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FBI, IRS Raid Home of Sen. Ted Stevens
A while back we discussed the corruption investigation aimed at Alaska Sen. Ted "series of tubes" Stevens. A number of readers sent us word that the home of Sen. Stevens was raided earlier today by agents of the FBI and the IRS. The focus of the raid was a remodeling project at Stevens's home and the involvement of VECO, an oil company.
who had the bridge to nowheres built. But since this article doesn't pertain to that, I won't go there...
...and this is the thanks you get.
... so vote for Ron Paul, who will help reduce the government's power. :)
Just think of a men's Federal prison as a bunch of tubes.
that prison isn't also a series of tubes.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
how about a little lol at Mr. Stevens expense?
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
The obvious question is: What about the bills that weren't sent to you?
To me, that seems to be the heart of the investigation.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
He should have gotten his tubes tied earlier... :-p
No big deal. Ted's 86 years old. He's independently wealthy. This is just a stage show for the government to have something to feed to the media to quell the questions about complete and utter lack of ethics and the exploitation of loopholes for their own benefit.
Whatever they find on Ted they could just as easily find on 95% of Capitol Hill, from elected officials to appointed positions to chauffers to the FBI/CIA/NSA agents themselves.
We'll hear about Ted's little corner of the conspiracy theory, maybe he'll get sacked out of his office, and then he'll retire to his home, the population will be exhausted from the effort, and the other 95% will continue along their merry way to robbing us all blind.
Don't US Senators have an appreciable amount of immunity from any real criminal prosecution, anyway? I don't know for certain. That's only what I recall from $somewhere. That could be wrong.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
People in Alaksa don't pay taxes. The government PAYS people that live in Alaksa to live there. I'm moving to Alaksa, along with all the other losers.
I don't think I'll make it as far as Alaksa. Probably stop in British Columbia.
You can't blame Ted Stevens here. If his understanding of federal corruption laws is anything like his understanding of Net Neutrality, he probably thought all those free upgrades to his house were perfectly legal.
/sarcasm
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
"As a practical matter, I will tell you. We paid every bill that was given to us," Stevens told reporters. "Every bill that was sent to us has been paid, personally, with our own money, and that's all there is to it. It's our own money." Yeah, like I would pay someone else's utility bill.
the innernats
the intarweb
this whole "series of tubes" metaphor in my mind reduced IT guys to nothing but plumbers 2.0
and IT guys with exposed asscrack is not a mental image i cherished
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They just want to clean out the tubes he laid in his remodeling job.
Dude, where's my packet?
I know a lot of people think it's a funny idea, but prison sodomy is actually not very funny at all. It can lead to the transmission of AIDS, HIV, or other diseases. It can lead to a destroyed psyche. There is, of course, the brutal physical damage it causes. So it's really not humorous at all.
NO!
Really .. His analogy of tubes is one of the best I have ever heard. And I am not trying to be funny.
..
..
I think its funny that people make fun of him for it. The way he presented it was funny. His voice is funny. But not the idea behind 'tubes' Because really , thats one of the best ways to explain it to someone that has no understanding of what it is
The "Internet" is simply a network of networks
The connections between "networks" is really just a tube for data to flow through.
But anywat
Now if he would have just got his tubes tied like his wife said, he wouldn't have gotten into this problem... Men, know your limits!
I guess it's worthless at this point to ask for you to support your outlandish claims which are completely devoid of any form of evidence. Not only because you won't provide it but because you can't. You have no evidence or support for your claims.
The only reason you are getting modded up is because any and every conspiracy theory gets modded up these days.
Mods, prove me wrong. Moderate this idiot down. Prove to me Slashdot hasn't been completely lost all reason. Don't believe he is a troll? Just check out his journal entries.
Ron Paul? And hand power to the conspiracy nuts? That sounds like a great idea.
Stevens' Washington, D.C., lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, said he had a "longstanding practice not to comment on such matters" and would not answer any questions about the raid.
Yeah, back in his moonshining days ol' Ted learned a lot.
The oil company knows all about oil pipelines, right? So Stevens enlisted their help in his remodeling project: he wants more and bigger intertubes going to his house, so that the internets that he sends to his secretaries get there faster. The problem is, terrorists could be hiding in these tubes -- oh noes! Cue the FBI.
Oh, and the IRS got involved for the hell of it. [sarcasm]Might as well, he can probably afford to pay more taxes, just like everyone else.[/sarcasm]
Legalize it.
... It's a series of frauds!
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
The government PAYS people that live in Alaksa to live there.
Seriously ?
Seriously.
The money collected from other sources (notably north slope oil pumping and transport) are far more than the state government needs for its own function.
Rather than finding new ways to waste it, the more-than-slightly libertarian-leaning politicians decided to do away with other taxes - notably income and property tax.
But they still had a big surplus. So they decided to distribute it to the citizens. Even a libertarian can support this as a move in the right direction, since most of the money comes from selling off a resource "owned in common by the citizens of the state". If the government sells it, the citizen-owners should each get their share of the proceeds, right?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, yes, it does.
We've got Congressmen, as well as many lesser bureaucrats, dropping left and right from scandals. Corporations are buying laws. We keep getting involved in Middle East conflicts for stupid reasons.
Do you seriously think no one's trying to screw the country over when dozens of people have been exposed trying to do just that?
...soooo, a guy who steals a tv should be ass-raped for it?
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
The Ted Steven's type politician will not go away until campaign contributions are permitted only from registered voters from a candidate's district. I should be permitted to give money to only those candidates I am allowed to vote for.
Yeah, from 1600 Pennsylvania to the Library of Congress (go look at a map), there's a lot of corrruption, but the figure of 95% does those that have tried and failed to remove corruption a bad disservice.
I find it odd to be defending some of these people, but indeed there are a strong number/percentage that don't take bribes, don't push their own projects in legislation, aren't on the take, have asked for campaign funding reform, and actually have a real heart-- and even a few that didn't vote for the war (for reasons good and bad).
Might Senator Stevens be guilty? Maybe. We let a trial by a judge (if selected by the defense) or a jury decide this, unless there's an admission of guilt or direct evidence to the contrary.
It's called due process, and everyone from scum to saints gets and deserves it. Even those that damn everyone with one brush.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I think it depends on what kind of person you want to come back from prison after his term is over. The way we generally do it, it is a wonder that the recividism rate is not much, much higher because the prisoners aren't rehabilitated much at all.
If you want a prisoner to come out who is neither predator nor preyed upon and who is ready to rejoin society in a responsible manner, then their prison sentences need to be spent in a way that furthers that goal. That means that their prison life needs to be as close to normal as possible. That includes education and job training to enable them to live productively on the outside.
I really don't think anyone should be released from jail or prison until they at least have a GED.
Make prison life reasonably normal instead of a concrete jungle with life threatening dangers at every turn and you will save a lot of money as well because of the reduction in the costs of keeping a prisoner there and because of a lower recividsm rate afterwards.
People are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
They give the 2 republicans notice that they were under investigation, and then several weeks later do a "surprise" raid. What do you bet that all evidence had LONG disappeared. I would not be the least bit surprised to find out that the senator (and shortly the congressman), got notice of when and where the "surprise" raid would occur. Just imagine if they had done this with the Lousiana congressman jefferson. All that bribe money would have disappeared.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Are you saying it's better to leave it in the hands of the...conspirators?
What?
But jails are a private enterprise, and by lowering the recidivism rate, they are getting rid of their cash flow. The prisons aren't interested in rehabilitating people, and the health insurance companies aren't interested in providing health care. That's what happens when things that should be socially funded get turned into a money making scheme.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Yep. He sure is. Perceptive, aren't you?
...but is it art?
testing... please mod down.
Do you seriously think handing power to someone who holds insane views is a way to fix corruption? I know he comes across as a genial, harmless old duffer, but he displays all the usual crank libertarian beliefs in hokey alternative medicine and the evils of government (yet wants to run for it). He's overdue for a zimmer frame, an aspirin and a nice lie down.
Thanks for the Republican attempt at humor. That's perceptive of me, too, right?
--
make install -not war
If you're going to sentence someone to sodomy and near-starvation, you'd better go ahead and kill them.
Only perceptive if it's true, I'm afraid.
...but is it art?
How the hell is this story "news for nerds"? Why all the politics shit? Even kuro5hin has less political bs.
Darn, I never thought I'd live to see the day when I'd say the following: bring back Michael Sims. He was bad, but not half as bad as these loser moderators we have now.
