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Netcraft Shows Smartech Running Ohio Election Servers
goombah99 writes "Netcraft is showing that an event happened in the Ohio 2004 election that is difficult to explain. The Secretary of State's website, which handles election reporting, normally is directed to an Ohio-based IP address hosted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center. On Nov. 3 2004, Netcraft shows the website pointing out of state to a server owned by Smartech Corp. According to the American Registry on Internet Numbers, Smartech's block of IP addresses 64.203.96.0 – 64.203.111.255 encompasses the entire range of addresses owned by the Republican National Committee. Smartech hosted the recently notorious gbw43.com domain used from the White House in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, from which thousands of White House emails vanished." Update: 04/25 01:24 GMT by KD : ePluribus Media published a piece called Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again on election eve 2006, when a similar DNS switch to Smartech occurred. They have been investigating the larger story of IT on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for two years.
Your own submission answers your question.
Nothing "changed" or was "transferred". http://election.sos.state.oh.us/ is a special web site in operation for elections. Otherwise, it points to http://www.sos.state.oh.us/ as it does now. It appears that the State of Ohio contracted with SmartTech for hosting, processing, and dissemination of the election results via the special elections web site, when it is in operation.
That probably won't be a good enough answer for people, though. Regardless, it appears that SmartTech has obvious ties to the Republican Party, and hosts many sites for various Republican political interests. The Secretary of State of Ohio is a partisan political position. This doesn't mean there aren't questions that can be raised or points to be debated.
The sad truth is that partisans are involved in just about every aspect of the voting and elections process, and that's not going to change, ever.
Witness the decades-old joke from Democratic stronghold cities: "Why did the Democrat walk into the cemetery? To thank his voters."
It's April 2007. Anyone who believes the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen (or not) isn't going to change what they think now.
All in favour of investigating this?
*Half of democrats and no republicans raise their hands*
All opposed?
*No democrats and every republican raise their hands*
No need to investigate then. Nothing to see here, move along!
Please tag this and similar articles ``nixon''!
1. How reliable is the Netcraft data? What would it take to hack Netcraft and make it look like there was a hack of the Ohio SOS?
2. What information do we have that the election.sos.state.oh.us domain was a part of the election procedures during the 2004 election?
3. Was the April 2006 change during a primary election?
Inquiring minds want to know...
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
"Can anyone suggest a good explanations (sic) for this seemingly dubious election-eve transfer?"
Somebody obviously hacked the Netcraft server to make it look like the Republicans were so stupid as to try to steal an election by using their own block of IPs. It also seems amazing that the GOP would wait until the last minute to change the DNS, as it can sometimes take a bit longer than expected for such a transfer to properly propagate. Heck, if they were smart enough to steal an election by changing the DNS, why not spoof the entry to make it look like it pointed to the Democrat Party?
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
This doesn't even pass the smell test.
As the Democrats' own statistician, Jasjeet Sekhon, who coauthored their 2004 post-election report said:
Are you kidding?
Bush makes Nixon look like a shiny, white pussy cat without a speck of dirt on him.
Bush. Worst. President. Ever.
Well, untill someone actually says "no, you can't do that", then he really DOES have the ability to do whatever he wants.
Example:
Shooting someone is illegal, yet you go out into times square and shoot someone in the face. A cop comes out and looks at the dead guy, looks at you, and sort of shrugs and walks off. Do you feel like you broke the law? What if you do it every day before work, and eventually a cop says "Hey, maybe it'd be a good idea to stop shooting people". Did you break the law then?
We really haven't done anything to show Bush that he is anything less than an absolute monarch in his kingdom.
Richard Nixon? You should call Mrs. Nixon and apologize. Richard Nixon may have been a crook, BUT HE WAS A COMPETANT CROOK. GWB doesn't hold a candle to Nixon.
At this point GWB is neck and neck with Harding for worst.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Today's Guardian includes this interesting piece entitled "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps". Guess how many steps down the path we are?
For the benefit of those who won't read it, here's the ten points.
And in other news: Jessica Lynch comes out and condemns the Hollywood show they made of the incident she was involved in.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I don't think there is anything especially nefarious about a state agency and the RNC contracting for hosting with the same company. Big deal. They probably both buy stuff from Wal-Mart too. I think somebody with an axe to grind is leaping to a conclusion that simply is not merited by the evidence given here.
