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Do you remember ABC/CBS/NBC/MSNBC/CNN/NYT/LAT/WaPo etc running stories front and center on their flagships about, say, Obama's admitted drug use? I can remember those same outlets attacking GWB the weekend before the 2000 election front and center. I can remember Dan Rather using phony evidence to push a story about GWB's National Guard years (again, remember, Obama's actions during the same time are irrelevant per you).

YES!

I'm at work so I can't dig up footage, but look around on youtube. I 100% PROMISE that you will find news footage from all of the major networks covering everything about Obama that Fox did, minus the frothing at the mouth.

And, some NON-BLOG sources for you that is either about or mentions his drug use:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/12/politics/uwire/main3823725.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/americas/24iht-dems.3272493.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/13/clinton.obama/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/27/costello.drug.use/index.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/02/AR2007010201359.html
http://www.obamapedia.org/page/Barack+Obama's+Drug+Use

Are you honestly going to tell me that the same amount of reporting went into Obama's past by the mainstream media as went into Palin's past?

YES I FUCKING AM! Again, check youtube. You will find MANY MANY MANY videos of mainstream news agencies questioning things about Obama's past.

Or did I just imagine that I heard "God Damn America" and "William Ayers" nonstop during election season?

If so, defend the statement by Tom Brokaw, one of the most entrenched national news anchors, that we didn't get to know Obama before the election

I will answer this by asking a question: if you have such a problem with the way the MSM handled Obama, why are you quoting one of its most prolific members to support your argument?

And were derided as birthers for wanting to make sure he was in compliance with the Constitution.

Irrelevant. You made a claim which essentially said his personal life was ignored. That is false.

Nobody complained about GWB's dad before election or during his time in office?

Again, irrelevant. We are talking about Obama, not Bush.

Someone chooses to associate with someone for 20 years, someone they call their spiritual adviser, and now that person is off limits too?

I never said they were off limits. I said people were examining (extensively) who his pastor was. A pastor, being a spiritual adviser, is a very personal relationship. You made a claim which essentially said Obama's personal life was ignored. That is false.

Fox News did some digging on him, they are the lone "they" from the media as far as your statements above go. Where were the other media outlets? Virtually all of them gave him a pass as far as investigating just who he was. Why else would Tom Brokaw feel the need to say that we don't really know who Obama is AFTER he was elected if he was fully vetted beforehand?

Again, bullshit.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/DemocraticDebate/story?id=4443788&page=1
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/wright-dominated-news-coverage/
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8630.html
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/obamas_weatherman_connection.html
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rich-noyes/2008/09/23/barack-obama-bill-ayers-stanley-kurtz-makes-connection
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/02/obama-birth-cer.html
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/obama_birth_certificate/2009/07/22/238969.html

Even fucking Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/21/obamas-church-pushes-cont_n_92802.html

Anyone that did attempt to dig through his history was excoriated for it. Look at what people did to Joe the Plumber just for asking him a question that exposed more of Obama's real views than the Obama campaign really wanted the public to know. The media ran cover for him, even going so far as to completely make up stories that would make him more sympathetic (like the one about someone publicly threatening to harm/kill Obama at a McCain rally. The Secret Service investigated and found no such threat).

Again, irrelevant. You made a claim which essentially said Obama's personal life was ignored. That is false.

Regardless of the reaction or fallout from looking into his personal life, to try and say it wasn't widely scrutinized is an outright lie.

My mistake on the EFF. But I do hope you can see the danger in a law that prohibits an organization like the ACLU or NRA from attempting to influence the political process. Those organizations were set up by American citizens seeking a redress of grievances from their government. If you can muzzle them then the 1st amendment isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

George Will published an op-ed today regarding this issue. Did you know the Sierra Club was fined by the FEC for distributing pamphlets in Florida contrasting the environmental views of various candidates for office? WTF is wrong with that picture?