Yes. That's too good for anybody who steals anything.
No, just the strawman.
>>> I know a lot of people think it's a funny idea, but prison sodomy is actually not very funny at all. It can lead to the transmission of AIDS, HIV, or other diseases. It can lead to a destroyed psyche. There is, of course, the brutal physical damage it causes. So it's really not humorous at all.
> Jeez, what do you want in Prison, Club Med?
What do you think the reaction would be if a large percentage of the prisoners captured in Iraq were ass-raped?
So this just shows both sides are corrupt.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I agree, everything from evolution to global warming being caused by your gas-guzzling SUV is a Democrat conspiracy. If those pesky Democrats weren't around reality wouldn't keep getting in the way of our predisposed opinions!
Personally, I tagged this story: 'voteforrepublicansisavoteforvictory'. Because Republicans are ftw.
Yeah...damn the fact that he made his career as a successful doctor before his run in politics. Oh and there is that whole retired veteran thing...then there is that pesky business of being a fiscal conservative. But he says we hold some responsibility for the attacks (go read your history book please, we have been screwing with the governments of the middle east for AGES) and that criminal scum Ghouliani (worth $7k at divorce but $30 million after 9/11) says he hates America and receives rounds of applause from moron kneejerk "towelhead" hating nutjobs.
It is depressing to me that the media spins him as some psycho conspiracy nut and even more that people believe it. In the meantime we readily cheer on our warhawks who dodged the service and then vote for war, and then call those who served a full 20 cowards for voting against it.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
So now we have to see articles about everything and anything Ted Stevens? The only thing these articles provide for nerds are more opportunities for stale tubes jokes.
And this from the same bunch who defended Al Gore when he - and I quote - "took the initiative in creating the Internet." He was involved in plenty of scandals. Did we post every last one so we could make more Internet jokes?
Why don't we just change this site to "News for political trolls. Stuff nobody cares about."
You really should just write a script to do this. Check /., see if there's a kdawson post, submit a flame. Just have your cron daemon run it every 10 minutes, and you'll get a much sooner posting time.
Your incapacity for guilt is of no interest to me. That's not what I responded to.
Instead, you purport that that 95% of (let's call them elected officials and other government types) have innate "naivete which indirectly supports the position of those who do abuse their priveleges(sic)."
In fact, you're presumptuous and have come to an incorrect conclusion from that presumption. I've been on the Hill, and started with a very sanguine view of the net results of elected official's output. I found many of my sample of appointed and elected officials to be genuinely aghast at what goes on in the hands of a very powerful few. The money in Washington is both stupefying and unbelievable, and it comes both from domestic and international sources.
Your dismissive attitude betrays your own naivete. You can toss you hands in the air, and watch the train wreck, or you can try to throw the switch. The choice is yours. Give up easily and we can know the score without watching what happens. Become a part of a process that changes it and you can have a real effect on the outcome. But I doubt you believe this. Armchair criticism, methinks.... cheap thrill.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
GWB was only a 1 term gov of texas. He was the PURE outsider in terms of holding positions. And by an AC who spoke out against engineers, he wanted a historian (turns out that GWB has a BS in history). Be careful what you wish for. You may already have it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Even assuming that you're right about him being insane, I'd prefer an eccentric person who isn't planning to screw me over to a sane one that is. And I don't see why I should care about his views on medicine, unless he wants to ban the practice of it.
His first appearance after announcing his run for the presidency? The Alex Jones show. Good on him for military service and voting against the war or whatever, but see him for what he is: a crank.
We're in the same country that thinks it's OK to torture someone on the vague suspicion that they have some sort of connection to someone vaguely associated with a terrorist. Why should our prisoners fair any better?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
When he ditches the FDA, consider yourself screwed (over).
How does a (yet another) Republican getting caught show "both sides" are corrupt? Unless of course you're a Republican, in which case everything bad about Republicans is true of everyone, and nothing good is true of anyone else.
--
make install -not war
...ass rapes PRISONERS!
"You can observe a lot just by watching." - Yogi Berra
Unfortunately, political corruption has a pretty long and well established history in the US and abroad. Having oil companies be a vehicle for corruption is rather unsurprising, as they have a lot of money, power, and interest in the activities of the political realm.
But suggesting or implying that corruption is limited or mostly limited to oil or the Republicans would be silly, and I hope that isn't what the GP is trying to do.
Not a subtle bunch our moderators ...
The reason they're concrete jungles, and the reason most people incarcerated join a racial gang for protection (at least, in the most violent prisons), is because there simply isn't enough guard power to guard them all. They keep them at each others throats on purpose, so they don't team up and all attack the guards.
> Also describing them as "bridges to nowhere" is somewhat like describing the first Transcontinental Railroad as a "railroad to nowhere". One of the bridges in question was probably a pointless waste of money, the other would have connected a city of 300,000 people and skyrocketing property prices to a large area of undeveloped land.
I'm glad you haven't at least confused it with the other bridge that at least goes somewhere. But I still have to ask, WHY should the federal government foot the bill when the Alaskan government collects so much money that it pays people to live there?
And no, I'm not kidding about them paying you to live there. The only requirements are that you not be a felon and that you stay there at least a full calendar year.
As a career choice. People who want to be in politics are probably the last people you want in charge. I say we double the pay for every single elected position in the country, halve the term periods, and appoint people (meeting certain criteria, 25 years old, HS diploma, US citizen) to every single position based on a lottery system at whatever level (local, state, federal) the position is for. Power corrupts, absolutely, and those seeking power are probably already corrupt. Things would be a lot more effective if average people whose friends and neighbors have a vested interest in whats going on were in power. And with shorter term limits, even if someone terrible got appointed, they wouldnt be there for long enough to do all the much damage. Not to mention they would probably focus more on the job at hand. How much time do politicos spend on their re-election campaigns vs actual work?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Politicians can be corrupted by power, and there are sources of power from both sides of the aisle. This should be relatively unsurprising. However, given your response it seems likely that you are just a partisan troll.
The Internet is not a big truck. It is a series of tubes.
When those tubes get clogged with pornography or misuse of government funds, those tubes get clogged.
When those tubes get clogged, The Plumbers (The FBI) begins to notice.
When those tubes get clogged with government pork, the bring in the plungers (The IRS).
But when the pumbers use the plungers to clear the pipes, they don't unclcg the problem.
The plumbers use the wooden handle of the plungers and stick it where the sun don't shine on Mr. Stevens.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
As long as anybody who gets raped also gets a free TV, that's logical.
Or as Robin Williams pointed out, sodomy is illegal in some states, so they will send you to jail where you will be sodomized.
i decided to say i lol'd instead of modding you funny. sorry; its probably the rum.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Veco is an oil pipeline service and construction company
(from Wikipedia). I've worked with them before on projects that mostly involved mechanical engineering design at oil refineries. There bread and butter does appear to be the petro-chemical industry, but they are not an oil company like BP, ConocoPhillis, Shell, etc., which can be considered "oil companies".
What is the big deal? It is perception that Veco being identified as an "oil company" involved with some senator shenanigans, a republican one in Alaska for that matter, makes the onerous label "oil company" more damning than what it really is. FTA, Veco only provided engineering consulting services.
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
Calling it a "non-profit" and wrapping it in a fuzzy socialistic blanket does not mean that nobody makes any money. The money is still there, it's just now instead of ME deciding how to spend MY money, somebody else gets to decide how to spend MY money. Now instead of a greedy system bent on destroying the world via evil 'profits', we have a greedy system that costs just as much and takes 18 months to churn out a hearing aid for an old lady.
Someone has to decide who gets limited resources... at least right now, the decision is somewhat fair (not based on location, religion, color, sexual preference or any number of other protected categories) - if you have the money, you get the care. When the decision is no longer based on money, what will happen? Everybody gets "free" care, if they live long enough to receive it. It sucks to be poor and it always has, but at least there's a goal for people to reach for. Once you take that away, everyone will have to be happy with their bread ration for the week.
yeah, and Boston should have paid for the Big Dig themselves....... but alas those booming local economies need federal money to make some roads.
Its ok, His buddy , MR. B., will give him a get out of jail free card.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
according to his website he is diehard against the rights of women to decide for themselves if they want an abortion. is it the Libertarian belief that the chosen religion should be the law of the land? i didn't think so.....
y /
he says it right here.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/life-and-libert
i am sick of people claiming he is not anti-choice and that he is just "defending the constitution".
