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Actually, there was a really interesting article in the Washington Post about election disputes under Fla. law. Any voter or candidate may challenge the election if the is a "reasonable doubt" that the election results "[express] the will of the voters". If the judge rules that the ballot did not meet the specifications set out under Florida law, then obviously some rememdy needs to be implemented. This is not about changing the rules, it's about making sure that the rules were indeed followed.

itachi

You are confusing real life with "Survivor" again.

That's funny you should mention that. For anyone, Republican or Democrat, who needs a little relief from all this, check out Joel Achenbach's column yesterday in the Washington Post. I nearly choked, and spit coffee all over the keyboard....

A sample:

Transcript of the First Presidential Ballot Counting Session, Nov. 8, 2000

JIM LEHRER (MODERATOR): Good evening from the Miami Beach Convention Center. I'm Jim Lehrer of the News Hour on PBS. On this stage tonight I am joined by the two major presidential candidates, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, and by these 17 plastic bins of Florida election ballots.

An eighteenth bin, containing 3,472 ballots, has been disallowed due to the discovery that every ballot was signed with the name "Hyram J. Spinkster." Still under discussion is whether to count a large sack of ballots that mysteriously descended by parachute this morning over the city of West Palm Beach. Both campaigns have agreed that any absentee ballots cast by a citizen who then expired prior to Election Day will be counted as one-half of a vote.

Under the rules established by the Emergency Presidential Commission on Counting, each candidate will be given 90 seconds to count ballots, at which time his opponent will be given 30 seconds for rebuttal. Each candidate has scratch paper and two sharpened pencils.

I alone control the pencil sharpener.

When all the ballots are counted, I will review the tabulations. The candidate with the fewest votes must bring me his tribal torch. I will then extinguish the torch and send him into the Everglades. The winner receives the presidency and one million dollars. We begin with Vice President Gore.

A date has not yet been set for the hearing of this case.

This decision is not about the DMCA. This is about the Copyright Act of 1976, though parallels to recent failed efforts to sneak in clauses about work-for-hire are apparent.

The lower court ruled in favor of authors. Will the Supreme Court uphold that decision?

The decision was reached solely on statutory language and congressional intent, not constitutional language. The Supreme Court has historically given free reign to Congress to play with copyright however it wishes under Article I.

An important precedent not raised in this particular filing is Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., which held (unanimously) that corporations couldn't claim copyright on mere facts by copyrighting page numbers or other artifacts/artefacts of typography. A reversal of the lower decision would undermine Feist by allowing corporations to claim their own copyright irrespective of authorship simply by the act of publishing (inserting those typographical artifacts).

Nader LOST, so expect corporate interests to dominate an unfriendly Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. Had he won, he could've used his appointments to turn the Court arround, but the American people have spoken, and they've (we've) chosen the plutocratic enslavement of the populace by CEOs who've sublimated their testosterone-driven sexual energies into the pursuit of capital at all cost to the human (living!) experiences of their subjects. We had our chance, but we blew it, and now we have to live with an ineffectual corporate president and a divided congress.

This decision will come as the tenures of as many as four Supreme Court justices are in question in this next Presidential cycle. Expect Rehnquist to chalk this critical decision up on his legacy with Dickerson v. US (upholding Miranda), City of Boerne v. Flores (reasserting state sovereignty in the US system of federalism), etc. If Bush prevails in Florida, then Rehnquist will all but certainly retire in the next couple years.

A date has not yet been set for the hearing of this case.

This decision is not about the DMCA. This is about the Copyright Act of 1976, though parallels to recent failed efforts to sneak in clauses about work-for-hire are apparent.

The lower court ruled in favor of authors. Will the Supreme Court uphold that decision?

The decision was reached solely on statutory language and congressional intent, not constitutional language. The Supreme Court has historically given free reign to Congress to play with copyright however it wishes under Article I.

An important precedent not raised in this particular filing is Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., which held (unanimously) that corporations couldn't claim copyright on mere facts by copyrighting page numbers or other artifacts/artefacts of typography. A reversal of the lower decision would undermine Feist by allowing corporations to claim their own copyright irrespective of authorship simply by the act of publishing (inserting those typographical artifacts).