The people that point at Christianity, and say "They've done worse!" are either $cientology shills, or $cientology operatives. Nobody gives a flying fuck what happened hundreds of years ago, this is now, and dragging up past idiocy in an attempt to hand wave current idiocy is disingenuous at best, fraudulent at worst.

You are an idiot.

Then you can winch the Rover out.

You jest, but having a self-burying harpoon with cable and winch attached might actually be a useful option for a future mission, particularly if the harpoon has sensors.

---

Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.

No, I'm saying people have tried, they've failed, we understand why, and that promoting it as applied research ("... people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again") is fraudulent. And that claiming our scruples in avoiding research to a very small extent---there never was a total ban, only a ban on using Federal money to create new embryonic stem cell lines, as I remember---is holding us back is just not true in any way I know of.

In this field as so many others, politics is the death of real science.

I think what's more important is China owns $1 out of every $10 of US public debt so they've got us comming and going.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111803558.html

Justice task force recommends about 50 Guantanamo detainees be held indefinitely

A Justice Department-led task force has concluded that nearly 50 of the 196 detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war...

God DAMN that EVIL George W. Booosh!!!!

Just wait until January 27th. I hope you have about $1000 to drop. Or you could just get an iPhone now.

Of course, never before in history have 70% of bills been subject to filibuster. The most recent social program of this magnitude was Medicare, in the 60s. The filibuster rate then? 8%. We have no bipartisan support because the Republicans want to make Obama look ineffective to better their chances in 2012 and are more concerned with party unity than the best interests of America. They want him to fail and will do anything in their power to have him seen as a failure.

Are you fully aware of the controversy surrounding laptop searches at US Border points? Here is a quick article to get you up to speed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/06/AR2008020604763.html

Basically the current thinking out of the US Government is that you are in a legal no-mans land when you re-enter the USA and the 4th amendment does NOT apply to anyone until the US grants them entry into the USA. When you're at an international airport in the USA, all areas before immigration and customs are legally not inside the USA, or so the legal reasoning goes. Furthermore, you have no choice but to submit your laptop for them to copy. I don't even think you have the option of simply returning from where you came, either.

It's disgusting.

"We," says Schroeder, "have a very serious issue with librarians. ... Technology people never gave their stuff away, but now folks are saying, 'You mean the New England Journal of Medicine is charging people?' ... Markets are limited. One library buys one of their journals," she explains, pointing to the Brie eaters. "They give it to other libraries. They'll give it to others." If everyone gets a free copy, she says, the publisher and the writer and others involved in making the book go unpaid. "These people aren't rich," she says of those in the room. "They have mortgages."

These are the people arguing against making publicly funded research publicly available. Here's the full article: Pat Schroeder's New Chapter.

The govt can print money. As Dick Cheney said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26402-2004Jun8?language=printer

Hey guys found the source, it was a Washington post article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102394.html

To add to ubernostrum's reply, and further drive the point home, the paper explicitly cites...

Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence...

I'm pretty sure preventing threats to the US public like violent acts such as, say, a McVeigh-style bomb attack, preventing cold-blooded murder, etc, are responsibilities of the government.

Well...considering that there have been public announcements that DHS et al are trying (with only limited success) to hire huge numbers of "security" techs it sure seems like they were caught with their pants down.

As for redundancy... put two GPS receivers on your ship.

Suppose that someone shoots down enough GPS satellites to disable the GPS system. What then? I'm in favor of some sort of backup system.

It's difficult to shoot down satellites, but not impossible.

That said, I have to assume that ships could still navigate the old-fashioned way, with an sextant, a chronometer, and some charts. You can automate the calculations, so you just take the readings with the sextant and put the numbers in to a computer program. It is even possible to automate the whole process, although nobody seems to bother anymore in these days of GPS.

steveha

I didn't mod it funny.

