protecting our constitutional rights. As a result, Members who stand in defense of constitutional rights have little to fear from their constituents.

The issue here is not that Obama is afraid of alienating his grassroots and average-citizen supporters. Why he's doing it is definitely a question that needs to be answered, but lets not waste anymore time thinking it's because he cares what the average american voter thinks. My guess would be rather that he's afraid of alienating corporate sponsors. Even as a sell-out though, I'd still rather have him as president than McCain. The things McCain says just scare the shit out of me.

You must not have researched this very hard, or even looked carefully at that site, because this is a very well known case of outright fraud that was debunked years ago. People can add their names over the Internet without any fact checking. So how is anyone going to find the person who lied on a website form?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200706060009

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine#Case_Study:_The_Oregon_Petition

"Look at how many politicians take money from anti-abortion groups in full knowledge that they can rant and rave about abortion, but the law is unlikely to change."

I'm not sure you've looked at the makeup of SCOTUS, and their decisions, recently. They've moved in significant ways to the Right. Don't take my word for it - read for yourself:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States#Political_leanings
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42160
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Supreme_Court

Many people seem to think laws are immutable. Often this is not the case, and if you think the abstract concept of "abortion rights" is set in stone, you may be in store for some surprises over the next 20 years.

Daniel Pipes founded Campus Watch an organisation dedicated to making sure that Americans only get a rabidly pro-Israel view in a McCarthyesque way, i.e. lists of those who disagree with his own fascist views.

He favours profiling and internment of Muslims in the United States.

The Daniel Pipes entry at sourcewatch is quite a read.

Daniel Pipes founded Campus Watch an organisation dedicated to making sure that Americans only get a rabidly pro-Israel view in a McCarthyesque way, i.e. lists of those who disagree with his own fascist views.

He favours profiling and internment of Muslims in the United States.

The Daniel Pipes entry at sourcewatch is quite a read.

"Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."

Hmm. That's interesting. Unfortunately, as I said before, LA is a cesspool, plus it's also very expensive to live there unless you live in the ghetto. Pilots don't usually get paid a lot.

It's a cesspool and expensive, because of all the oil there.

I don't know where the oil drilling is in Africa

Nigeria is one place oil is pumped, and it's a dangerous place. Angola, Cameroon and Gabon also produce oil. While Cameroon and Gabon are relatively safe Angola isn't. South Africa also has some oil. allAfrica.com has more articles on Africa countries with oil.

Even Kenya, which used to be a safe place for tourists to visit and see wild animal parks, has lately become violent and dangerous.

Many African countries are no longer safe because of the natural resources they have in abundance and the wealth generated from them are not shared by the ruling clicks. Take for instance Nigeria, the Niger Delta is rich in oil yet those than live there live in squalor because they are from different ethnic groups than those that make up the government. In the Congo the conflict and fighting is over the control of mining for coltan, diamonds, and gold as well as logging. Sadly when the European colonizers went to Africa they set national borders that ignored the different ethnic groups. Latin America didn't have as many colonizers there, basically it was just the Portuguese and Spanish, and for a while Portugal was ruled by Spain. Portugal controlled South America east of the Andes while Spain did the west. While the language in Colombia used is Spanish, it's Portuguese in Brazil.

Hmm, SSPI, who are they? Ah, they used to be the Center for Science and Public Policy at Frontiers of Freedom. To quote Sourcewatch quoting the NYT: "Frontiers of Freedom, which has about a $700,000 annual budget, received $230,000 from Exxon in 2002, up from $40,000 in 2001, according to Exxon documentsâ. They also get tobacco money for their little public policy "research". Amazing how not-hard it was to find that.

But why stop there? Who is this McLean guy that wrote it? Let's consult his own description of himself: "John McLean has an amateur interest in global warming following 25 years in what he describes as the analysis and logic of IT." Apparently he has a Bachelor of Architecture.

So your no-consensus argument comes down to a piece written by a guy who isn't a climate scientist for an oil-industry funded think tank. Convincing. There's some criticism of the actual paper here, and more linked to from there.

Apart from accusing every climate scientist of some mass conspiracy, do you have an actual argument to make, or some actual climate scientists to quote?