If you really want to do something, get a "no consecutive terms on Capitol Hill" law enacted in your own state. Make them come home and live under the laws they passed for the past two to six years while holding an elected office. Eliminate their special pension plans, forcing them to live under the same Social Security and Medicare plan they force everyone else to live under.
Change in the way our government works will not occur until the people wise up and realize they're being strung along with lots of lip service and "feel good" knee-jerk reaction laws.
I have no plans to hold my breath waiting for that change, however.
OCO is Loco
Personally, anyone found to be a participant in voter fraud should be barred for life from voting.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
think of an explanation.
On election day, the people who run the SOS's DNS point election.sos.state.oh.us to a contractor who has contracted to provide "real time" updates from election data, something the SOS's staff is not equipped to do.
That vendor markets hosting services to political and government entities. It unwisely assigns a governmental web site from the very next block of addresses that are given to a political client, and unfortunately that block of addresses has become implicated in a serious scandal. Note the address is not in the RNC owned block (contrary to the article's title).
Now there are a gazillion possible ethical temptations that marketing yourself to political and government entities entails. So contracts let to such companies should be looked at very closely. But this is no smoking gun; or if there is smoke, it is more likely to involve improper contract selection than anything else.
So, it bears looking into, but is nothing to get excited about yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually you do need to go on, but please don't.
"Failure to rescue Iranian hostages."
Excuse me? Don't you remember that they came out alive? Is there some better outcome that you expected? I bet I know what it is, we didn't bomb, strafe and kill to get the hostages back, and that makes you mad. Of course if we did then almost certainly many of the hostages would have been killed as a result, but hey, YOU weren't a hostage, and not killing to get them back makes you mad. What a monstrosity, no wonder you love Bush.
The economy isn't blasting along. Spending is. It's not the same thing. It's just digging a hole that will have to be got out of later, somehow.
On a side note the Geneva conventions are "quaint" and "obsolete," particularly when applied to warfare with cultures that don't recognize said conventions. Also, there are a lot of conventions and protocols that fall under the catch all term of "Geneva Conventions," and not all of them are readily applicable to warfare with "terrorists."
I'd also say it's sad commentary that Slashdotters are so willing to mod up anti-Bush rhetoric, without support for those mis-guided conclusions.
Then again, everyone likes a scape-goat just as much as they like a panacea.
Just because the other side isn't following the rules set by the Geneva Conventions doesn't mean we are freed from the responsibilities of following them. I'm pretty sure we're bound by them regardless of the antics of our enemies. I'll have to do some research to back this up, but I'm willing to bet there is no clause that waives your responsibilities to follow GC under certain circumstances.
The Dow Jones Average is up, but most individual stocks are still trading low and many companies are posting lower-than-average numbers. You can't look at the average itself and use that as a reliable indicator of the health of the economy. The same with the unemployment rate. What you have to look at are correlations of average salary versus the average cost of living.
IAALS.
I've done stat analysis too. I concur with you that accusations based on statistical about what happened in florida don't seem to be strongly supported. That is to say the statistics are not conclusive. But I've also follwed the ohio reports pretty closely too. Some of the reports are incorrect. But some can't be so easily debunked. The strongest cases indicate that shoddy voting equipment created long lines that detered voters in selected precincts. It's also now certain that the recounts were rigged (they precounted then selected the precincts without problems for the official counts. And there are precints where the votes and voters don't add up. You always expect some of that so one can never really put a finger on if there was too much or too little. All very statistically nebulous. and hence an opportunity to tilt things and hide in the noise.
This is why getting the results early and having the ability to delay posting them enlarges the opportunity for dirty tricks. For example here's a sort of maxwell's deamon way to rig an eleciton completely legally. If you look at the early returns you will see lots of mistakes. Some will go in your favor some will go against you. If you selectively inquire with precinct judges only on the cases where the votes go against you, you can make gains. Indeed both parties routinely do this after the elections so that's not even science fiction. But now suppose your party, and only your party, is magically granted the power to do this on election night itself. Getting totals "fixed" is a lot easier when things are in flux. a simple phone call can say "Hey that can't be right, read those numbers again" will get you an updated total. After the election is done getting changes is much harder. Hence eraly knowledge helps. Running the reporting site would be a windfall.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yes, about 5 minutes after Reagan took office.