Good to see a fellow time warner subscriber online...
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
So you think someone who broke the law and was sentenced by his peers in accordance with the constitution deserves to have other criminals inflict additional, unconstitutional punishment of their choice? Not to mention that it seems to counteract any rehabilitation they may receive (for those who get paroled... I hope one of the more bitter ones who got psychologically damaged from repeated rape and beatings moves next door to you).
I think those in prison deserve to be protected, to the best of the DOCs ability, from torture and death. I realize it's not realistic to expect 100% prevention, but it's a good goal...
nothing against Alaska, but if they have such a financial surplus, they should be able to build their own bridges to nowhere.... and nobody would complain. build 15 of them for all i care. Ted Stevens is notorious for getting tons of federal money for projects in Alaska. that makes me wonder how much surplus they really have?
again, nothing against Alaska, but my city has to float bonds to make capital improvements to silly things like schools and police stations. it's somehow twisted that Alaska is trying to suck up federal money for bridges to reduce traffic, or to open up new land for private developers... when they have such a freaking surplus.
Consider it as an additional deterrent. Most people would consider -prison- itself to be deterrent enough...
I'm a Libertarian and your a fool if you don't think with little effort I can find plenty of examples of corruption on both sides of the isle. From stolen pages of presidential documents, African bribes and miles of roads to no where theres lots of nasties out there. The masses just choose to ignore it.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
so, he's anti-babykilling? the fucker
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'm glad you are so well informed to have researched his past, his record, his writings, his speeches...oh wait...you just made a decision based on a media appearance... He is also one of the few politicians that has a solid record of voting based on the constitution rather than all the other nonsense. This is EXACTLY the mindset that got us stuck in this situation...stupid kneejerk reactions to media appearances. Certainly by your logic everything the current administration has done is the best possible path because the offending members of the administration make regular appearances on 'legitimate' media outlets... We are under attack by Islamofascists who hate our freedoms because President "you gotta catapult the propoganda" Bush said so on all the major outlets right?
Are you honestly going to try to tell me that The Alex Jones show is any worse than Fox News about going overboard and making sensationalist shit up? Incidentally, not that I agree with much of Jones' ideas...look up The Big Lie. Telling a lie so implausibly huge that it could not be anything but the truth... Welcome to modern American government. Go research the people in office, where they have been, the positions they held. Robert Gates our current SecDef was also head of the CIA during the Iran Contra business, Donald Rumsfeld swore to have the ban on aspertame lifted while he was Chairman of G.D Searle (the makers of) sure enough reapplied the day after Reagan entered office, and eventually was approved by a Reagan appointee who then quit under allegations of impropriety. Dick Cheney SecDef during Gulf War I, Bush Sr CIA Director, the list goes on and on and on and these are only the well known household names. If you actually bothered to read the history of these things it has been a select cast of a few in key positions of power in our government for the past 20+ years. We elect new figureheads yet all of these people just shift around appointed to new positions and park in some of the most criminal corporations in between. Monsanto, G.D. Searle, Halliburton, again the list goes on. None of this is conspiracy theory...it is clearly written and documented history that people are too god damned lazy to bother looking up. So grab your flag, sing your song, and bomb the infade...err...bomb the terrorist...sorry the justifications are so similar I get them confused sometimes.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
This has absolutely nothing to do with corruption or the massive amounts of money he didn't receive from oil companies for the home he didn't remodel - the FBI just got tired of the damned "internet=tubes, !=trucks" jokes. Next up: I've got tin-foil hats for sale to whoever came up with the backwards Russia joke and the bastard responsible for captioning cats, cuz they're gonna need 'em!
I see W, Cheney, and ROve STILL in office. Libbey was commuted. A number of republicans connected with Abramhoff is still awaiting to be tried (and I doubt that much will happen). All in all, the republicans are FAR more corrupt than the dems. I just think that the dems have to take their licks from those that do not belong to either of the 2 major parties.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Or, perhaps they could stop wasting your money on bridges to nowhere and provide prisons, schools and hospitals with those funds. No 'fuzzy socialistic blanket' required.
I'm not arguing about the sodomy, but I know a guy who's a cook at a maximum-security (state, not Federal) prison, and the food they serve isn't half bad. It's definitely better than what gets served in many schools.
Unless you're talking about situations where someone's food is repeatedly being stolen by other prisoners or something, nobody's starving.
But yeah, they're probably being ass-raped and beaten, so being well-fed is probably small comfort.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Wow, you disproved your statement in the same sentence. I'm impressed. ;) Sure, you said "move in the right direction" but I think they'd prefer taxes over "socialism". ("Wealth to the people? SCREAM!!")
Some (Ll)ibertarians will take any piece of their agenda they can get, regardless of whether the effect of taking one piece makes things worse for getting the others (i.e. for freedom). Others are aware how the order of taking the steps from statism to libertarianism affects both your chances of getting there and whether things improve monotonically on the way.
Example: You need to gut the welfare state before opening the borders. Otherwise things get worse - in ways most voters can understand, which means that your candidates don't get elected.
I call the latter sort "Law 'n Order Anarchists": They want to repeal all the LAWS, but IN a correct ORDER. (Make that "Law 'n Order Minarchists" if they think there is some residual proper function for a government.)
Ron Paul is one (of the minarchist stripe - currently calling himself a "Constitutionalist"). I'm another.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This has nothing to do with religion, it's a simple moral question: When are unalienable rights conveyed; when does life "start"? Ron Paul believes that life begins at conception. I happen to believe it is closer to when an individual becomes self-sustaining (i.e: can be isolated from the parent organism and survive unaided for a "reasonable" amount of time - like 24 hours or so). His belief is certainly more easy to define than mine, and thus also to defend. Spontaneous abortion or failure of a fertilized egg to adhere to the uterine wall is simply a tragedy. There is no religious overtone, whether this inspires him to hold this belief or not. From his perspective, he is morally right - assisted abortion is the extinguishing of a human that has an inalienable right to life. The official Libertarian platform (http://www.lp.org/issues/platform_all.shtml#repro dright) essentially "cops out" of the question: there is no attempt to define when life begins and those rights are conveyed, it simply says that government should not interfere in any way, and emphasizes things like birth control and forced sterilization. It implicitly rejects the concept that life begins at conception, but never forthrightly claims to support a "right to choose". As the LP states, "people can hold good-faith views on both sides".
Well... no, not really.
That's what happens when things that are government funded are "privatized" by sub-contracting them to private companies, but the payment, the measures of efficiency and accountabilities are still the same as a social enterprise controlled by the government.
I think when we consider that these issues 'should' be private, or 'should' be socially funded as a matter of principle we ignore the fundamental problems.
Neither 'private enterprises' nor 'social institutions' are fairy dust that anoint an organization with the qualities of efficiency and efficacy. Their respective benefits and deficits are a matter of methodology, not political taxonomy.
The promise of privatization is to enlist capitalistic self-interest in optimizing a service.
This actually works very well in the market, because the private enterprises are accountable to their consumers. Their cash flow depends enough on their reliable satisfaction of the customer needs, so that 'preserving your cash flow' by defrauding your customers tends to be suicidal.
But the main reason that works is a shorter distance of accountability: companies are directly accountable to their customers' satisfaction (in terms of revenue). So they optimize to minimize cost while maximizing that satisfaction.
The point of democracy and representation is the same after all.
If your efficiency/effectiveness problems with a large government institution are due to lack of accountability (and I think that is most frequently the case), privatization can theoretically either increase or shorten the distance of accountability.
Most often we just increase that distance and make things worse: you put a middle-man customer (the government), and moved the responsibility farther away... and then allow private self-interest to optimize the service with the middle-man's satisfaction (based on its own self-interest) as the bar.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
"Accidental" troll, huh? Anyway, prison is not a death camp.
"That's what happens when things that should be socially funded get turned into a money making scheme."
Well, in my opinion, prisons should be neither privately funded and run nor government-funded and run. The whole concept that the prison is some magical society-healing, attitude adjustment ward that takes bad people and turns them into good people by treating them as zoo animals and laboratory experiments is absurd. Prisons are simply a modern extension of the dungeons that were so popular in the Medieval period -- places to keep political prisoners. For most real criminals, the punishment of prison does not fit the crime; it's too harsh a sentence for petty crimes, it's too soft for serious crimes like murder, and prisons have no business being used to enforce some corrupt politician's idea of what drugs we're allowed to ingest or what ideas we're allowed to share. Prison makes far more criminals than it "rehabilitates", and to make things worse, it forces the victim to pay for the food, lodging, and health care of his assailant. There are better ways of dealing with almost every crime and social problem; other societies have found and effectively applied them in the past.
