Slashdot Mirror

They are a Miserable Failure?

Although he still has some friends. AOL specifically filters this one result, but chose not to take out the other links to Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter, or Hillary Clinton. AOL good ol boys? See here for more info

http://www.whitehouse.gov, or even worse, http://www.georgewbush.com.

President of the United States of America.

For the libbies :)

Looking to the past, the nefarious powers hidden in the shadows knew that when threatened by an enemy, the masses would give up their freedoms in the name of patriotism. And so it was that in all but name, the human race was once again ruled by Imperial forces.

Hmm... Reminds me of something...

What the hell kind of tongue do you have that can hit both ends of a AA battery?

Like this one or this one.

You forgot he created the Internet bubble. What has Bush created besides war, lies and corporate raiding of the treasury. Attacks on the middle-class are standard Republican fare. Just look at Bush's attempt to reclassify overtime. Who do you think that it benefits? The working man or the corporation?

At least with Bill Clinton, he was screwing the girls and not me. Bush has been a miserable failure to date.

Okay, TLDs are gone. Who gets "whitehouse" -- whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.com? Yeah, any reasonable person would say "that's an easy one" (answer is left as an exercise for the reader, but how about tldp? The Linux Documentation Project or Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients?

miserable failure

miserable failure

miserable failure

miserable failure

miserable failure

miserable failure

is to vote this miserable failure out of office. This guy has done absolutely nothing for the average guy, instead his policies have benefited the big corporations. Another 4 more years of his disastrous policies, and there won't be any tech industry left in the US. People with higher educational degrees will be driving taxi cabs.

That "kind of pablum" comes directly from George Bush's own strategery.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20 040114-1.html

That would be Pennsylvania.

You don't want any kids reading /. to fail their history exams, do ya?

The Monkey went to Harvard already.

He received a MBA from Harvard. Or so he says says.

Actually, I should have linked to this.

Or you could check out the 2004 budget.

Chack out what George W Bush is doing.

This was a memo, not a $3 million case study. Don't overreact just because it has to do with the government. I'll bet you anything this cost about an hour of someone's time and the cost of emailing their workers and handing out some paper copies.

If you want to start bitching about where your tax money is going, do some research first.

The U.S. gov't knew that 15 years earlier, Saddam gassed the Kurds, in part because U.S. companies and the CIA provided the materials needed to produce those WMD, and continued providing Iraq assistance even after the U.S. had knowledge of their use against the Kurds.

We also knew the WMD existed because the U.N. oversaw their destruction after Persian Gulf War I.

Isn't it funny that, after getting the green light from the U.S. to become a mass murderer, the U.S. spun that knowledge to begin their own campaign of death and destruction in Iraq? You don't know who to believe anymore.

BUSH IS LEAVING TOWN IN 2004!

The applause you heard when he said "the PATRIOT act is due to expire soon" was not coming from the pro-Bush side of the room.

I was amused (in a sad way) with what happened immediately after that. The Pro-Patriot Act supporters must have been seething over the usurping of attention. Something had to be done! They have to show their support! President Bush continued with his speech, "The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule." And, without thinking, the Patriot Act supporters applauded.

Yes, that's right. They applauded that the terrorist threat will not go away! They cheered that U.S. citizens' lives would continue to be in danger! They celebrated that there were still those out to harm us!

That is the same kind of knee-jerk, 'gotta do something' mindset that got us the Patriot Act in the first place.

In case you're interested in verifying the above, read President Bush's State Of The Union speech. I'm slightly surprised that the publisher has noted the applause at both the points mentioned above. I thought they might have 'edited' that out to avoid embarrasment to the administration. I'm glad I'm wrong on that count.

heisthebest.com is available.

hey, if the miserable failure guys can do it and the french military victories guy can do it, so can you!

SECURITY ALERT:We have been receiving unspecified reports of increased virus activity on the Internet. We are advising that all recipients maintain a Mauve state of alert.

Please stay alert for updates as more detailed information becomes available. Be aware that we may decide to raise the alert level to Chartreuse.

Please enable Active X, Java scripting, non-encrypted forms, and form redirection and click here for detailed information on the Mauve and Chartreuse Alert Levels.

In compliance with Act S.877 please click here to remove yourself from our mailing list.

This email best viewed in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

SECURITY ALERT:We have been receiving unspecified reports of increased virus activity on the Internet. We are advising that all recipients maintain a Mauve state of alert.

Please stay alert for updates as more detailed information becomes available. Be aware that we may decide to raise the alert level to Chartreuse.