Nader LOST, so expect corporate interests to dominate an unfriendly Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. Had he won, he could've used his appointments to turn the Court arround, but the American people have spoken, and they've (we've) chosen the plutocratic enslavement of the populace by CEOs who've sublimated their testosterone-driven sexual energies into the pursuit of capital at all cost to the human (living!) experiences of their subjects. We had our chance, but we blew it, and now we have to live with an ineffectual corporate president and a divided congress.

This decision will come as the tenures of as many as four Supreme Court justices are in question in this next Presidential cycle. Expect Rehnquist to chalk this critical decision up on his legacy with Dickerson v. US (upholding Miranda), City of Boerne v. Flores (reasserting state sovereignty in the US system of federalism), etc. If Bush prevails in Florida, then Rehnquist will all but certainly retire in the next couple years.

The why isn't relevant, though, is it? The important part is the result. I mean, if you aren't sure which box to check to vote for your candidate, and the poll workers may not tell you, you're just as confused as if they may tell you but will not tell you.

Also, re the military vote, the only large military unit from Florida that potentially might be overseas is in fact at home (the USS JFK, an aircraft carrier based in Mayport, according to the Washington Post). The overseas voters from Florida who migh make a difference apparently include a number of US/Israeli dual citizens (~1000, heavily Democrat, and their votes wont be tallied until as late as the 17th) So there's a lot still up in the air.
Also, I highly recommend taking a look at the questionable ballot (Findlaw's picture)

itachi

The Washington Post has an excellent article that goes into detail about everything going on in Florida. One thing it mentions is that there are about 1000 Florida voters living in Israel, most of whom would be expected to vote for Gore (if they voted).

They also mention Pat Buchanan getting more than four times the votes in Palm Beach County (the one with different ballots) than he received in a nearby comparable county, Broward, and more than four times the votes compared to a nearby county that is more conservative.

We'll know soon, but there are going to be complaints and allegations no matter who wins.

It looks like at least three thousand Florida votes that should have gone to Gore went to Buchanan instead because of the confusing ballots issued in Palm Beach:

"One supervisor of elections decided to do their ballot a little bit differently than others," Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth told NBC's "Today" show.

Butterworth said that if Buchanan won a disproportionate percentage of votes in Palm Beach County, "that may be a problem." In fact, Buchanan appears to have done better in Palm Beach, which is heavily Democratic, than in comparable areas. He won 3,407 votes there, but got only 789 in Broward County, which lies immediately to the south, and 108 in Martin County, which is immediately to the north of Palm Beach. Hillsborough County, which tends to be conseravtive, gave Buchanan 800.

The above from The Washington Post.

Well, that was pretty thoughtful...

So, either the Founding Fathers, who managed to get a couple other things right, were elitist snobs; or perhaps they were a bunch of idiots; OR maybe there's some purpose to having such a system, which takes an attention span longer than a sound bite to comprehend.

Please pardon the inflammatory tone of this post. If you're interested to hear an argument in favor of the electoral college, then here's an article which is more eloquent than I could be:

The Framers' Electoral Wisdom

The 70-hour workweek is one aspect of some successful models of software development. Nevertheless, it is hardly a sufficient aspect. IBM and others have for years encouraged long hours and it seems in my experience this was just effort tossed away. Also, the extreme programming approach advocated by Jeffries and others puts a premium on proper design and pair programming work rather than isolated heroes, seems to be successful, and keeps within a reasonable workweek both so to not overly fatigue its participants and to be predicatable.

Simply put, a 40+ hour week is not sustainable for the long term. Further, it is not realistic as an HR policy. The participants will either get old enough to wonder about other things in their lives (and have made enough money so they can bolt and not give a damn) or pull back because of health reasons. And I really wonder about the ethics of an industry that says its doesn't care and demands such despite its effects.

Finally, one successful e-entrepeneur, Jeff Bezos, makes it a policy to demand he and folks around him get enough sleep. Or at least so he told the Wall Street Journal . It appears he's backed up by a lot of scientific evidence. There are recent articles about this in Kinko's IMPRESS magazine, the Washington Post, and the above-mentioned Wall Street Journal, unfortunately either only available for a fee or only in dead-trees form.

There have been several columns on this in the Washington Post over the last few weeks.

• About the fact that 30% of Feds are due/eligible to retire in the next 5 years or so. . .
• About the abysmal treatment of Federal Job Candidates
• And some more details about who gets the raise, and who doesn't.