Doesn't that strike you as a bit suspicious? There's been a lot of speculation about Reagan making a deal with the Iranians.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Are you kidding me?
I initially tried to respond to your post, but the list of scandals alone the Bush Administration has been involved with, in addition to economic performance and the overall failure of the Iraq War, was just too much to put in.
The worst you can say about Carter is that he fucked up a rescue attempt in Iran.
The worst you can say about Bush? Torture, signing statements, Katrina, wireless NSA tapping, etc., etc., etc., and that doesn't even count that gawd awful mess we're dealing with in Iraq.
Please. There's no comparison.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The economy sucked under Carter. However, any economist worth their salt will tell you that this was an unavoidable consequence of global factors, including our exit from Viet Nam. There was also the fact that the Fed was still applying, what Greenspan would later prove to be a losing strategy for managing inflation. None of this was under Carter's control.
Well, I'm pretty sure the president appoints the members of the Federal Reserve. As president, he should have acted to reverse their course through whatever means he has as Executive in Chief. Saying their was nothing he could do is a cop-out. That's a lot like the other side saying Clinton had nothing to do with economic expansion. Presidents own their economies and have the power to right the ships, no matter how politically unpopular it is.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
The key thing is that the middle class is going away. You are either rich or poor. No in between as the US manufacturing base has gone to the orient. Yeah, there are tons of jobs clerking in stores or flipping burgers. Those count towards the employment statistics. Real wages and buying power are dropping, and have been since 1979 according to the CS Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0211/p03s01-usec.htm l
I used to work in telecom (MCI), now I work in the medical field and make less money. Not only that, all my recurring bills have gone up. I know I have way less disposable income than I had 8 years ago.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
The unemployment rate itself means nothing if the income is not stated for the employment.- 02-23-fed-incomes_x.htm
n g-and-investing-what-is-a-stock-market-index/
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2006
The statements about the stock market are meaningless without knowing where the indexes come from, how they are derived, and most importantly: using multiple specific indexes centered around economic health stock indicators.
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/04/13/savi
Gas prices are around $3.20/Gal here and have been going up. It is getting to the point that it is no longer news worthy to report on the astronomic gas prices because they are becomming a standard. With the major gas companies all reporting record profits and bonuses for the upper management, there is a disconnect between the welfare of the people and the inherrant corporate goals of making a profit for such a vital infrastructure as gasoline. I hope I'm not alone in thinking that some services should be regulated by the government. If only to limit the maximum percentage of personal profit from sales of a vital infrastructure.
If we don't need to push alternative fuel souorces right now with aggressive legislation, then we should have the resources to keep our country running without sending additional billions overseas for oil. Paying the areas of the world that supposedly harbor terrorists. They have an economy just like ours, if there is an influx of money in a region then they prosper. "Trickle down" to the enemy is a bad way to support our troops. This government has reversed and hobbled legislation that could have kept us in the front running technology to become independant. No specific technology will help us now. It must be a multifacited environmental/political/economic push to be better at providing and distributing what we consume. Trash, electricity, and commuting fuel all need to be addressed a whole lot better than they are now. The political grandstanding and photo ops don't cut it. Real action and real commitment from the people in charge (automakers and elected officials) will keep this country a world power, or let it fall into mockery on the world stage, their actions will lead us, and we are responsible for our complicity.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Care to cite references that say we're "kicking ass" in Afghanistan?
Google "Taliban 2007" for all the reference you need.
You'd think the administration and the Pentagon would be quick to hype up the ass-kicking to deflect against Iraq.
The Admin does. The Pentagon does not. The press ignores both.
Next, you say:
If you believe the mass media have any sort of "left" agenda, or have any agenda whatsoever beyond getting the next advertising deal, you need to buy more tinfoil.
and
And yes, I do see combatant body counts. All the time, in fact, and you would too if you read media outside of the US or read some non-mainstream news sources, or at least not the "big" outlets.