Please enable Active X, Java scripting, non-encrypted forms, and form redirection and click here for detailed information on the Mauve and Chartreuse Alert Levels.

In compliance with Act S.877 please click here to remove yourself from our mailing list.

This email best viewed in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

whew! And in related news: thankfully mexico doesn't seem to produce a large programming talent pool, otherwise we really would be in trouble

(-mod because I'm conservative)

Because of the miserable failure of the current administration, any kind of high tech job is destined to be shipped overseas. Switch to health-care or genetics. These industries seem to be hiring local. The EE & CS industries are being slowly killed by this administration. They are rewarding their base, and the only thing their base is interested in is in lowering their costs. Currently, their biggest expense is labor, and so, have targeted all cost-cutting efforts towards labor. This administration has gutted all labor protections. They are even reclassing overtime. This administration believes in only 2 classes for America - the rich who rule the poor. This president has caused the largest transition of the middle class towards the poverty line since the crash of 1929. This is the first generation that will not be better off than the previous one. Don't underestimate the effect of this transition will have on the American people for generations to come.

Even if a new president is chosen in the 2004 elections, it will take at least another 2-3 years to reverse this trend.

But what I want to know is when did it become OK to make fun of people for their learning disabilites? I thought Hollywood Liberals were sensitive and caring? I guess it's OK to pick on disabled people if they're conservatives.

Ah, you bleeding heart conservatives make me sick. The moron is supposed to take decision that influences literally life and death of thousands and influences the whole worlds military and economic stability now and in many years to come. That Bush has a mental handicap is definitely something that should be made known and discussed. If this serious issue is only noticed by the general public through humor so let that be. It is funny at first then you start thinking about a world leader with no knowledge and who doesn't read the news.

WH could mean "White House", but it could also mean "Waffle House"

holy crap, you're right...

I just remember Watergate. .... Guys like Agnew got nailed for things completely unrelated, but without the scandal, they never would have been investigated. If this blows up, watch for a lot of other things (Haliburton?) to suddenly show up on the law-enforcement agendas.

Didja know that Rumsfeld was a member of Nixon's cabinet?

"Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Assistant to the President, and a member of the President's Cabinet (1969-1970); and, as Counsellor to the President, Director of the Economic Stabilization Program, and a member of the President's Cabinet (1971-1972)."
- Source

The Rumsfeld-Cheney-Nixon connection is also interesting:

"When President Richard M. Nixon selected Rumsfeld as White House counselor in 1970, Cheney joined him as his deputy. In August 1974, Gerald Ford assumed the presidency and asked Rumsfeld to be his chief of staff. Rumsfeld immediately sought out Cheney."
- Source

Rumsfeld never got press as a major Watergate player. But this is interesting:

"Rumsfeld was not entirely divorced from Nixon's political operations. There is no sign that he was involved in any of the illegalities of Watergate, but he was willing to offer Nixon other help of a not particularly exalted nature--some dirt on political enemies, some covert ties with a prominent pollster. The Nixon tapes reveal that Rumsfeld often worked with and was a special favorite of John Mitchell and Charles Colson, Nixon's roughest political operators, who viewed Rumsfeld as savvier than other White House aides."
- Source

Mitchell was an obstructor of justice, and Colson was a hatchet man. Rummy was close with those guys? Must be sweet to have a resume like that -- fits right in with the Bush administration.

-kgj

Oh, a sensitive one? You did know that dogs have been sent to space for suicide missions, didn't you? More than that, there are some
humans that many would like to see sent up there for just these kinds of missions.

Hey, be glad. They're going to trash the space shuttle program.

Not only that, the plan has no replacement in sight. X-37 is canned. Next generation launch vehicle is canned. That's excellent news! NASA is finally getting out of the transportation business after causing unimaginable damage by subsidizing commercial payloads on the shuttle (prior to the Challenger crash) and planning, spending millions of dollars and then cancelling at least seven shuttle replacements since then. With Uncle Sam and his tax dollars as your maybe-maybe-not competitor, what investor in his right mind would invest in the orbital transport business? With Uncle Sam and his tax dollars as a customer things start to look better for the first time in 30 years. Of course, lots of launches will go to the Usual Suspect (EELVs) and to "International participation" (i.e. Soyuz and Ariane) but some crumbs will fall in the direction of SpaceX and other entrepreneurs which will hopefully embarrass the Usual Suspects as much as possible with their costs.

"...Pursue commercial opportunities for providing transportation and other services..."