Federal Personnel Offices have several drawbacks. . .like not getting back to a candidate at all, or waiting 6-8 months to tell him/her that they have got the job. . . Even with up to 33% more pay (and this is targeted mostly at the entry-level IT types. . . Hell desk and such. . . )

Now, I work as a contractor to several Federal agencies (we have a number of contracts), and I don't see this measure doing much at all: 95% + of all the IT is already being done by Contractors: most of the Feds, in my experience, are in Sr. I.T. Management.

IMNSHO, another proposal full of sound and fury, but in the end, signifying nothing much. . .

There have been several columns on this in the Washington Post over the last few weeks.

• About the fact that 30% of Feds are due/eligible to retire in the next 5 years or so. . .
• About the abysmal treatment of Federal Job Candidates
• And some more details about who gets the raise, and who doesn't.

Federal Personnel Offices have several drawbacks. . .like not getting back to a candidate at all, or waiting 6-8 months to tell him/her that they have got the job. . . Even with up to 33% more pay (and this is targeted mostly at the entry-level IT types. . . Hell desk and such. . . )

Now, I work as a contractor to several Federal agencies (we have a number of contracts), and I don't see this measure doing much at all: 95% + of all the IT is already being done by Contractors: most of the Feds, in my experience, are in Sr. I.T. Management.

IMNSHO, another proposal full of sound and fury, but in the end, signifying nothing much. . .

There have been several columns on this in the Washington Post over the last few weeks.

• About the fact that 30% of Feds are due/eligible to retire in the next 5 years or so. . .
• About the abysmal treatment of Federal Job Candidates
• And some more details about who gets the raise, and who doesn't.

Federal Personnel Offices have several drawbacks. . .like not getting back to a candidate at all, or waiting 6-8 months to tell him/her that they have got the job. . . Even with up to 33% more pay (and this is targeted mostly at the entry-level IT types. . . Hell desk and such. . . )

Now, I work as a contractor to several Federal agencies (we have a number of contracts), and I don't see this measure doing much at all: 95% + of all the IT is already being done by Contractors: most of the Feds, in my experience, are in Sr. I.T. Management.

IMNSHO, another proposal full of sound and fury, but in the end, signifying nothing much. . .

There have been several columns on this in the Washington Post over the last few weeks.

• About the fact that 30% of Feds are due/eligible to retire in the next 5 years or so. . .
• About the abysmal treatment of Federal Job Candidates
• And some more details about who gets the raise, and who doesn't.

Federal Personnel Offices have several drawbacks. . .like not getting back to a candidate at all, or waiting 6-8 months to tell him/her that they have got the job. . . Even with up to 33% more pay (and this is targeted mostly at the entry-level IT types. . . Hell desk and such. . . )

Now, I work as a contractor to several Federal agencies (we have a number of contracts), and I don't see this measure doing much at all: 95% + of all the IT is already being done by Contractors: most of the Feds, in my experience, are in Sr. I.T. Management.

IMNSHO, another proposal full of sound and fury, but in the end, signifying nothing much. . .

Does this surprise me? Yes and no. Yes, because I often look to Canada as our more enlightened neighbor to the north who's solved so many of the problems that did or have plagued us for so long: universal health care, rampant racial strife, rigorous environmental protections, etc. At the same time, Canada as a nation has long had a strange relationship with its children.

Most countries put children and minors into the same legal category as imbeciles and the insane, but Canada is much more aggressive about it and in the process, their parents are often in practice lumped in as well. Have you ever been to a supermarket in Canada and tried to buy caffeinated Mountain Dew or caffeinated rootbeer? It doesn't exist, because children can't be trusted with caffeine and their parents might be too stupid to realize that non-cola sodas may contain caffeine.

Frankly, it astonished me at first, because Canada is more dedicated than most countries to conducting research into children's psychology: if we understand our children, then we can change the world! That sort of thing. But what's even more surprising is that a recent study ; demonstrated that in spite of how much effort and funding was being poured into Canadian schools and Canadian children's programs (from prenatal and on), immigrant children still on average outperform native-born Canadian children. And that's in spite of the fact that Canada's immigrant children are in greater poverty and penury than their native counterparts; the education they received in foreign countries prior to arriving in Canada has helped them succeed where Canadian children without that opportunity languish.