>

- nuclear power still has the stigma of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl attached to it. It'll be tough to get public opinion on that changed, especially with advances in fuel cell and solar technologies

Not true also. The original "hippies" are all behind nuclear power now. They all want us to go and build them. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html as shown by this article and a few others I dont feel like Bing'ing right now

We used to criticize the Soviets for everything, be it rational or not. :)

BTW we criticized them for not letting people LEAVE their borders, not for controlling their own airspace and controlling border ingress.

Interestingly, we're already at that point: U.S. readies plan to ID departing visitors, Nov. 8. 2009.

Now, granted, it doesn't say that people will be prevented from leaving, but I suggest you think about it for a moment. What is the purpose of identifying people who leave, other than to control who leaves?

The Obama administration and Congress under Pelosi have made it clear that along with wiping out the health insurance industry, their vision for "Green Eeconomy" includes a massive wealth transfer from big corporations to their constituents. Nuclear power doesn't fit into their vision for the future.

Maybe then you can explain to me why almost a dozen *NEW* Nuclear Power Plants are either, a) BEING BUILT RIGHT NOW, or b) in the end phases of licensing for construction?

It's a cute fable from the right than left-wing groups killed Nuclear, but like most fables, it's full of holes. Nuclear Power died in the United States, really even before Three Mile Island.

While Three Mile Island is the favorite target for blame, fewer and fewer plants were being ordered, period. The reason for this is a Classic "bubble" effect. Nuclear Energy was the end all, be all for decades starting in the 50s, but by the 70s the bloom was already starting to come off because of massive cost overruns and extended building schedules.

While the Government does share some blame (archaic licensing requirements, for one), the largest portion of blame belongs to the contractors who constructed the plants and the companies that ordered them.

Nuclear Power has always been (by comparison to the U.S.) dirt cheap in countries like France because of the most basic Capitalistic principle, standardization. The French basically licensed two or three designs, spent the time and money guaranteeing those designs were safe and efficient, and then simply chose from those two or three designs every time a new plant was needed.

Well, common sense tells you that once you build a plant two or three times, you'll most probably have discovered all the weird things that creep out of any new engineering project. by the time you've built it five times or more, you can almost be certain that the procedure in building the fifth plant is going to be almost identical to the procedure you use to build plants six through ten (or ten through one hundred, etc.)

In the United States, however, utilities looked at Nuclear (if you will please excuse the pun) like dick-measuring contests. It seems every utility spent more to make sure their plant was as different as possible from the ones that came before it. It's as though they were trying to be as expensive as possible just to show they could.

Every single plant was unique, every single plant had to be gone over from scratch for safety checks, every single plant had to have custom manufacturing processes invented just for it, and every single plant always cost just as much (in some cases, more) as the proceeding one (going back to the first one, practically).

There was never any traction made on standardization (in construction or licensing)

Because of this, Nuclear's supposed advantage over coal (cost, chiefly) *never* materialized in a timeframe that made it a selling point.

People and companies brag now of the Economics of Nuclear, but these plants are all hitting middle age now, where the costs to run them have pretty well been determined and likely costs for the future can be calculated.

What excites me about the future of Nuclear in the United States are plants like the Westinghouse AP1000 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

These plants are modular, can be built over and over again as many times as needed. Are engineered from the start with economy in mind (rather than "gee whiz, that's cool!"), and,best of allare fully licensed by the NRC right now.

As opposed to the early plants, the licensing procedures for these plants are greatly simplified because the NRC has already determined that th

Really? It's because when most people see an article in a newspaper talking about the intricacies of copyright, their eyes glaze over in boredom. Some newspapers do cover copyright issues. News outlets mainly give people information on topics they are interested in. Similarly, I doubt you keep up with the latest developments in choral music.

Really? It's because when most people see an article in a newspaper talking about the intricacies of copyright, their eyes glaze over in boredom. Some newspapers do cover copyright issues. News outlets mainly give people information on topics they are interested in. Similarly, I doubt you keep up with the latest developments in choral music.

The Obama administration and Congress under Pelosi have made it clear that along with wiping out the health insurance industry, their vision for "Green Eeconomy" includes a massive wealth transfer from big corporations to their constituents. Nuclear power doesn't fit into their vision for the future.