Which kinda proves my point. The US media does not present any US military victories, just "how many US soldiers died today." Why should I have to go outside US media outlets to find out how many "insurgents" we are killing vs. how many soldiers we are losing. It's kinda hard to keep score when all you see is how many scores opponent has. Don't get me wrong, this is not a game, but if we attack an Al Qaeda stronghold and kill 10,000 insurgents and lose 5 US soldiers, all I see reported is how Al Qaeda killed five soldiers today. Are you telling me that's not pushing an agenda?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The top 10% of earners pay 70% of the taxes. If that isn't "sharing the wealth," then socialism is much nastier than I thought.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
How many people even remember the topic of this Slashdot story at this point?
The Matrix so completely has you...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In your world,
You don't think the tax revenue from the capitol gains cut and the roth IRA conversion which was temporary had anything to do with this do you?
And I'm wondering about,
You don't think this had anything to do with the oil embargo do you? Or could it be the government price controls that lead people to believe tankers were waiting just outside US waters waiting on the government to increase the market cap?
Could this be because Reagan ended up outspending the russians and with his famous MAD scenario, took the only real leverage the Russians had off the table?
Could this pass be also because Clinton started the spying on the Internet and the programs only matured under Bush? Green lantern?
well, To be truthful, I don't have any questions here, just some clarifications. Leaking of wilson's name or more precisely his wife, PLame was done by Richard Armatage, a democrat and the special council knew this from the very beginning of his investigation. But more importantly, The land deal was a direct result of Carters policy and the collapse of the savings and loans along with the loss of farms too.
Carter tried to improve the economy by letting the banks invest directly in real estate were before all they could do is back a loan and broker the sale of a mortgage. When the banks dumped all their money into it, it drove real estate prices through the roof and eventually caused the bottom to fall out of the market once the prices for land became so high, a normal person couldn't afford it anymore. This forced the banks to scramble for funds to operate and they started foreclosing on mortgages in an attempt to bring cash flow into the system. Eventually this backfired and caused the loan collapse and the rose law firm was right in the middle of it with the Whitewater land speculation.
But because of this, Farmers were seeing land prices go from $25 -$100 an acre to over $2500 and acre and they took loans out to buy modernized farm equipment with the expectations that the prices would continue to rise and with the increased productivity of the new equipment they thought they could sell a few acres and afford the payments. once the banks dropped and the bottom fell forcing the bailouts, these farmers now owned a huge sum that they couldn't plant themselves out of and their land values dropped so much that selling the farm wouldn't even cover it.
This leads us into the farm crisis were family farms were being foreclosed to cover the debts of the banks and eventually the savings and loan bailout. The good thing about this was the instillation of the FDIC insurance and limits to the amounts of money that can be loaned out with a required amount to be placed in reserve.
Unfortunately, All this good stuff could have been avoided with a little more government oversight and some limits imposed on the banks concerning the investment properties. IT should have works on paper but failed miserably in practice. If you are old enough to remember how life was back then, you will know that it is much better today is and how wrong of a statement losing money on a failed
I bet I know what it is, we didn't bomb, strafe and kill to get the hostages back, and that makes you mad. -- No, it made me feel humiliated, as did the rest of the country.
Behold, most of what's wrong with the US in just one sentence.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Gas is 2.87 a gallon nation-wide. It peaked at an average of about $3 per gallon last year and the year before. I'm unable to find good graphs with this previous year's data on them, but it looks like the peak was around $3 in today's dollars; I should remind you that we're not being embargoed, and it's still almost as bad as it was then. The media disbanded the Iraqi army? The media put incompetent partisan hacks in charge of the reconstruction effort? The media decided that torture was a great idea? "Kicking major ass" isn't a foreign policy goal, it's a movie tagline--and it's a stupid euphemism for "killing lots of people". Pretending to be the Golden Horde doesn't work when you're also pretending to be George Marshall. Don't blather on about how you're the armies of goodness and light when you also want to kill kill kill, and those corpses were probably Al Qaeda anyway.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
For every worker who becomes unemployed, I'd bet there are plenty more who move to lower-paying jobs, lose benefits, take pay cuts, and otherwise end up in a worse situation than they started in.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"The top 10% of earners pay 70% of the taxes. If that isn't "sharing the wealth," then socialism is much nastier than I thought."