There are very few things tyrannies and police states cannot function without. A vast prison system is one of them.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Blah blah blah. The US Treasury owns "your" money. You get to borrow it, with interest. So just shut the fuck up already.
Seems like now his career is "down the tubes", as they say... [ducks]
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
I keep telling you people that the media corporations exert primary control over who gets elected (because the media controls the message), but many keep acting as if there's no connection. There is, and it's a very strong one.
The media spins Ron Paul that way because the media corporations don't want him to be elected. It's as simple as that. If the media corporations liked Ron Paul, the media would be singing his praises continuously.
Given that, it frankly amazes me that he somehow got into the running at all.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I stole this Sig
why is it everyone talks about women's right to decide to have an abortion, but no one cares that the baby doesn't get the right to decide whether or not they get to live?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Come on, if the son of a friend of the cousin of your spouses' uncle claims to have heard that someone saw that a guy which looked like you once walked down a street which once another guy walked down who once visited Afghanistan where he met someone whose brother was the in-law of some official working for a Taliban who allowed Bin Laden to hide there - that's evidence as hard as it gets, especially if he gets paid for delivering a terrorist to the government: if that isn't an incentive to tell the truth, nothing is.
You can't hope for anything better - except maybe phone records showing that, if we ignore daylight savings time and swap those two numbers around, replace the first number by a 1 and add a six-digit number to it, you called a number of a store which is next door to a hotel in which the room whose number is the sum of the digits of the first two digits of your birth year times 911 is the very room in which the criminal incriminated by aforementioned evidence was resisting arrest by accidentially shooting himself.
In Soviet Russia, government controls corporations.
In Capitalist America, corporations control government.
...who has final veto power over all budgets and legislation? Unless you're just another blind partisan drone, I think the answer of where ultimate responsibility lies is quite clear.
If only he had a series of tubes he could use to escape and warp to World 6.
Let's see some figures to back that up, please. Every article I've read on the subject seem to think that the US federal government spends more per capita on health care than any other. That's the government, not the poor saps who can find themselves bankrupt from hospital bills because they were unlucky enough to get sick.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
The only thing that could make this better is if the FBI found that Ted had been hiding money in a series of pneumatic vacuum tubes.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
What do you expect?
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
It is too bad he doesn't understand the internet, because the writing has been on the wall, or on the web rather. It has been speculated for a while they were coming after him. If he read /. he would have known to shred the evidence long before they raided his home.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Because it's not a baby, but rather a collection of cells which could potentially become a baby, but currently has even less capability to "decide" than a dog.
In any case, what do you mean with "no one cares"? Last I checked, there are still plenty of people supporting your (apparent) position.
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
The difference is that:
A) Early railroad made its big bucks less from transporting people, and more by transporting goods and raw materials for the industry. In fact passengers were often the necessary evil: you wouldn't get a permit to build a railroad if you didn't haul the people too.
Hence just counting how many people were there, is highly misleading. The west was by and large the captive market and source of cheap raw materials for the east coast, in much the same way as India was to England. Building a railroad there made sense.
B) Railroads were a _major_ strategic asset for the army. I don't think these bridges to nowhere count as that.
B) More importantly, railroads were built by private capital, because they were profitable. That's a freakin' huge difference between that and pork barrel contracts to at most please a village on an island.
The laissez faire capitalism of the 19'th century was pretty vehemently against using government money on something that competed with private initiative. Plus, the government didn't even have that kind of money anyway.
I must admit, though: That doctrine was often taken to absurd extremes, such as in England where, when they _had_ to support their own population in a crisis or famine... because they couldn't just give money to people (they thought it would compete with the employment market) or build something useful (it would have competed with private industry), they paid the people to build some useless stuff like roads from nowhere to nowhere (literally, unconnected, in the middle of a field) or useless towers or such. But even then, it must be said that it was only in times of extreme necessity, instead of social security. And it was openly useless stuff. Even in its stupidity, it just wasn't the same thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What person is morally fit to legislate the destiny of others?
Agents to Senator Stevens: "we're in ur base probin ur toobz"
You term limit politicians, they'll spend their years in office thinking about their next job. And what's going to get them a better job: serving their constituents, or selling them out to powerful special interests?
No, the solution to corruption are hard ethics rules, sunshine laws and aggressive oversight. Term limits just make the problem worse, not better.
I will now forever cringe whenever I see the "Comcast van" pull into the neighborhood. Thanks turkey.
So a single current corrupt Democrat, actually from several years ago, who hasn't been shown to be part of any conspiracy with any other Democrats, is how this Republican getting caught in a Republican conspiracy along with the endless ranks of other current Republican conspiracies shows "Democrats are just as bad"?
I know Republicans (and the independents who love them) skipped math class to score coke, but you do know that 0.1 < 1 + 5 + 2 + 1, right? Just because there are two sides to the comparison doesn't make them equal.
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I defy you to find anywhere near the amount of current or recent (say, since Republicans took over Congress in 1994, over a decade ago) corruption by Democratic Party conspiracies as is completely evident in those Republicans.
Hell, I defy you to find a comparable amount of Democratic corruption in the Democratic Congresses from 1980-1994 as in Republicans from 1994-2007. Even though I'm not as interested in a history lesson as I am in identifying the problem facing us.
Give it a shot. Let's see which Party offers sustainable corruption, however awful, and which offers corruption that is actually destroying the country. Did someone say "Gonzales, Libby, Cheney"? Or was that just the voice of Nixon from beyond the grave?
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Sounds like the Great American Firewall that everyone was screaming about last week is now dead, considering that Tubes Stevens was one of its two sponsors. He is now "radioactive." No one will want to get near it.
What is it with home improvements and political corruption? "Hey, how about a nice patio or pool? Nobody'll _ever_ notice!"
We had a local politician the other year using government employee time to build him a deck.
I replied to a few of the responses. Then I wrote a long post responding to all of them.... and deleted it. I realized I was letting myself get dragged into this too. Whether it's "Executive Non-Privlege" or "no controlling legal authority", this isn't the place for it.
Seems like each day I see more and more off-topic political posts being modded up and down like noise in a spectrum analyzer. And thats what it is - noise. Each attacks or defends some politician, while bitching about how ultra-partisan the moderators are. Now we're graduated from off-topic posts to off-topic articles.
I know you were all big fans of the "tubes" piece, and are clamoring for more. I'm sure another major piece of tech-related legislation will come up sooner or later and he'll have something stupid to say about it. The majority of us can laugh and move on, while these rest of you sling nasty posts back and forth and mod each other up and down. Just be patient....
Yeah. We all know Mr. C. didn't play that game. No sir. No commutations for him. Just straight pardons of convicted felons. But it's not like anyone was actually paying attention, right?
However, operating prisons isn't supposed to be all about efficiency. It's about keeping dangerous people out of society, and trying to make them not so dangerous. The owners and investors in a business are a happy as long as the business is making money. It can't be argued that the government paying someone else to do the job, and have them make a profit, can be cheaper than them doing the same thing themselves, for no profit. That's a logical fallacy, assuming they are doing the same thing as the private enterprise would be doing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
.. the fascination with the perfectly good analogy this man used. Why aren't people ripping on how he explained email in the same speech? Anyone I know who actually knows would explain the Internet in the same way to laymen.
Can I ask why that's always the response?
Has Clinton been in office for the last 7 years? Didn't think so.
You throw shit at the person in office, not at the people out. The ones in office are relevant.
How much sense would it make for me to start bitching about Reagan, Nixon and Carter?
Excuse making at its finest.
How long have you been a Republican? As someone who is disgusted by corruption and graft, your obvious support of Republican thinking patterns is disgusting.
Bigot. Trolls Slahshdot continuously.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Anonymous Republican Coward doesn't know that 0.1 < 1 + 5 + 2 + 1 . Redundican.
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That fucking idiot just won't go away.
The cruise companies that refuse to go around the bridge if it were built more cheaply? The construction companies building the bridge? If he is truly just representing the people that put him into office, wouldn't he rather save them some tax dollars by requesting funds to have it built in a cheaper way?
Feinstein also has not caled the Internet a "series of tubes".