You mean, they are fools to rely on the security infrastructure that the Bush Administration set up over seven years? Or do you mean, there's no director at TSA because Republicans in Congress have been blocking nomination confirmation hearings?

Competence is a non-partisan issue, so stop trying to force the "fair and balanced" point of view that everything wrong in government began the moment Obama took the oath of office.

After all, it was Bush who ignored the Osama Bin Laden poised to strike in US memo from the CIA a month before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Talk about unqualified...

That guy needs a lawyer. But looking at the authorities referenced in the "subpoena", there are some real questions. It's an "administrative subpoena", not one issued by a court. Some agencies can do that. (The FBI has been refused that authority by Congress). The Department of Transportation has subpoena authority for its hearings and investigations, and Homeland Security inheirited that authority when TSA was transferred from DOT to DHS. For all administrative subpoenas, the party served can file a motion to quash the subpoena with a District Court, and the court has to rule before anything happens.

But that section (49 USC 46104) refers to a "hearing or investigation", a formal proceeding presided over by a hearing officer. This is just some "special agent", and the subpoena is signed by someone with the title "Senior Counsel - Civil Enforcement". There's a list of people who can sign these things at 49 CFR 1503.303, and a "Senior Counsel" isn't high enough up the food chain to sign off. A Deputy Chief Counsel or the Chief Counsel is supposed to sign. This probably reflects who the TSA had in the office on December 26. A more senior official probably would have considered the political implications of doing something this embarrassing.

This is a touchy area, related to the "National Security Letter" debacle. See this Congressional Research Service analysis. The FBI got in trouble for issuing demands for documents without statutory authority.

The Associated Press reports that the blogger is going to challenge the subpoena in court.

Poor people at the bottom of the social ladder seldom rise on their own against injustice. When it happens it is often mob violence not organized resistance, or activism. More often the leaders of resistance/activism are middle class or from the wealthy.

Was the historical Buddha a poor person? No he was royalty. He did sympathize with the poor and sick that he became one.

Did you know that Nelson Mandela, for example, comes from local royal lineage?

Bin Laden was rich initially, by inheritance, until he went to Afghanistan for fighting the Soviets. He spend a lot of his money there. His wealth dwindled after he criticized the king of Saudi Arabia and his citizenship was dropped and forced into exile (first to Sudan). After he was exiled, his wife and kids in Saudi Arabia were supported by his brothers: they were never given cash lest they would send it to Bin Laden, but the school bills and grocery were all settled on his brothers' credit. He never sent a penny, nor did he receive any from his family.

Another example of rich people going astray: Patty Hearst was initially kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, but then joined them, wielded a weapon in robbery for them. She was partially coerced, but she could have also ran away. She was from a rich background too being an heiress of publishing empire.

The Nigerian guy has changed over the years. He was lonely, cut ties with his rich family too. See here for more.

We said, "Hand over these people who are terrorists." They said, "No, unless you provide us with evidence." And someone with your mentality said, "They're non westerners, so their lives are worthless. Let's tell the public that there's no way they would accept the evidence, even if we had any. Proceed with the invasion."

We have the money to pay for it. We can print it.

Banks create money using the fractional reserve system. This process is not subject to the public srutiny or transparency required when the govt does it. So we don't really know that banks are creating money all the time, but when the govt does it, it is made into a big thing that we should all be afraid of!

In conclusion, we can afford to provide a minimum standard of living to every citizen. As Dick Cheney said, Reagan proved deficits don't matter!

Who said I'm the only one that's discovered it?

I guess you get all of your news from Keith Olbermann, eh?

"There are only two ways to really fix internet security: wait for technology to improve through private industry, or pull the plug"

You mean like TCP/IP or SSH or KERBEROS ?

"each deal made between a private company and the government puts us one step farther away from equal competition"

You mean like when Homeland Security standardized on Microsoft Windows ?