Fascinating, that 10% you're talking about also earns 95% of the countries wealth in a year! Meanwhile the 90% that earns 5% of the country's wealth each year is paying 30% of the taxes! Wow, what a burden that must be for the bottom 90%, paying 6 times the rate the top 10% does.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
If so, wouldn't that be a violation of the Logan Act that all the conservatives claim (incorrectly) that Pelosi violated?
In fact, it's rather hard to imagine a scenario where the hostages get released minutes after Reagan takes office that doesn't entail a violation of the Logan Act.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Sometimes you just gotta feed the trolls?
around 30 reasons
30? I mean I know it was a new one every day, but I didn't realize we were up to 30.
Why does the far left support groups like Hamas and Al Quada
Here's a relatively simple answer: They don't. Opposing the war in Iraq ~= support for Al Quaeda. That's a pretty important point to grasp. In fact, if you can't grasp how that is possible, ho boy, I really don't know where to start.
And you actually explain cogently why lefties don't support Muslim terror groups- you are absolutely right, no feminist or gay would ever welcome sharia law. QED.
That's another problem with the far left. Its inability to allow others to argue their side.
Yeah, cuz it's not like Tom Delay accused Reid of treason today, or anything. It's all on the left, huh.
And I personally love it when people whine about their anticipation of getting modded down. Especially those who tend to criticize the supposed 'victim culture' in the US. Poor me, people criticize my dumb ideas.
Hell, one single item, small children being imprisoned for the political beliefs of the parents, was a good enough reason.
And now they get blown up b/c of the religious beliefs of their parents. Big improvement.
Listen, people on the really far left tend to piss me off. But they aren't the problem here. The problem is that we had a bad plan for Iraq and implemented it poorly, and it all comes back to senior leadership. Even if one accepts that removing Saddam's regime was the right thing to do for humanitarian reasons (a position I can support in principle), everything else with Iraq (too light a force, no post-fall-of-Baghdad plan, dissolution of the Army, etc.) has been a complete cock-up that has cost lives and billions of dollars. I can't pretend to know the right course of action going forward, but it should be led by someone new. Hell, let's swap Bush 41 back in there, or something.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
My Gods!
The Secretary of State is an elected, partisan position in every single state of the union. However, the "vote counting" is done at the local precinct level, usually by county elections staff which in some cases are elected, some cases appointed, some cases partisan, some not.
The web site in question is just a site for reporting result to the electorate. It has nothing to do with how the votes are counted.
This is akin to Fox News screaming, "Oh, look, somebody, PBS's web site is run by a company that is owned by a man who makes huge donations to the DNC!"
The simple fact is, the state of Ohio contracted out to a web hosting service to handle increased traffic on its web site for election returns. The site itself has nothing to do with how the votes are counted or managed. It is a report only.
Are /.'ers that dense and so ready to cry foul?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Yep, good old Reagan supplying Iran with illegal arms to make a political game of freeing the hostages. What a great man, proving that by Iran taking hostages, we will bend over backwards to give them whatever they want by negotiating with terrorists. Got to love revisionist history. I'll bet you blame the way Bush trashed the economy on Clinton somehow too! (all good neo-cons can trace every problem in the world back to Clinton in 3 steps or less)
P.S. shouldn't your alias be "Archie B" as in Bunker?
"But this one goes to 11!"
Social Security isn't a replacement for your personal 401(k), it's an insurance policy in case you get disabled or old. You can also think of it as a tax we pay so that we don't have old, sick, dying people filling up our sidewalks. (Well, to the extent that we would without it--we'd have six times the number of seniors in poverty that we do now.) You can't opt out of that any more than you can opt out of coverage by your local police and fire departments.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The unemployment rate is below 5%. It doesn't get much better without forced labor!
While 5% unemployment is generally regarded as very good, the economist's term "unemployed" does not accurately capture the number of people not working in the country. The term "unemployment" is actually the number of people who have recently applied for unemployment benefits, or who are temporarily unemployed but still seeking work. This number is reported to the government, which explains the problem right there-- there are lots of people who do not work for one reason or another, and either they don't tell anyone, or those responsible for collecting the figures disqualify them from that category. I think it is fair to say that the actual population of people who are eligible to be working, which is probably what most people think of when they hear the term "unemployed", is in dispute, but probably higher than the unemployment figure that you quote.