If you don't know what OpenWatcom is, then it's likely you don't care about it. Of course if you had the reading comprehension skills of a trained chimpanzee, you could tell from context that it's some kind of compiler. The sentence "the Watcom C/C++ and Fortran products will be the first mass market, proprietary compilers to be Open Sourced" kind of gives it away. If you still had questions you could have actually CLICKED ON THE FREAKING LINK and looked at the project web site, instead of whining that you aren't being spoon fed information.

How do *you* know the contents of simoniker's rejected story submission?

I know the original contents because - if you look at the posted story - it was written by me. That's what's weird about it. It shows up as rejected when I log in. I'm just wondering if it's yet another symptom of the various 500 errors. Another gremlin: my previous comment was submitted even though I clicked the preview button to check for any errors. When I clicked the submit button after only one preview, the response from the server was that the form had already been used and submitted. It didn't include everything that I wrote, but I figured why bother with another comment hat was substantially the same.

Correction to post: the $12 billion is not new money, but will be diverted from other NASA programs to the manned Moon/Mars program.

Also, the online chat transcript with NASA Chief Scientist/Astronaut Dr. John Grunsfeld discussing U.S. Space Policy is now online.

That's weird - simoniker slightly different headline but the rest of it is identical to the submitted post.

2004-01-14 21:33:38 It's Official: USA to the Moon and Mars by 2015 (articles,space) (rejected)

This afternoon George Bush announced space exploration plans for the USA to return to the Moon by 2015, the design and construction of a new space vehicle fleet by 2014 (called the Crew Exploration Vehicle) to replace the aging space shuttles which will be retired in 2010, and the construction of a permanent Moon base, followed by manned missions to Mars. The initiative begins with a $1 billion increase to NASA's budget and $12 billion in new space exploration money over next five years. However Congress is concerned about how to pay for the new space policy, initiative in the face of a $500 billion national budget deficit. AP via Yahoo has a Moon/Mars/space policy FAQ. NASA Chief Scientist/Astronaut Dr. John Grunsfeld will discuss U.S. Space Policy today at 5pm (ET) in an online chat. They want questions. More at NASA and the New York Times among others.

I know this comment may be somewhat OT but I had to add a comment. Anyone know what's going on with this? Maybe related to the many 500-class errors I've been getting lately?

That's weird - simoniker slightly different headline but the rest of it is identical to the submitted post.

2004-01-14 21:33:38 It's Official: USA to the Moon and Mars by 2015 (articles,space) (rejected)

This afternoon George Bush announced space exploration plans for the USA to return to the Moon by 2015, the design and construction of a new space vehicle fleet by 2014 (called the Crew Exploration Vehicle) to replace the aging space shuttles which will be retired in 2010, and the construction of a permanent Moon base, followed by manned missions to Mars. The initiative begins with a $1 billion increase to NASA's budget and $12 billion in new space exploration money over next five years. However Congress is concerned about how to pay for the new space policy, initiative in the face of a $500 billion national budget deficit. AP via Yahoo has a Moon/Mars/space policy FAQ. NASA Chief Scientist/Astronaut Dr. John Grunsfeld will discuss U.S. Space Policy today at 5pm (ET) in an online chat. They want questions. More at NASA and the New York Times among others.

I know this comment may be somewhat OT but I had to add a comment. Anyone know what's going on with this? Maybe related to the many 500-class errors I've been getting lately?

That's weird - simoniker slightly different headline but the rest of it is identical to the submitted post.

2004-01-14 21:33:38 It's Official: USA to the Moon and Mars by 2015 (articles,space) (rejected)

This afternoon George Bush announced space exploration plans for the USA to return to the Moon by 2015, the design and construction of a new space vehicle fleet by 2014 (called the Crew Exploration Vehicle) to replace the aging space shuttles which will be retired in 2010, and the construction of a permanent Moon base, followed by manned missions to Mars. The initiative begins with a $1 billion increase to NASA's budget and $12 billion in new space exploration money over next five years. However Congress is concerned about how to pay for the new space policy, initiative in the face of a $500 billion national budget deficit. AP via Yahoo has a Moon/Mars/space policy FAQ. NASA Chief Scientist/Astronaut Dr. John Grunsfeld will discuss U.S. Space Policy today at 5pm (ET) in an online chat. They want questions. More at NASA and the New York Times among others.

I know this comment may be somewhat OT but I had to add a comment. Anyone know what's going on with this? Maybe related to the many 500-class errors I've been getting lately?

That's not entirely accurate. Everyone's favorite pet spending program, Social Security, constitutes over one fifth of the federal budget, roughly half a trillion dollars, or just under 5% of GDP.