You say you want a revolution....
It's been tried in several state legislatures, such as California.
The end result, is Government is run by the unelected bureacrats, because no legislator is in office long enough to figure out how things work.
Well, nothing is all about efficiency. It's always a balance of efficiency and effectiveness.
Prisons, like any other organized endeavor, is ALL about efficiency and effectiveness to accomplish X goal.
The question is what is X: Is it controlling and rehabilitating dangerous people, integrating them back into society?
Or is it punishing such people and locking them out of society permanently?
I don't see the logical fallacy you claim.
OF COURSE it can be argued that the government paying someone else to do any job more effectively and efficiently (and turn a profit) can be cheaper than doing it themselves. The world economy has been built on such arrangements long before Adam Smith, and government itself is such an arrangement!
What is silly is to assume that the job is NECESSARILY cheaper or more effective just because it is being done outside of the goverment.
For that to be true you would need to have:
- Healthy and open competition - if there is an advantage in privatization, is opening the doors for different businesses to find better ways of doing things as they compete with each other.
- The government being a VERY demanding customer with clear (non-budgetary) goals - effectiveness in accomplishing the goal is driven by the customer's interest. efficiency by the business'.
- Good accountability, short-term and long-term, on both sides - the government's requirements need to match society's, and the businesses need to be accountable for results against those requirements.
Sadly, it is rare that any measures are taken to ensure any of those things, and you can end up with a government-sponsored monopoly with no mandate to serve the customer. This is typically not better than the original government monopoly, for pretty much the same reasons.
I'll reiterate my point:
Businesses in a free market are a great machine to fulfill customer requirements at the least possible cost.
But when government fails catastrophically in the first place, it is typically a problem of effectiveness, not efficiency.
I think this is most often because the customer's (society's) needs are not really that clear or the primary goals of the process anymore.
Moving the problem between public and private hands at that point will accomplish little.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
It's more than the fact that Teddy Stevens wanted me and the rest of the country to pay for most of the costs of a local bridge. It's the nowhere part that really gets me. Before NYC built it's East River bridges with city money there were numerous ferry services and hundreds of thousands of people on the other side. If Anchorage had 500,000 people living on the less populated side of the bay I really wouldn't mind some of my money helping them build that bridge, say 20% federal money, 40% state money and 40% local money. If the bridge connected something important to the interstate network or cut down on green house gases with a mass transit provision (light rail connection?) then I could see a 40% federal contribution.
When there are no people and no active competing ferry services it just screams "White Elephant Project!"
caught on the joke reuse ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bleah. I don't know that she could be turned on - don't you think her cooze is all dried up by now?
Then we end up with a bunch of psychos ready to run down little old ladies and gun down cops rather than go back to prison. Seems there is no way to win.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"Senator Stevens, please open the door."
...maybe that'll be funnier to those who have seen his on-floor antics.
"NO!"
"Senator, we don't want to have to break the door down."
"NO!"
Says the man who bittorents all his TV shows...
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You insult the intelligence of your readers, attempt to smear a run of the mill and fairly ethical politician by comparing him to one of the worst crooks in the system, repeat a lie that has been debunked countless times, and THEN try to take the high road because you can't back up your original position? Classy.
Why are you reading this? Why are you posting here? You do care about politics, obviously. You are completely partisan but trying to appear impartial. It's not working.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Rehabilitation ultimately depends on people unlearning something. In the case of violent criminals, for them, they have learned that robbing and shooting and raping and killing are all fun. Indeed, it must be that these sins are fun, otherwise, companies wouldn't make billions of dollars selling this stuff in music, movies and video games. For someone that actually did those terrible things, you are sort of asking them to learn to believe what they will always see is a lie, and no amount of psychiatry can cover that up, I think. The best you can get is a promise to not do it again, and I don't know how much that is worth.
This is my sig.
Education, especially the '101' classes are hardly objective and rarely cover enough material to make anyone a pundit on economic markets. Your education can hardly be used as an objective justification of economics. Before you start regurgitating the praises of FDR, I suggest you check out Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' and Harry Browne's 'Why Government Doesn't Work'.
Considering we're still all funked up from the economics of every single example you gave I think it's VERY relevant.
If you REALLY don't think that the decisions made more than 10 years ago don't affect us today, please read this. (PDF)
Just a small list of democrats, I'm sure there are just as many republicans. Those seeking to serve are the least fit to do so, on both sides of the isle. Open your eyes democrats are just as bad, personally I think they are worse, they keep trying to solve everyones problems with my hard earned money! - An independent counsel who investigated possible tax violations by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros charged that the Clinton administration thwarted his efforts to get to the truth.
.State Board of Elections is investigating Black's campaign finances. The investigation comes after the group Democracy North Carolina said it found evidence that video-poker operators were funneling money through unsuspecting donors to Black's campaign.
- U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) is under criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for possible bribery in exchange for promoting business deals in Africa
- Federal prosecutors alleged in court documents that Ernest Newton, a former state Democrat Connecticut senator worked with a reputed mobster and his associate to try to stop police raids on businesses and advance their business interests
- Clarence Norman Jr., the longtime powerbroker of Brooklyn NY Democrats was found guilty of intentionally soliciting illegal campaign contributions.
- A top aide to Jim Black, the Democratic speaker of the state Legislature of North Carolina, resigned amid reports he had received payments from a company hoping for the lottery contract. The
- West Virginia.Logan County Clerk Glen Dale "Hound Dog" Adkins admitted to selling his vote for $500 in the 1996 Democratic Party primary, while Perry French Harvey Jr. pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe voters in last year's Democratic contest
- Former Democat Gov. Donald Siegelman of Alabama was charged in a "widespread racketeering conspiracy" that includes accusations he took a bribe from former hospital executive Richard Scrushy for a key state appointment.
- Frank Ballance - a former Democrat Rep. from North Carolina was sentenced to four years in federal prison for conspiring to divert taxpayer money to his law firm and family through a charitable organization he helped start. Ballance, was a state senator before being elected to Congress in 2002, also agreed to repay $61,917 and to forfeit $203,000 in a bank escrow account in the name of the John A. Hyman Memorial Foundation.
- Five Democratic activists in Wisconsin accused of slashing the tires of vans rented by Republicans on Election Day 2004 are currently on trial
- Chuck Chvala, a Former Democrat Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader was sentenced to nine months in jail for felony misconduct in office and illegally funneling campaign contributions. Chvala had reached a plea deal with prosecutors earlier this year, admitting to charges that he directed a state employee to run a political campaign and used an independent expenditure group to funnel campaign contributions to a fellow Democrat.
- Brett Pfeffer, a former legislative director to Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting bribery of a public official and conspiracy.
- Raymond Reggie, a New Orleans political Democratic consultant and fund-raiser who is Senator Kennedy's brother-in-law was sentenced to a year in prison yesterday after pleading guilty to bank fraud charges. Try Google.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Wow.
Though I don't support Mr. Paul, it is because of his fiscal policies. See, I don't personally agree with the level of regulation (specifically the lack thereof) Mr. Paul would apply to businesses.
Having said that, you are 100% correct in your rant about why MANY of the people who are against Ron Paul are so. He's a thoughtful man who wants to pull the U.S. out of the foreign and fiscal policy mudpit it's been pulled into for the past 25 years (60 years if you want to go back to the roots, but the past 25 have seen a strong ramp-up period of stupidity). His foreign policy is a little isolationist to me, but a refreshing breath of air compared to what's going on now. The lame ass "lunatic fringe" argument bursts immediately upon the realization that the CURRENT administration is filled with the REAL lunatic fringe, as you so aptly demonstrated in your post.
If you don't like Ron Paul it should be because of your LIBERAL tendencies, as the man is obviously an original old-school conservative. If you don't like Ron Paul because he's not Republican enough for you, well, then you've been tricked by some rather simple distractions.
I will say this though, he seems to be honest and if the choice next November came down to Ron Paul or Hillary Clinton, my registered (D) ass would pull the (R) lever next to president without hesitation. I dislike compulsive lying even more than (what I consider to be) extremely conservative fiscal policies. I know all politicians lie, but that lady could school ole' Cheyney himself in the art of question dodging. Must've been paying attention to her husband, the best liar ever to grace the Oval Office whilst on TV. Not to say he wasn't a decent president, I personally think he was the best of my lifetime, which is to say a mediocre performance.
