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Everyone got a good laugh out of their own ignorance of how the Congress works and it cost him the election and got us eight years of Bush. Was a joke made at his expense really worth eight years of Bush?

Given that Gore's running mate Joe Lieberman now campaigns for McCain and fully supported the war in Iraq, I wonder just how much different eight years of Gore/Lieberman would have been.

Saturday Night Live will be airing it's first episode this Saturday night. Has George Carlin hosting.

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "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. Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a lot like communism that way.

... Dr. Murphy has announced she is leaving USF. The brain drain continues. Our new state slogan: "Florida: spend your tax dollars on not education!"

Google is your friend. The poor schlub is Mark O'Hara:

http://blogs.tampabay.com/breakingnews/2007/08/freed-man-faces.html

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/07/23/Opinion/The_nonsensical_trial.shtml

http://www.totallawyers.com/legal-articles-vicodin.asp

http://www.miami-criminal-lawyer.net/caselaw/2007/07/18/ohara-v-state/

If we could find the mechanical outcome of what we think when we listen to music.

There was actually Nature paper a few days ago about that very topic:

Musical imagery: Sound of silence activates auditory cortex

Auditory imagery occurs when one mentally rehearses telephone numbers or has a song 'on the brain' -- it is the subjective experience of hearing in the absence of auditory stimulation, and is useful for investigating aspects of human cognition1. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify and characterize the neural substrates that support unprompted auditory imagery and find that auditory and visual imagery seem to obey similar basic neural principles.

Here's a popular press article.

"We played music in the scanner (FMRI) and then we hit a virtual "mute' button," said David Kraemer, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department and author of the study, published recently in the journal Nature.

With familiar songs, "we found that people couldn't help continuing the song in their heads, and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped," Kraemer said.

The researchers said the findings extend previous research that showed sensory-specific memories are stored in the brain regions that first experienced those events.

"It's fascinating that although the ear isn't actually hearing the song, the brain is perceptually hearing it," said co-author William Kelley, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.

Or, more germanely, that one shouldn't try to fix a problem at all, because it will still be fucked up, anyway?

Of course it will still be fucked up. It's the web. The *company* cannot be reliably counted on monitor the reviews that sadly contribute to its revenue stream. The thought that anyone with half a brain actually believes those reviews is pathetic. Check out that link again I posted - The author himself posting his own reviews - what a joke - And read further - "Internet sites like Amazon.com don't seem as concerned with conflict of interest". They only change it when it suits their purposes.

Because those reviews are obviously from people who haven't read the book.

The choice is not whether one has read the book, but *is it helpful* - as in does it help you make the selection in buying the book.. To answer *No* it is not required that one already have ready the book.

As for this:
They're also bound to be blatantly unobjective and biassed, which skews the rating of the book. /. fucked with amazon's data, and they unfucked it. What's wrong with that?

If you think Amazon's data is not already skewed and therefore in need of *unfucking with* - Then consider what has been business-as-usual for Amazon (they have had the ability to know of the practice since the database contains the necessary information):

This was earlier this year -

"Everyone could see that - oops - some of the site's reviewers really were the author's friends, relatives and even, at times, the author himself. Perhaps worse, other "reviewers" were really arch-enemies of the author, intent on sinking their rivals' work."

Interestingly in this story - a former Amazon literary editor said in the article (link above) - ""Think of it as a chat room," says Marcus. "Anonymity is part of the Web in general." So in effect, to have this book about the potential evil of chat rooms, by using the name of a woman's site who gains income by hosting chat rooms, and then have Amazon decide to take the (cough) "high road" in this current story? Methinks the purpose of removing unfavorable comments is to boost sales.

Your "evidence" is from a middle-aged freelance writer who found a Web site "on about the 15th page of Google" with this information.

Yes, we should all restrict ourselves to viewing only the first page of Google results. Especially if we're a freelance writer.

I fail to see how this could have anything to do with Bush "buying" the election.

Well, that's probably because you aren't middle-aged. The state government in Florida was obviously extremely friendly to the Bush candidacy, and it is measures of exactly the sort that have been shown to have taken place in Florida that have been historically used to deny people the right to vote in democratic/minority precincts.

Read history sometime. The south has been pulling shit like this ever since blacks won the right to vote. What happened in Florida is little better than what happened under Jim Crow.

Katherine Harris and the US Supreme court enforced the laws as they were written.

Actually, Katherine Harris has been found guilty of violating election laws in the past, so I wouldn't be too confident if I were you that she was innocent in the 2000 election. It is simply a question of the Bush bros. being unwilling to investigate her conduct.

And exactly what law is it that you believe the supreme Court enforced? Their guilt isn't in what they did, but rather, what they didn't.

And by calling the President names, I guess you don't really try to hide your bias.

Absolutely not. And why should I? The man doesn't bother to hide his many crimes against humanity or the Constitution. He steals from us in plain sight, and with a straight face. There hasn't ever been as contemptable a president as George Bush. It's not even close. The man is a monster.

You'll come around to my point of view here soon enough. And there will be plenty of time to rue the day this man seized the office.

You mean the war on drugs that Clinton increase spending by 10% each year on?

Yes. If you want to make the claim that the democrats deserved Florida for their complicity in the war on drugs, you will get no debate here.

That the nation is made to bear this humiliation on the other hand is very disturbing to me.

Maybe you don't remember that it was Gore who was limiting recounts to 3 counties where he thought he could gain the most votes, and it was Gore who was trying to block absentee ballots that were perfectly valid according to Florida state law.

Even assuming this is true it doesn't change the fact that this election was a fraud.

And a harbinger of things to come.