I'm torn as to how to how to find a solution, of course. On the one hand, parents are proving insufficient, but at the same time, the government is proving incompetent to solve the problem. Clearly something has to be done, but who? The only choice I see is the UN, but they're usually unwilling (or not allowed) to get involved in purely domestic affairs, and you don't get any more domestic than child-rearing. But whatever Canada does, it must act soon. Certain industries (particularly the film industries in British Columbia) have been on the rise and have successfully drawn an international presence formerly reserved to the US. But if Jonny or Sally can't read, then when the children grow up to staff or lead those industries, the nation will find itself in a lot of trouble.

I only wish we in the US had something to offer in aid, but we've failed our children too. I suppose that ultimately, we'll have to rethink the legal status of children and perhaps move them into a more autonomous position and role, where they can think for themselves and make decisions in their own best interests, since obviously we can no longer trust ourselves to act in anyone's best interest but our own. First it was propertied white men who were enfranchised, and then came men of other races, and then finally ;wo men. It's time for children to join in the society of nations and receive their full share of human rights including the right to vote, not just in silly online polls but in elections that matter. They have voices of their own, and it's time we started listening.

i wish i had moderator points...

it is good, i think, that the campaigns are willing to respond truthfully. for bush to say anything other than what he's been saying the entire campaign would be dishonest...

let's give them credit for answering, regardless of how much crap slashdot will put them through on the discussions. :)

on an unrelated note, there's a very good defense of the electoral college system available on the washingtonpost.com site. you can find it here.
jon

Info on this is also available at the Washinton Post

While GWB's massive tax break isn't nailed to a positive economic forecast as well? "Read My Lips.. No New Taxes.. " The fact is, according to the current Secretary of Treasury, if Bush's tax plan is realized, the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted by the time someone who is 42 now retires! Oh yeah, now _THAT'S_ a good idea! (http://www.wa shi ngtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7719-2000Oct24.html )

You know... I'd much rather have a President who might utter a white lie who has experience dealing with international leaders and is actually somewhat respected than a bumbling fool who can't remember said leader's names without flash cards in his pocket.

What's that whole.. "pursuit of happiness" thing I hear so much about...

Ahhh, the "murder" card! Touche! Didn't see _that_ one coming!

Why yes, I do. Every time. What a, if I may say so, stupid thing to say. But you seem to have taken simplistic arguments to an artform. Someone wearing a yarmulke does not impinge on others. A schoolwide prayer session does. I don't think many people would (at least I wouldnt) have a problem with individuals taking time out to pray, but when its mandated by a group which has power (either in numbers or influence) over others.. well, then you have a problem if its in a public place.

Federal Crime to protest a business? Huh? Be a little more vague and mysterious, please.

And even with those icky huggers and kissers (which is what people do in bed), the economy has thrived.. unlike the recession which came before. PUCKER UP!

I'm sorry you are scared to watch MTV. Maybe you should see a therapist about that...

No, they'd rather they just take over other people's lives and tell them how they should live. That's the ticket!

You can have them. Hey.. don't lose hope. You've still got Nick At Nite!

As well-intenioned as John McCain and his counterparts on the Democratic side (most of whom also support similar legislation) may be, we all know this isn't going to work. Either the software they choose will have its problems (which isn't the fault of the software, but of the bad, bad, evil English language for having words that look the same, but mean different things.), or the local implementation of the law is going to be spotty (Who gets to deem what's inappropriate?).

What this whole mess boils down to is that neither party, Democrat or Republican, seems to have a firm grasp on what it is that they're supposed to be doing. On the Dem side, most thought seems to be "Let's have the Government take care of folks wholeheartedly". The Repubs come out with "Let's make some laws, but let local jurisdictions sort out how they want to enforce them, and at what level of strictness". Neither of these approaches work, and neither is even remotely close to what's allowable according to the US Constitution.