And before the deluge of comments telling me I'm wrong about Bill C. :
I know, I know, Reagan is some sort of God or something, come back and talk to me about that AFTER we've paid off the debts we still have lying around from his 'greatness'.
Anyways, in summary, you're absolutely right about Ron Paul's detractor's foolishness, and any REAL conservative would be screaming this guy's name from the rooftops. Kinda like the 'liberals' who favor Hillary when Dennis Kucinich is the only ACTUAL liberal up there. Maybe Mike Gavel too, but he has some different ideas that put him in another category alltogether as far as I'm concerned.
I didn't say there were no criminal Democrats. I said the magnitude of Republican criminal conspiracies is much bigger than that of Democrats. Even though Republicans have been running a witch hunt out of the DoJ to damage Democratic campaigns during the 6 years Republicans controlled the DC power monopoly.
I see you list, and I raise you just (a subset of) the Abramoff list plus the Ohio Republicans exposed as corrupt in just 2006 alone - though the Abramoff conspiracies are bigger than all that you've named. I could swamp your Democrats list some more just by invoking Ernie Fletcher's Kentucky conspiracy. And of course the Stevens corruption, also already connected to other Alaska Republicans, is just starting its own list.
For real meaning, compare the nature of the crimes. The Democrats you mentioned stole a few $million, maybe, slashed some tires. I mean, come on - you've padded your list with a guy who took $500 for his anonymous single vote in a Democratic primary. You're comparing that to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales?
Please be reasonable, or just admit that you're a Republican calling yourself "Libertarian" because even the "Conservative" brand has been ruined by the Republican crime wave.
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The thing I never got about that controversy is why did it really matter? So what if he calls it a series of "pipes" vs. a series of "tubes". Not everyone has to be as computer savvy as your average slashdotter. I imagine there are quite a few slashdotters that lack the social skills to work on capital hill, the mechanical skills to rebuild their car, or the medical skills to perform heart surgery. The problem is, that in the tech community, we project expected knowledge on others. The reason technical specialization exists is because it is good economically, and people have different skill sets. The failure to completely understand another's skill set is not a failure of the person, but rather a difference of abilities and responsibilities, and rarely anything more.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Yawn
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
While I like was he says most of the time about protecting our rights, then he's goes of on unrealistic lame tangents about how we need to shutdown every government organization.
Well to hell with that libertarian dream, we have a real country with real problems to run that needs real governing. I want paved roads, and I want clean water, and I want national parks, and I want corporate oversight, and I want help paying my tuition, and don't want the poor starving on the streets or looting grocery stores with pistols. We can have those and still have our rights with a little goddamn moderation.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
And I suggest you study more economics than just the blowhard who spout what you want to hear say. The Austrian school of economics is pretty widely ridiculed.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The theory of evolution is widely ridiculed. What's your point?
Thanks for demonstrating the Republican attitude towards corruption. If there are a dozen Democrats stealing staplers from City Hall, then the Democratic Party is just as bad as Republicans robbing $BILLIONS, lying us into war, rigging elections by millions of people, turning the Justice Department into a wing of the Republican Party.
Libertarian? You're a corporate anarchist. Too exciting for me. Or worse, a political pure idealist, totally boring. But clearly you don't understand how government or politics work, except in some virtual mindgame.
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The difference is the Austrian school is ridiculed by fellow economists, not laymen with no knowledge of the field. In fact, evolution is about the perfect analogy for Aurstian economics and libertarian fiscal philosophy. You guys are just like the creationists. You want to believe its true so badly that you ignore the millenia of evidence against it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The difference is the Austrian school is ridiculed by fellow economists, not laymen with no knowledge of the field. In fact, evolution is about the perfect analogy for Aurstian economics and libertarian fiscal philosophy. You guys are just like the creationists. You want to believe its true so badly that you ignore the millenia of evidence against it.
"You guys"? I have made No assertions as to the validity of EITHER economic point of view. For all you know I may be in agreeance with you. My point was/is that you shouldn't make claims about one theory, without even taking the time to study the other (which has been logically justified on its own accord in the LIterature I listed earlier). Claiming that you are right does not make it so, neither is using ad hominems in place of logical reasoning.
It matters because Ted Stevens wasn't just another politician talking about things he didn't understand, rather, he was in a position to be proposing and backing legislation to change things he didn't (and doesn't) understand.
He actually believes that his email is stuck somewhere waiting for days because of people downloading movies, and is basing legislation on that belief.
I don't have the mechanical skills to rebuild my car, but neither do I propose a laws to dictate how the experts do it.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
Guess who writes the budget? The Executive. Pick up any 8th grade social studies textbook or hell, just read the news every January.
The Office of Management and Budget is an Executive agency. THEY write the budget. Congress just changes some numbers around and puts it into action. The president is largely the one who pushes for funding and makes up the master plan--that's basically what the State of the Union is for. He names priorities which give a preview of the next budget cycle.
If you don't believe that, consider this: how are there "budget showdowns" with the president practically every year if Congress truly controls the money?
But I thought that the Republicans were going to restore honor and dignity to the White House, and that Republicans were holding themselves out as the examples of clean, good government. I thought that these hale and hearty good christian men and women were of the tough moral fiber that makes them resistant to the forces of corruption that infect the weak, comyanist Democrat party.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
I agree with your point of view 100%.
hm.
Paying your local Mafia Don "protection" money was about keeping dangerous people out of society too. When you paid your protection, they didn't come around and mess up your home or business. Maybe I should open up one of these "prisons". . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What do you think the reaction would be if a large percentage of the prisoners captured in Iraq were ass-raped?
Bush elected dictator-for-life?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You are very wrong. I am way more D than R and I despise DF for what she has done. I my eyes she is another typical Washington politician. I never voted for her and never will. I live in her district.
In more cases than not the D's and R's are exactly the same. They show their few differences so that we think there IS a difference and hopefully they can get our vote that way. Anyone here who thinks that things are gonna get better because we get D's in office are avoiding the truth. Sure, some things may change, and in some minor ways even might be considered better by some, but the truth is that they are ALL in it for the same reason. That reason has NOTHING to do with you the voter, the politicians constituency, or what is good for the country. And while I am at it, all you Ron Paul people need to pipe down. Ron Paul will be taken seriously when he can explain how he is "in support of personal liberty" but is pro-life.
For the record, I am posting AC for the same reason I don't have bumper stickers on my car.
You express a nice sentiment but the reality is a felony conviction makes the odds of success the rest of your life very low. People do succeed in spite of it but the odds are you are going to continue to fail.
With the ubiquity of back round checks these days if you have a felony conviction your odds of getting a good job again are extremely low. I think its an unwritten law that when you get nailed once, even if its for a victimless crime like drug posession, and you get a felony conviction, society has pretty much written you off. Getting a GED, or getting "rehabilitated" in prison isn't going to change that which may be a reason most prisons don't even try. There is a good chance you are going to come out of prison, be unemployable and broke, or have to take the worst of the worst jobs where you will barely scrape by. So should you be surprised that people return to selling drugs, robbery, etc. to survive? You don't need to pass a background check to return to crime.
The prevailing solution today is to pass 3 strikes laws, something like 20+ states have them. You nail someone once, then you just have to nail them twice more even for trivial crimes and then you lock the person up for life. This is the most basic indicator America doesn't want to rehabilitate. They want to lock people up who broke the rules and throw away the key.
The cost to society to imprison vast numbers of people for life is staggering and growing, but as someone else pointed out prisons are a huge private enterprise now so it is a very profitable. It does add a steep toll to your tax burden though, and it is a great way to divert money from roads and education to warehousing people on an industrial scale. The U.S. has one the highest per capita prison populations in the world.
I rather suspect that the vengeful Nancy Grace mind set of America thinks prison rape is what the people who get convicted of felonies deserve as part of their punishmemt.
@de_machina
It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other. Maybe they could make it so there are gradual rewards like access to the gym and tv for exceptional behavior (not just "not causing major problems" which seems to be the definition of good behavior in prison). If you're just "good" then it's normal prison. But there still shouldn't be gangs and violence allowed in the prison, since that seems like it would definitely cause some people to get worse.
That's rather presumptuous isn't it?
The low value of the dollar against other currencies is not necessarily a bad thing. We've had a huge trade deficit for years now importing all sorts of luxury items from overseas. Note that we don't import a lot of food though. So the benefit of a weak dollar against other currencies is that while we may have to cut back on some inessential purchases, we won't be starving to death since within the country the dollar is relative to itself. We also might start exporting more goods and services than we have been.