All that money, and, as far as I know, no one is expecting Social Security to give rise to any life-changing technological advances.

You think those explosions in the Australian outback are a coincidence? That ain't a fractionator mate, it's a launch tower! Those weren't gas explosions, they were rocket fuel!!! Think Dubya is being a mongrel by not signing Kyoto? It's not that he doesn't like it, just that it is irrelevant, 'cause he won't be here!!! Is he a bastard for tearing up the ABM treaty? He needs that gone so he can get his launch vehicles away! Dick's affilation with big business is just a front for the collection of global fatcats who will be riding the rocketship to freedom, away from environmental disaster.

Up until now the only bit we haven't been able to figure out has been the destination. Now we know! It's Mars!!! First stop will be the moon, from where Dubya and friends will move onto their new Martian Utopia while the rest of us fry back here on earth!!!

As I write this, I'm boucing through the outback, in a ute with my comrades, tinfoil akubra on my head. Our objective is to save civilisation from this menace . It's a tough mission, but someone's gotta do it. Wish us well and pray for us as we roll towards our destiny...

I'm all for space exploration, but this just strikes me as nothing more than a political game.

That $1 billion increase sounds good at first, but spread it out over 5 years, and you've got $200 million/year. On the other hand, increasing NASA's budget at a rate consistent even with November's unusually low inflation rate of 1.77% would give a yearly increase of $230 million. So, in the best case, they're treading water. (For comparison, NASA's 2004 budget received a roughly 3% increase over 2003.)

What about that other $12 billion in exploration money? It "will come from reallocation of $11 billion that is currently within the five-year total NASA budget of $86 billion". So, NASA just got 13% of their budget reallocated.

Aside from the apparent fiscal impotency of the plan, the thing is just dripping with political rhetoric. From the white house release: "From 1992 to 2000, NASA's budget decreased by a total of 5 percent. Since the year 2000, NASA's budget has increased by approximately 3 percent per year." What an interesting point to suddenly bring up! Why yes, it is an election year!

Transcript of the speech here Unfortuately the white house uses real audio/video:
audio

Transcript of the speech here Unfortuately the white house uses real audio/video:
audio

This argument never fails to frustrate me and I'm sure it's going to come up in this discussion.

Here's the thing, the federal budget is well over a trillion dollars. NASA's budget is around 17 billion. It's roughly 1 percent of the national budget. People get so scared about the word billion that they forget the scale of cash that the US has to allocate.

Does anyone honestly think that putting that bit of money elsewhere would solve whatever domestic problems you want fixed? Have we yet cured hunger, poverty, or undereducation? No? Well, we've been throwing billions at them so far. If you're looking for funds to cut and inefficiencies to uproot, look in defense and welfare. Diverting funds from NASA to domestic programs will not change anything except to kneecap our development as a multi-planet species.

Another misassumption is that if money is cut from one department, it automatically gets redistributed to others. That's not the way it works. And yes, I know we're running a deficit but a 1 billion increase over the next 5 years isn't going to contribute significantly to it. And IIRC, every administration except for 1 (maybe 2) has run a deficit and the country has not yet fallen.

But won't this cost a trillion dollars? No, not if done right. Father Bush's plan was scrapped because the estimate he was given was based on an outmoded model for Mars exploration. On top of that, it was subjected to a committee that took it as a chance to write themselves a blank check with their 90-day report. Bust the first was ignorant to any alternatives so he abandoned it. Read up on Mars Direct. It's a plan to do Mars missions on the same budgetary scale as the Apollo missions. Those were done for about the same budget that NASA currently gets. NASA doesn't need more money, just proper direction and it looks like they're finally getting some of that.

See my other post for more on the case for Mars and space exploration.

will this one do?

Uhm, well, since IANAL and my English vocabulary is a bit short in legal matters, I find it very hard to explain this properly. But trust me, we have a really hard problem here, something that will be used in big FUDslinging if we don't fix it.

Carter may or may not have been a failure as President (I am not giving an opinion) but he has definitly been a success since then, raising a lot of awareness about Habitat for Humanity. Read more if you are interrested.

have you travelled at all lately? things at airports have just gotten a little zany since the world trade center attacks...and people being pushed around or worse by airport security in the name of homeland security is not unheard of any more. while your step dad may have been able to get around security without much pressure to find the sheer insanity encompassing the airlines recently as something other than it is...i think it would be folly...and to see this as an unlikely event is included in this. (although it may have taperred off somewhat, i havn't flown recently and mabye people have calmed down a little...but i doubt it.)