The stock market is at near record highs. It has never passed 13000. Right now the Dow is at 12,983.19. The stock market has never been better!
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is the figure you are quoting, is merely an indicator of the performance of the 30 companies which comprise the DJIA. In some sense, the DJIA is a good indicator-- it quickly and intuitively tells you how the "top" 30 companies are doing. These companies certainly have some bearing on the stock market, but as you can see, it glosses over some important component markets, like housing, which is (comparitively) in trouble. Now the DJIA's selection of companies is chosen by the editors of the Wall St. Journal. It's not too hard to see some potential conflicts of interest there, but the really interesting thing is that since the list of companies changes over time, it's not particularly useful to compare current DJIA figures with past ones, since it's not really measuring the same thing. We also need to take into account that the stock market is a world phenomenon, and there is currently tremendous growth in China, so the performance of the stock market as a whole should not be taken to apply to any one particular trade or state of any particular country's economy, ours included.
Also, gas is cheaper today than it was in 1979...
You're right here. We are, unfortunately, accustomed to the extremely low oil prices of the 1990's. Oil is a hot-button issue for many reasons which I do not care to enumerate, none of which drilling in Alaska will even begin to address (except, of course, those people who directly benefit from drilling in Alaska).
I beg to differ on the "losing" portion of your propaganda.
I beg to differ with the "kicking ass" portion of your propaganda. Look, folks-- you can't "win" a "war on terrorism" by combat alone. Let me ask you this-- are we killing more "terrorists" than we're creating? Is it even fair to say that the militiamen that we're killing are "terrorists"? Sure, the people we are fighting are frequently savage, and hardly conform to the Western idea of "just", but let's put this in perspective: nearly all of the people we are fighting had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole, Madrid train bombings, UK bus bombings, Oklahoma City, or any other act of terrorism that has affected the West. Furthermore, many of these fighters were essentially kids when 9/11 happened, as are many of our own military forces. Where did they come from? Is there a big "terrorist" factory out there, or is it the fact that, to them, we are foreign invaders, combined with decades (to put it mildly) of ethnic and religious hatred that is creating a bad and worsening situation over there. Go ahead, try to answer me simply. You
Umm, even if this is true, so what? Let's say the Republican conspiracy controlled the Ohio Secretary of State website. How does this help them steal the Ohio electoral votes? It doesn't change thc actual vote counting. What, was the Secretary of State and his web staff desperately trying to get the "real" vote totals out, only to have the Republicans put fake numbers on the website? These people had no other media access other than their own website? Where are they now?
What branch of the US Armed Forces did you serve in???? Nope, didn't think so - and I'm pretty sure you fall into that age category which is still acceptable to military service - but no doubt you have some irrational excuse as to why you aren't over there fighting Bush's War on Terra.
Today the American soldier fights and dies for Halliburton, this time next year they'll be fighting and dying for Halliburton, a Dubai corporation.....
Let's not sully the English language by referring to what was being tossed out of the White House as intelligence. There was overwhelming evidence at the time that the case for war was non-existant - pointing this out cost many civil servants their careers and lives. Trying to pass the buck to Britain is especially rich. Do you remember David Kelly, or did you just shut off your brain for the six months prior to the invasion?
It wasn't until Carter's Treasury Dept. folks decided to change how taxation was going to apply to religious private schools in the south that this particular voting block switched sides overnight. This resulted in the Republicans being saddled with the religious right and forever screwing up the right wing and American politics.
That does not follow. Even if we stipulate for this argument that your identified lynchpin did result in the then-democratic voting incipient "religious right" (hereafter "theocrats") to abandon the Democrats. However, it was purely the fault of the Republicans that they accepted this albatross in hopes of building a lasting power base. As a Democrat, Carter did the right thing to chase these whackos out of his party; the sensible thing would have been to let the organization wither and decay, like Segregationists and the Bull Moose Populist parties have. But no, the Republicans were too desperate and wanted to quickly overcome the distrust from Nixon, Agnew, and Ford too soon.