For instance, I'm currently working for a company overseas so the weak dollar tends to benefit both myself and my employer. The company I'm contracting for is getting me for relatively cheap, and I'm making plenty of money to buy the things I need. For a "knowledge worker" like myself (a programmer) the Internet is a wonderful boon as it makes the market for my services so much bigger.
The downside of the weak dollar is that one big import this country has is oil. That of course makes transportation more costly which does have an effect on the price of goods. What this is probably going to mean is that we'll start to see more local foods again. For instance, apples are easy to come by in Virginia. Corn, soy, wheat, cotton can all be grown easily around here. But orange juice is going to go up because orange trees need warmer climates and thus orange-based products need to be transported.
Of course, you actually have to pick those things too so we're probably going to see within our lifetimes farms moving to electrical power to run the equipment. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that we will see fields with power lines stretched across them or even see a return to (gasp) manual labor.
This is the nature of economics and the nature of life. We've all grown rather lazy and accustomed to being able to get whatever we want whenever we want for not much money. That kind of opulence cannot last forever and was mainly brought about in the first place by the discovery of an incredibly cheap source of energy. As we've seen over the past few years, as that source of energy becomes more expensive it ripples through the economy. Eventually, we will find another source of energy and we can return to our previously scheduled overindulgence. That will probably be my children or even my grand children. Tough shit, that's how it goes. You and I will just have to tough it out.
If you really do want to continue the lifestyle you've been leading with a high dollar and an apparently limitless American economic machine then you ought to be in favor of taking over the middle east. I'm not talking about what Bush is doing now, supposedly trying to build a democracy. I mean, we'd outright have to invade and plunder every bit of oil they have. That is, obviously, not an option and it would in effect only delay the inevitable. Those who say war in the middle-east is mostly about oil are dead on. But it's not necessarily about stealing it, just about making sure we don't have to bend over to every demand the oil-rich nations make. It's a check on the power those states can wield.
The only good thing about high oil prices is that it is and will continue to cause quite a bit more R&D in alternative energy sources. If we're really lucky, we'll be able to bring at least one of our current blue-sky ideas to market within the next 20 years and keep the oil-rich nations in check until we no longer require them. That is a quite plausible reason for keeping the war in Iraq going for another couple of decades. Shitty, isn't it?
Of course, I am sure this will fall on deaf ears because it's actually a reasoned argument about the pros and cons of various government policies, not a tirade about how bad Bush is. Anyone feeling that way should just go back to Kos so he can boo the GOP "team" as if this was some game of high-school football.
If you read his stuff you will see that he actually has answers forhe Federal government has everyone held hostage by saying "You have every right to not comply with our rulings...its your right as a state in this wonderful union...but then we are going to not give you any federal money, and no you can't make us stop taking money out of your state in the form of federal taxes" most of this, namely the poor starving on the streets. He points out the fiscal insanity of the government out of control we have is what is causing the evergrowing divide that cause the poor and lower middle class to suffer. Roads, water, and parks I will agree with, but your tuition is really your problem, and honestly would be much less of a problem to deal with if you weren't forking over so much money to the government in the first place, nevermind that the government is frequently the cause of rising tuition rates through assinine legislation and requirements. The Federal government has everyone held hostage by saying "You have every right to not comply with our rulings...its your right as a state in this wonderful union...but then we are going to not give you any federal money, and no you can't make us stop taking money out of your state in the form of federal taxes" Extortion is what that is normally called.
The problem is people don't understand the opportunity cost involved with letting the government handle half of the crap that it does. Government contracting is a VERY lucrative business because the government is rarely concerned with the price or quality...and they certainly aren't spending any of their money...they are spending yours...to pay their political contributers, relatives, and friends...through various deals. Go back and look how often people are getting busted for corruption and bribes in these contracts. Realistically the only ones getting caught are the ones that don't have enough friends in high places to otherwise bail them out of the hotseat.
And while I certainly want my roads paved and clean water and all of that...I will point out that none of that is a "right", especially the tuition. The interstate doesn't exist for the people, it exists for the military. Now certainly many of these things are conductive to a healthy and prosperous nation, but they most certainly are not rights. I personally believe that many of these things would be handled infinitely better by private industry IF AND ONLY IF the private industry actually is forced to comply with the rule of law (which is another of Ron Paul's key points, is that the corporations and government view themselves as above the law). The real bitch is that so many of our problems are so interelated (credit cards, insurance, poverty, medical care, etc) that we really are at a point where you can't solve one and not cause a collapse without having to tackle a whole host of things all at once.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Haven't you ever been in a fistfight or stolen something? Haven't you ever broken something? Come on? Getting drunk and rowdy and raising hell on some level is fun. I mean seriously, if getting into a brawl in a video game is fun, why not the real thing? It only ceases to be fun when the kind of hell you would inflict on someone else is inevitably inflicted back on you.
To me, all of those scientific disciplines that you mention always try to look through things your way because academic types are precisely the sort of people that eschew the sport of violence because deep down inside they know they suck at it. I was never good at sports. I was never good at fighting, so I hid out in the library and learned computers in h.s. But, wow, when I did win a few fights every now and then, I really did enjoy it. Then, when I went to college, our frat was basically a high tech gang, and, well, getting into giant frat to frat brawls was pretty cool. Don't know a barroom brawl until you tried it. So, I see people that pretend to believe otherwise are living a lie.
Really, today's crime among young men is because we have a society that gives them too much freedom, so they do the free thing, which is to get violent and rowdy. What you really need is a lot of structure, and a lot of powerful authority figures intervening early on. Fathers matter, but so do strong teachers, and strong police. Young women may not need the brutal headmasters of old, but young men surely do.
Men are powerful things, and so, are capable of sustaining some amount of discipline in youth that honestly would be damaging to women. And men need to be tempered, like a piece of metal must be beaten into steel. IT's just the way it is. You may have some self denying academics on your side, but I've got thousands of years of successful societies on mine.
This is my sig.
I have come to the realization a while back that the Republican party is not my fathers party anymore. The old school Rs were fiscal conservatives, political conservatives, and by the very nature of those two social LIBERALs. You can't be a fiscal and political conservative and advocate the "daddy knows best" style of government we have had lately. I don't give a crap about what people say, Democrats are NOT social liberals by any stretch...they want to legislate on a different class of issues, but its still "protect the children" nonsense, and frequently some of their crap about hate speech is dangerously close to "thoughtcrime". Should it matter if I killed you because you were black...I still killed you right? We already have laws to deal with murderers...thoughtcrime... On top of this...there is the insane notion that the government should take care of the people...which is another one of those critical flaws that put us in this situation...R and D alike believe that the government should take care of us, they just have different ideals as to what that means...the REALITY is that the people should take care of the government and the government should be leaving us the hell alone to succeed or fail without their interference.
I think the key to successful deregulation is to ensure that the corporate world is no longer above the law and CEOs and whatnot cannot hide behind the legal shielding it provides, which is pretty much his exact stance on things. He frequently talks about how the rule of law is critical to our freedom and that corporations and government have been ignoring this. His fiscal policy scares me, but it scares me the same way an invasive surgery does. The idea of going through a dramatic procedure that is going to be very painful, require rehab, and could possibly kill me, yet is ultimately better for me in the long run is certainly better than just letting a serious condition continue to get worse until death is inevitable. I would rather take the risk to try and fix things than to face the inevitable collapse that we are looking at today.
Our way of life simply cannot be sustained for a significant amount of time on this path we are on...you can only borrow so much...credit only goes so far. Do you think prices of housing, cars, or even basic convenience items would be so fucking high if it weren't so easy for people to accumulate huge amounts of debt purchasing them? Low interest rates! Buy now pay later! etc, etc, this type of spending has screwed us and it is only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down. Windows is being offered for $3 in china and people are crying about how its not fair that they get a better deal...well...then don't fucking pay $300 for it...if no one is willing to pay $300 the price will come down until it reaches a point where people are willing to pay for it. Simple freaking economics and basic math skills can show all of this...but we get the current crop of R and D telling horror stories about aweful it would be if they didn't control everything and people (who are frequently poor at math and have a horrible understanding of economics) run to them for help. Go look at the average debt for most Americans and compare that to the number of people who have retirement funds and the like...it certainly isn't because everyone is out to get them...its because they think lower payments means they are saving money and have no concept of how compound interest works. Go look at almost every single American millionaire that didn't get his from an inheritance..they have a damned fine understanding of compound interest and investment and you won't see them paying $40,000 over 10 years for a car worth $20,000 that will devalue down to $2,000 in 10 years.