"There are only two ways to really fix internet security: wait for technology to improve through private industry, or pull the plug"

You mean like TCP/IP or SSH or KERBEROS ?

"each deal made between a private company and the government puts us one step farther away from equal competition"

You mean like when Homeland Security standardized on Microsoft Windows ?

How much progress could be made if these religious fanatics (including Islamic states like Iran) could focus their energy on science rather than their own petty prejudices?

Well, when countries like Iran attempt to make their own advances in science, they get accused of wanting to develop WMDs and get threatened with military action by Israel. Could you imagine the uproar if Tehran tried to get into space exploration?

A good article on why the nuclear issue in Iran is also medical, and not just energy / weapons research.

I do agree with your point overall though. As someone who has visited Iran, their situation would be much nicer if the government spent their funds on their own people rather than propping up Hezbollah over in Lebanon. Their water treatment plants are antiquated, they have virtually no space program, and most of their technologies are hand-me-downs from US tech from the 70s or Russian-made.

Theocracies just do not work and will do anything possible to continue their survival, even if it means sacrificing their own citizens.

Why shouldn't they oppose it? The Democrats aren't interested in meeting in the middle. They are interested in pushing their own agenda. The fact that they can't even convince the moderates in their own party to go along with some of the stuff they've tried to pass ought to tell you something. Mind you, this is exactly how the GOP operated when they had control, but the silence coming from the man who promised us a new kind of politics is deafening, isn't it?

Are you serious?

The Democrats have made concession after concession to the Republicans on every major bill they've tried to get through Congress, and the Republicans just move the goalposts. This is why we ended up with a watered-down, crap stimulus bill. This is why we're ending up with a watered-down, crap health reform bill. The Republicans are taking obstructionist tactics to new extremes, like "accidentally" losing their voting cards, and filibustering a defense slash war-funding bill in the hopes that the Senate won't even be able to debate the health insurance reform bill. Meanwhile, the Democrats refuse to use the options at their disposal, like reconciliation, to pass the health care bill without bipartisan support or a supermajority. Senator Baucus worked with Republicans for ages on his version of the health care bill, only for them to oppose it anyway. Republican Senators gleefully announce that they intend to break Obama and make health care his waterloo. Republicans previously for health care reform suddenly oppose it for nebulous reasons.

100% party unity is unrealistic for the Democrats on any issue, and the Democrats have 60 members in their caucus in the Senate, not 60 Democrats. Senator Lieberman lost his Democratic primary and garnered more Republican votes than his Democratic opponent, and also more than his Republican opponent. He opposes pretty much every big-ticket Democratic agenda item. That's hardly a party-line Democrat to begin with. Other Democrats are suggesting they will vote against the bill because of a lack of cost-control options like the public option (removed to appease Republicans, despite it's 60%+ support among the public), or because of compromises made to the Republicans, which have garnered no Republican votes and only weakened the bill.

The Republicans don't want to meet in the middle, and the Democrats are fools for trying to act bipartisan. All they get for it is Republicans shrilly insisting that the Democrats are bullying them around any time they want to pass any of the legislation they were elected to pass. The Republicans don't oppose the health care bill on ideological grounds. Plenty of Republicans have supported health care legislation more liberal than what's in the Senate today, such as, say, Richard Nixon. Mitt Romney imposed a very similar plan to the one in the Senate now while he was governor. And so on and so on and so on. It wasn't until the current cycle that Republicans became opposed to plans such as the one now before the Senate. The ideology behind conservatism didn't suddenly change. No, the Republicans made a political decision that it was in their best interest to do their best to attack and bring down any initiatives Obama came up with.

The Republicans aren't opposed to the health care reform bill for any other reason than they were determined to make the Democrats failures. And they're doing an excellent job of it.