I'm now convinced, after much disgust with both major parties and a lot of research into the issues, that the only real answer (and one which may not be a viable option, but I'm still willing to work on it, as much as I can), is to get the Libertarians into there. They don't have the perfect platform either, but they do have one overarching principle which rings very real to me: The Federal Government has specific duties, and they must only be allowed to do those duties, and no more. Everything else can be slugged out where it belongs, on the State and Local levels. At least this puts most issues in play where people can reach them - state and local legislators are far more approachable, and responsive, in my experience. Besides, the Libertarian party, for all the press they're not getting (How is Buchanan and Nader getting mentioned in the Gallup and Washington Post/ABC News polls, but not Harry Browne? In polls where he is included, he outpolls Buchanan and nearly outperforms Nader!), is the largest third-party in the US, and has more members currently in office than the other third-parties combined. That also impresses me.

Is kids having access to porn bad? Sure it is. Can the Federal Government legislate against it? Sure it can. Will that legislation do one bit of good? No chance in H**l, and we all know it.

And for those who aren't US citizens, this matters in the sense that, for better or worse, the US is the top dog driving the tech industry. The decisions made here will reach to other countries (as they already have with this seemingly insane new proposed treaty outlawing "hackers". BTW, can anyone actually show me one of these extremely dangerous cyber-desperadoes? I've yet to see one. I doubt they even exist). These decisions being made here are word-wide decisions, even if they don't appear to be so now. -Jimmie

I'm all for privacy, but people are being way too paranoid. The NY Times editorial mentions an article in the Washington Post, and it's worth reading. As I mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the article points out that this is wanted for statistical modelling, not snooping. Congress already has the IRS data through the Joint Committee on Taxation, so the real purpose is probably to obtain the demographic information to reduce the standard error of various budget estimates. This is a BUDGET office, not the NSA.

I completely disagree. As reported in the Washington Post, CBO wants this for statistical modeling. I've worked for Federal statistical agencies for years and this is entirely consistent with everything I've seen. The tax data doesn't even list your name, just your SSN. The whole point of linking is to get the demographic information missing from the IRS data (which Congress already has through the Joint Committee on Taxation). I'm certain that the only thing they care about is the statistical analysis. I mean come on, it's a BUDGET office, not the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.

--

Here's an article about Nader that got rejected by Slashdot, about how Gore's camp is pissed that the Nader vote may swing key states towards Bush.

Link

Nader opposes the "maximum wage" tax. See this article. Of the GPUSA's plans to scrap the Senate and impose a 100 percent tax on all income over 10 times the minimum wage, he says: "I don't like those two positions. . . . I'm adopting positions that disagree with some positions of the Green Party USA."

read the facts in this washington post article. Nader is not a member of The Green Party USA. He is a member of the Association of State Green Parties. He opposes the maximum wage. I do not know off hand his position on the other two issues you mention.

Nader is against the maximum wage.

The Green Party USA (GPUSA), which calls itself "the original Green Party organization in the USA," traces its history to 1984, 12 years before the Association of State Green Parties (ASGP) formed. But Nader, who is not a Green Party member, says he doesn't "really pay much attention" to the older, more radical party's platform. Of the GPUSA's plans to scrap the Senate and impose a 100 percent tax on all income over 10 times the minimum wage, he says: "I don't like those two positions. . . . I'm adopting positions that disagree with some positions of the Green Party USA. I'm not for the abolition of the Senate. There's so many bad things going through Congress I want two opportunities to stop them." Taxing a maximum wage, meanwhile, he dismisses as "not comprehensive enough. If you really want to have a tax on wealth, have a tax on wealth."

Fifteen minutes with a web-browser brings up some of the real "FACTS" behind several of your items. I don't have time to check them all -- I wish you had done it before posting:

FICTION: Al Gore said his father, a senator, was a champion of civil rights during the 1960's.

FACT: Gore's father voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was a racist who was fond of using the "N" word.

I assume you're refering to the Washington Post's article from back in April, though I've never seen any mention of Al Sr. being "fond of using the 'N' word"! Here's the full quote from the Post article:

Long before Bill Clinton came along, Gore lived in the shadow of another dominant politician, his father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee. Many of the deepest tensions of American race relations were played out during the long career of Sen. Gore, whose opposition to the segregated ways of his native South angered many of his constituents and eventually led to his political demise. With one notable exception, when he capitulated to regional sentiment and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the choices he made over more than three decades in Washington were courageous -- and they provided lasting lessons in the political education of the son. If there are as many ways of looking at Al Gore on the issue of race as Wallace Stevens found to look at a blackbird, the first views, shading all the rest, including his relationship with Clinton, come from the life and times of his parents.
(no longer available for free from the Post, but a reprint is available at http://www.jessejacksonjr.o rg/ issues/i042300173.html)

FICTION: Al Gore claimed the book "Love Story" was based on his life and Tipper's.