This is your fault. You held your nose and kissed 'em, and let politics make strange bedfellows, and if you haven't the stomach for a divorce by now (even despite the up-front pain and cost) then that's COMPLETELY your own fscking fault.
(I also suspect, but cannot prove, that you misidentify the key split point. I think the faction split was started when the Dixiecrats lost the desegregation fight and started bailing — there are enough common players that it looks fishy. However, that just may be co-locallity of the time frame of political involvement, and the need to take one side or another. Still, a lot of people who chose poorly are still far too prominent and too far whack.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
So, Reagen gets all the credit for "saving" the hostages immediately after assuming office, but Clinton gets all the blame for 9/11 over 9 months after he's gone from office?
"Could this be because Reagan ended up outspending the russians and with his famous MAD scenario, took the only real leverage the Russians had off the table?"
Its more likely the Soviet Union collapsed be because the Russians foolishly got bogged down in a decade long war in Afghanistan. A war that tore Russia apart from the inside. The scarred veterans returning from the horrors of Afghanistan were an integral part of the uprising against the Communist party that sent them there.
The only credit I'm willing to give Reagan in toppling the Soviet Union was the weapons he gave the Muhjadeen. As a cruel and ironic twist it turns out he was also helping build the Taliban and Al Qaeda at the same time. Reagan's arms build up had no clearly defined role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its main accomplishment was to enrich U.S. defense contractors. Most of the weapons he spent massive sums on were a joke, Star Wars never did anything worthwhile, his battleships were billion dollar artillery pieces that just diverted funds from more useful projects, and the B-2 and B-1B were a complete joke that are largely shunned to this day in favor of the B-52 which cost a fraction of the price.
I would give far more credit to Pope John Paul and Gorbachev for toppling the U.S.S.R than Reagan. They used peaceful persuasion, and accomplished a lot more, than squandering money on staggeringly expensive and largely ineffective weapons.
@de_machina
"Are you saying that wealthy people use more highways, police, fire services, etc. then poor people?"
Considering that a fair amount of the services protect investments by the wealthy, protect the wealthy from the vagaries of social upheavals and provide protection of the owners from foreign incursions, that would be an entirely reasonable view to take.
Compare with previous aristocratic and feudal societies; the upper classes could protect themselves by keeping armed forces, but it more or less always eventually ended up with either outsiders or insiders in their armed forces eventually realizing that the rich were fewer and they could beat them up (or send them to gulag, or chop their heads off, as it were) and take their money.
The benefits to the poorest may be large in monetary value compared to what they pay, but the more intanglible value of not constantly worrying about wether your liutenant or brother is going to stab you in the back, wether the workers are going to band together and execute you, etc, is worth quite a lot. Not to mention the amount of money you save by not being engaged in a constant arms race with your neighbours.
The U.S government is working with groups like the ACLU to systematically suppress Christians and Jews while elevating Muslims to "untouchable" status and people are looking for conspiracies in ip addresses and delete emails. For years, liberals have been crying about separation of church & state regarding issues like prayer in school and the word "god" in the Pledge of Allegiance. They've been pushing for unrestricted abortions. Now, anyone can kill their baby and Muslims are being given special prayer privileges in public schools all over the country. On top of that, the U.S government is prosecuting Marines for alleged crimes that were originally reported to US journalists from enemy combatant. If we fought WWI and WWII this way, we'd all be speaking German. Soldiers are now wearing cameras on their helmets to prove that they were fired upon first when they engage the enemy. This is sad.
I'm an independent agnostic, but something just doesn't seem right about this. It looks to me like the end goal is to make the U.S a Muslim country. First, let's send our military to the Middle East, politicize the war to the point that they can no longer defend themselves and let them all die. Then let's let anyone and everyone kill their babies. Next, lets make Muslims in the U.S completely untouchable in the name of their religious beliefs, but not afford that same privilege to any other religion.
Sorry, but where election results are hosted just isn't important to me. Especially when who is sitting in the White House really isn't all that important. Bush is supposed to be a conservative, but he has no balls. As soon as Hillary is elected, you can say hello to the Islamic Republic of America. I'm not sure it would be any different if Republican managed to pull it off. Everyone is set on guilting America into golbal submission.