A lot of folks were uncomfortable with the deficit spending under Bush. Even leaving that aside, and leaving aside the bank bailouts, stimulus, and auto maker bailouts of the past year, the Obama budget deficits will be significantly greater than the largest Bush deficits:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/03/21/GR2009032100104.html

Note how *none* of Obama's deficits will be less than Bush's deficit of '08, by the White House's own admission, and how the Congressional Budget Office thinks their numbers are too optimistic.

All this funding is going to come from where?!

I don't know, they could stop the Iraq war for a day and a half. Get your priorities straight. If you're worried about the Federal budget, don't get in the way of progress and science, just stop the senseless war.

My guess would be somewhere in the region of all of them.

Make that "most of them". OS X botnets have been appearing for a while, and other forms of OS X malware have been known for quite some time.

While many of these pieces of malware are fairly lame, I'd expect more and more "professional" variants of those in the future. One factor that shouldn't be overlooked is the generally complacent attitude of non-Windows users towards the security of their own machines (not unlike what you exhibit in your own post). In other words, from a technical point of view, if users download a malware-infested key generator and enter a password to execute it, it's pretty much irrelevant whether it's for OS X or for Windows. Arguably in this scenario, OS X is actually slightly more likely to be infected, since many Windows computers have at least some form of anti-virus software installed, while on other platforms this is still fairly rare.

OK, HERE is a better write up. Um, also don't hammer me for using a wiki source. As I recall, you used a wiki source as well.

Now, I never said Libby didn't lie. I never said that Libby wasn't innocent. What I did say was that he was innocent of the crime being investigated, and in that entire investigation, he was the only one convicted, or even charged with any crime. They even know who did the crime they were investigating and didn't charge him! Why was he not charge? (forgive me for using another wiki quote):

A close associate of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Armitage was regarded, along with Powell, as a moderate within the presidential administration of George W. Bush.

That's right! He was not an evil neo-con. He simply wasn't conservative enough. Besides, when all this was over, he was retired. No point in dragging some poor Powel fan moderate out of retirement just to convict him for committing this crime we are investigating. Let's go after that evil, no-heart VP's chief of staff.

It was North Carolina, not South Carolina where holding public office required belief in God.

North Carolina IN ADDITION TO South Carolina. I've lived in SC all my life and the issue has come up several times.

For a specific reference, from the following article:

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/herb_silverman/2009/12/atheists_in_office_deja_vu_all_over_again.html

"The constitutions of both North and South Carolina bar atheists from holding public office."

The article from which it looks like you drew your facts is here. Also quoted therein:

"Atheists are now eligible to run for any office in South Carolina, which means the provision against atheists is unenforceable."

The only defense I can offer for over a third of the South Carolina legislature voting not to overturn their anti-miscegenation laws is that, since the legislation was elected democratically, perhaps the constituents of South Carolina have exactly the kind of government they deserve.

Isn't it?

I can't wait to hear all of the partisans who rightfully complained about Dick Cheney's energy task force come out of the woodwork to tell us why this is "different".

Reasons why this is different:
1. Dick Cheney never put out a press release announcing there was a meeting
2. Dick Cheney never released any of the names of the people he or his Task Force met with
3. Most of the activities of the Task Force have never been/will never be disclosed by the government

Here's most of what we know about the Energy Task Force (two articles)

I find it distasteful that the press is getting kicked out, but none of this is happening in Cheney-esqe secrecy.
I'm going to save my outrage for something more substantial like the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty negotiations.

I can't wait to hear all of the partisans who rightfully complained about Dick Cheney's energy task force come out of the woodwork to tell us why this is "different".

Reasons why this is different:
1. Dick Cheney never put out a press release announcing there was a meeting
2. Dick Cheney never released any of the names of the people he or his Task Force met with
3. Most of the activities of the Task Force have never been/will never be disclosed by the government

Here's most of what we know about the Energy Task Force (two articles)

I find it distasteful that the press is getting kicked out, but none of this is happening in Cheney-esqe secrecy.
I'm going to save my outrage for something more substantial like the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty negotiations.