FACT: Author Erich Segal called a press conference to deny his claim. (Couldn't he at least lie about a love story where his sweetheart doesn't die?"

This is actually an older story that first started circulating in 1997. Here's the actual article from the time about Erich Segal's supposed "denial."

"When the author Erich Segal was asked about Gore's impression, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones." (Original from December 1997 NYTimes no longer available on-line. Similar article at the Chicago Tribune http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/print edition/article/0,2669,SAV-0008280152,FF .html )

FICTION: While running for office, Gore's campaign literature claimed he was a "Brilliant Student".

FACT: Washington newspapers said he barely passed Harvard and consistently earned D's and C's.

What are these mythical "Washington newspapers" you keep citing? Give me an actual cite, ferkrisakes.

In this case, you're talking about this article from the March 18 Washington Post. Gore did get one D, some C's, and a B his first year, but his grades moved up from there, and he was generally an A and B student his senior year. He graudated cum laude (a far cry from "barely passing") based on the strength of his thesis. Here's a quote from the article:

In his junior year, he earned a B, a B-plus and an A-minus in three government courses, and he aced his senior government thesis on the impact of television on the presidency, a strong finish that made him a cum laude graduate. His devotion to the subject by then was so intense that he gave much of his time to a not-for-credit seminar with his favorite professor, Richard Neustadt, an expert on the presidency.

-- Adam

Gore actually got worse grades in college than Bush ever did! The Washington Post did an front-page article comparing the two on March 19, 2000. The Post charges $2.50 to dig stuff out of their archives but a little searching turned up a copy here.

--LP

Here's a Washington Post article on the topic, dated 14-Dec-1998.

In the 1950s, it was Communism; now, political speech may be more tolerated, but if you look at the second half of the article, certain other types of speech would not be protected...

Here is a link to the post article. no login reguired

"But Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."

The Internet is to blame for these murders. The Internet is evil. That's his opinion.

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

Actually, I'm fascinated by the implications of the fact that no Slashdot reader posted the story when it showed up Tuesday night in the Style section of the Washington Post, but "zillions" did when it showed up later on a Microsoft website

I watched the launch on space.com. I thought I remembered them having thermal issues with APU number 2, so it was shut down before the other two APUs. Anybody else catch this? When was the last time they did a compete design audit on the shuttle? Granted it's a very complex system, but it seems that they have more problems than I would be comfortable with.

Karl

I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.

Although the stock market isn't exactly a coin flip, it's a lot closer than you think; and "productivity of industry" doesn't have much to do with why it's not.

"Productivity of industry" will compensated for in the price of a stock. If I think that stock XYZ has a future payout plus value gains yielding a present value of x, then I'll only sell the stock if you offer me more than x.

That's why stock prices are so sensitive to new information. If you buy GE today and tomorrow they lower their earnings expectations you'll be hurting, even though their productivity is the same. But if you buy a completely unproductive company (like many internet companies) then you can make money if there is good news the next day. "Productivity of industry" as nothing to do with it.

But this means that in the long term, you can only beat the average by

• being smarter or more knowledgeable than the people who have the stocks now, or
• by being lucky

For the average amateur investor, then, it is basically a coin flip. Many novice investors have been lulled into a sense of confidence by the long bull market. Those of us know with longer memories know that stocks can also go down, down, down.

It's true that a well-managed portfolio should make more money over time than putting the money in a less risky investment like, say, government bonds. (Or like putting it in your mattress.) But that doesn't really have to do with being "based on the productivity of industry"; it has to do with the fact that equities are riskier, and riskier investments pay higher returns.

For more infomation, start reading about ;ri sk premiums. You'll find it enlightening.

the scary thing is, THE RUSSIANS BEAT ME TO IT BY PATENTING THE BOTTLE!

no joke. then again, this is at the russian patent office, which is even more lenient than the USPTO...

---

First, the terms proposed by AOL/TW are so harsh, that a large majority of ISPs will not access the high-speed network.