I didn't say that loud ads were a market inefficiency. I assumed we were talking about regulation to prevent and correct monopolies, since the grandparent was said that regulation was good in monopolistic situations, and you said that regulation was axiomatically bad.

I believe solutions to such problems should not involve the state as they have too much power already. We don't need yet more laws in the law books. We don't need to justify them taking even more taxes off us.

Taxes are low in the United States, even in a historical context. And given the deficit and the exponential growth since 1980 of the National Debt since Reaganomics. (" "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" -- Dick Cheney) we need increased taxes to pay as we go. (Cutting spending is a non-starter as government programs are already underfunded and popular. Witness California's perpetual budget crisis with Tax Rates held at 1970's levels due to a 2/3s vote to pass any budget or tax increase, an budgetary obstruction GOP holding a whopping 35% in the legislature, and a majority of the budget being mandatory spending due to popular (and popularly abused) initiative process.

Futhermore, given that the current economic crisis was spawned by deregulation of the banking and investment industries. (Just like how the California Power Crisis was was spawned by the industry written deregulation of the power industry, less regulation is demonstrably not a good thing in all cases.

It's true. It's expensive to be poor, and meanwhile the rich and famous get retarded amounts of free shit.

Sometimes rich people are given free stuff because the vendor hopes it will lead to bigger purchases. For example, you might buy dinner for a prospective client in order to get an account that would net you far more than the cost of the dinner. Or sometimes people give rich people stuff out of a kind of hero worship. But often, very often, the idea is that rich people will influence others through their fame or their contacts.

If you consider something at "University" a Youth Mistake. Most people are generally at the age of adulthood since then.

If you think someone at University at a typical post-high school age is an "adult", then practical experience, cognitive science, and auto insurer's actuarial statistics have something quite different to say. Even ignoring brain maturation issues, in today's society that's the time when most folks are away from home and on their own for the first time, and are really just starting to figure out Which End Is Up.

There are lots of things which are perfectly legal yet something one would prefer to keep private.

There was an example of this in richmond, VA 3 years or so ago. There was an art teacher here who was using his Ass to paint pictures and actually sell on the Internet [1]. He had a video of his process on youtube, but in that video he wore a disguise, used a pseudonym and generally tried to disconnect himself from his professional life. However it all came to light and he was hounded out of his job. See this article in the Washington Post.

[1] Its his choice to call it Art. But then again I have a painting on my wall from a famous US pornstar who painted her tits and impressed them on paper - see her [NSFW [2]??] catalogue here

[2] Is nude art NSFW? What about the nudes by the old masters?

" schools look for any excuse to fire teachers who have been around the longest, because they cost the most money. Then they can hire a new teacher for a lot cheaper."

Why would they take advice from a bankrupt company?

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/04/AR2009120404600.html
"They had learned to man the turrets and handle the grenade launchers, to hike up rock-strewn hills at 90-degree inclines."

Aren't those "cliffs"? That's some hiking there.

I agree that the data and code should be made public. Fortunately, NASA has been doing this for some time, as have many other researchers. Gavin Schmidt at NASA has put together a list of links to global warming data and code that is available online.

If you are interested in the scientific context of this story and the emails, I would recommend reading Gavin's posts on context at Real Climate as well.

There have also been interviews with Gerald North who led the NAS investigation into the hockey stick controversy a few years ago, and Peter Kelemen, prof at Columbia, explaining why this hack will not affect the science. Basically, global warming theory is supported by many lines of evidence from many different sources, and does not depend on the credibility of any one source. Furthermore, there is nothing in these emails or data that actually disproves any of the published research.

If this is the best skeptics can do, I think they're in for a rough time. The skeptical argument has little scientific support, so they resort to a silly PR stunt like this hoping to get a draw in the public debate. It has been great to see prominent deniers like Inhofe in the senate going way out on a limb, claiming this proves global warming is a hoax and so forth. There will hopefully be full investigations, at which point they'll probably end up looking pretty foolish when the science is vindicated.