Second, the terms probably are non-discriminatory. This means that the terms are the same as AOL/TW has in its current (exclusive) relationship with Road Runner LLC. Hence what AOL/TW is doing is very likely legal. The legality needs to be checked by the FTC, though, which has not yet made an announcement.

http://www.wa shi ngtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28372-2000Oct6.html

Yes, 602P is a fake - but that doesn't stop our good samaritans on Capitol Hill from fighting against it just the same. Our stalwart guardians of justice, as reported in the Washington Post back in May, have introduced a bill to prohibit the FCC from even possibly imposing Internet access charges, even though the FCC has said repeatedly that would never happen in the first place. According to sponsor Fred Upton (R-MI), though, his bill, the Internet Access Charge Prohibition Act, "soothes the fears" of those thousands of people who have written him and other representatives because, frankly, they got bamboozled by the hoax. Upton's bill (HR1291) is still pending committee review before the House.

So don't be too hard on Clinton and Lazio - at least they only talked about the fake; others are actually wasting real legislative time on it. Sigh... and you wonder why it takes so long to get anything useful done on Capitol Hill.

"People have kids for all kinds of reasons: to save a failing marriage, to work on the family farm, to perpetuate the family name. In the scheme of things, this is the most wanted child I've ever met. They love the heck out of this kid."
--Charles Strom, director of medical genetics at Illinois Masonic Medical Center

Heck, the biggest problem with these 'risk takers' is thier complete stupidity at what they throw money at. The VC's that have been fleeced in this first round of the internet merry-go-round may have been one of the biggest group of lemmings ever assembled. I love this st ory about Kibu.com $22,000,000 down the tube and the web site only lasted 46 days! All for a website aimed at teen age girls. For crying out loud! How can you be so stupid to blow that much money that fast????? There must be a patent on that.

Patents as an argument for protecting investors is very weak these days. A fool and his/her money is soon parted. There are a lot of fools out there.

Of course, as long as the lawyers are trying to get their cut, we will continue in this morass. Don't look for any help from Congress. We gave control of that to the laywers a long long time ago.

http://washingto npo st.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18824-2000Sep26.html

The principle has the power because he is, by virtue of his office, the publisher of the school paper.
Look at it this way... If Katie Graham doesn't want something published in The Washington Post it doesn't see the light of day No 1st amendment argument, it just doesn't get printed. The students in question should start their own paper. If the administration then stops distribution of that paper then they have a legitimate 1st amendment bitch

Washting Post, Septmeber 12th 2000:
"Several university studies have shown that the H-1Bs tend to earn less than their U.S. citizen/permanent resident counterparts, with the gap being 20 percent or worse. The law requiring that H-1Bs be paid "prevailing wage" is riddled with loopholes."

The full text can be found here.

My .02,

There shouldn't be a declared venue, and beyond that, Virginia is a particularly odious one, because Virginia passed the UCTIA, which empowers authors retroactively do all sorts of malicious things with their code.

The Washington Post is re/pre-printing this glowing review of CLOS2 in today's edition.

So maybe the DoD will find room for Linux on the desktop if not in the server room.

BTW there is a good review of CLOS 1.2SE in today's Washington Post.

The author states:

The software's K Desktop Environment also is open-source. KDE creates a graphical interface on top of Linux. Competitor Red Hat uses a different graphical interface, the GNU Network Object Model Environment, or Gnome for short. I liked KDE better than Gnome.

By using KDE, Corel delivers something that most Linux vendors have ignored: It has given the OS a look and feel that will be familiar to most PC users. For Linux to become a viable alternative to Windows, that user-interface harmony is crucial.

Thanks to this KDE front end, Corel Linux has better-organized multi-layer menus than Red Hat's Gnome. For example, Red Hat included the same item more than once in different locations under repeated headings. Corel arranged items logically and with less repetition - although a couple of items do appear more than once.

And that's the difference in this election. They're for the powerful. We're for the people."

You've blown your cover! Kurt Granroth is Al Gore! :) (or at least, he's a politician...)

Why don't we use the same test that the INS gives to people who apply for citizenship? A prospective voter should have a basic knowledge of the history of the United States and the structure and function of the govrnment. See this page for a Washington Post article on the INS test, including sample questions.