As for Reagan...well...his VP was the director of the CIA and he was an actor... Maybe I am paranoid...but uhm...CIA director VP + Actor P certainly seems a little frightening. But, while some of this may lead you to more conspiracy theory things, the facts are out there and you can
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
it's all about the money, baby
But do you really think the current debt of 8.9 billion dollars , largely Bush's responsibility, are an improvement?
Didn't think so. Apples to apples, my friend.
Sorry, it's late. 8.9 trillion
You are the one that is dangerous, because you suffer from the twin evil of approaching human morality on absolutist terms, and to make that work, you have to oppress humanity to make it conform to your stilted world view.
My argument is that violence is fun. The common sense evidence is that people wouldn't do violent things if they didn't enjoy it. The fact is, violence is as much as a part of the human enjoyment as it is for any other higher animals... really, most animals.. dogs, cats, bears, tigers, all along the line. Guess what they do? As children, they all fight! What are people but animals? What do people like to do, but fight! They fight as children to learn to survive and to strengthen themselves, and they fight as adults to win favor in whatever social unit they are in, and to win the right to mate with the most.
Our society, of course, puts our violence into bottles, and rightfully so, so we can have a lawful civilization. Right now, that's sports, and a bit of fisticuffs between boys until they reach college age. That's what society approves of. It approves of it because people instinctively know that you have to be ready for conflict - if anything, women instinctively like men who win versus men who lose. Just like animal females will mate with the alpha first, so too do human women.
Beyond that, there's the military, or a physical line of work where one's conflict is against nature itself. In either case, a society has trained its children through conflict and sport, born out by evolution, to either expand against a harsh natural world, or against other national rivals.
In your world, no violence is acceptable. And that's simply not human. It's like arguing that sex isn't acceptable, but for procreation. Sure, you may not like the morality, but at the end of the day, you have to either deal with reality or ignore it. Like a deluded scientologist or other brainwashed whack job, you repeat your unrealities over and over and over again, calling everyone who disagrees with you stupid. But all I have to do to prove mine is to invite you to actually look at the world instead of trying to impose your own analytical framework on top of it. You keep bashing this square peg into a round hole and really have no clue.
If violence isn't fun, then why do people watch ultimate fighting? Why do people play Unreal Tournament - and so many play the sniper role, even though it is the hardest, just to get that special satisfaction of hearing it say "head shot", when you blow someone's head off? Why does EVERY modern culture have a metaphore for every collective action as a form of violence? We have our war on drugs, war on terror, war on poverty, war on crowded superhighways on tuesday, crusade to save the earth, and and so on. It doesn't even matter which political party. Across the ocean, our islamic rivals have jihad, which really, in their culture, means a jihad on drugs, a jihad on poverty, a jihad on superhighways on tuesday.
Look, if people are only a few million years evolved from other animals, then scientifically speaking, we really can't be THAT much better. We're just not. Anyone whose never enjoyed pinning someone in a wrestling match, knocking someone on their ass in a football game, socking a guy in the mouth for saying something to your wife, really, isn't human. It's you that's f--- up, not me. I can at least acknowledge what's in myself and thus develop a moral framework to guard against its excess, or adopt a religion designed to do the same, you, on the other hand, just sweep the problem under the rug.... fly into the murky storm of human emotion with a hand on one of your eyes.
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Well, I'm basically happy and you're just a dick, but that's ok because I still enjoy conversing with you. I was never beaten as a child, and I don't lay a hand on mine either. I'm one of those people that cringe when I see the person in a supermarket grabbing their child's arm too much. In such a case, were it not for the threat of jail, I'd probably deck that person and enjoy it immensely, largely because, I have such a strong empathy for the child. But, by and large, you are talking to someone who kept an ugly choke cherry tree alive in his back yard until it ultimately died by lightening, largely because I felt bad for it being an ugly tree. If someone would have knocked my tree, I'd probably would have been tempted to shoot them!
There is a huge difference between organized violence of war and the kind of violence that I am talking about. War is violent, for sure, but it isn't the kind of violence that is automatically built into people, and I believe that people get into wars assuming that it is. Fundamentally, that which makes you want to catch a pass thrown to you is the same emotion that the army plays on when it hands you a rifle and makes you want to shoot someone. That's got nothing to do with it the instinctive enjoyment of small, animal violence, although, victory does play a part in reaffirming one's commitment to the war.
Even today, Barrey McCaffrey said that the Army is basically, at its best, designed to attract varsity high school atheletes, and then they present the war as a sort of a sport, with the same team chemistry, but with much higher stakes. You don't want to have older people on the battlefield because as you get older you tend to become more secure and become less suspectible to the need to impress other people. And its also for this reason that the Army is very conservative when it comes to changing unit chemistry or culture. Tradition is a powerful motivator.
I used to drink with B-17 pilots that had no problem dropping the bombs on civilians, but, they still drink because of all the flak coming back. As I said, the reason we avoid wars is that people do like to inflict violence, but, they don't like it coming back to them. At its best, society should try to replace the spectacal of destruction with the spectacal of creation, so that, we get our visual stimuli from building newer and bigger things. It's only natural that a society that builds less tends to become more violent.
This is my sig.
Should it matter if I killed you because you were black...I still killed you right?
Is there a difference between a black man that shows up dead, shot in the head, or a black mand that shows up dead after being hanged, cut down just before death, then dragged behind a pickup until dead, with a note left on the body, "If you are an uppity nigger, the same will happen to you"?
Some think the first is murder, and the second is a hate crime done not just to kill the person, but to intimidate countless others. It isn't the murder of a black person by a white person that is the problem. It is the intention of "sending a message" to the black people still alive that is the reason why there was a push to treat some crimes differently.
We already have laws to deal with murderers...thoughtcrime...
No, it's murder, not a thought crime. Like all homicide, intentions and motivations count. If I commit homicide because the guy broke into my house armed and told me he was going to kill me, that motivation would be sufficient to have that homicide not count as murder. It would most likely be considered justifiable homicide (for reason of self defense). If I hunt down a black man because he's black and dated a white woman, kill him and tell everyone that niggers shouldn't steal our white women, do you think that should be treated differently than the self defense example? They are both homicide. If you don't want them treated the same, you are a proponent of the thought crime you claim is bad. The only question in the minds of lawmakers is where to draw lines, not whether motivation and other "thoughts" should be taken into account.
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You actually proved my point and I think you misundersood what I was getting at. Homicide (self defense) vs Murder (not self defense). My point is that we already have the laws to deal with the difference between various types of deaths. You die in a car wreck because a trucks brakes fail and crush your car. You are dead, and the trucker MIGHT get charged with some form of involentary manslaughter if there was negligence or something. You die because you break into my house and I shoot you. Odds are I will not be charged because of self defense. I stab you in the face for irritating me one day. I am going to get charged with some degree of murder/manslaughter. I hunt you down and kill you because I don't like you for some reason and I plan out your murder. I am going to get charged with a higher degree of murder. My point is the reason I hunt you down and kill you is irrelevant. Whether Mr.Killer hunts down blacks for dating whites, or maybe for because you drink Coke instead of pepsi it should be treated the same. The real crime is that Mr.Killer is hunting people down and murdering them, the fact that it was because they were black, white, asian, pepsi drinkers, coke drinkers, hookers, etc is completely and totally outside the fact that he committed murder. Hate crimes are just a PC way of prosecuting thought crime. It is entirely legal for someone to hate someone else for being a black pepsi drinking hooker or whatever, the illegal part is murdering them regardless of why you decided to do it. The ONLY difference it should make is that when you put the guy who killed people for drinking coke in jail you think "what the hell was that about" and when you put the guy who was killing blacks in jail "damn skippy, now maybe prison sex will cure hate like American History X taught us". The crimes they are charged with and the sentencing should be the same. (Honestly, just for a chuckle at the absurdity of our current system, the guy killing coke drinkers might acually get sentenced harsher because he is sending the message don't drink coke, which could cause people to drink pepsi instead, and then he could be charged with the plethora of corporate protection laws that have been purchased as of late).
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
You actually proved my point and I think you misundersood what I was getting at. Homicide (self defense) vs Murder (not self defense). My point is that we already have the laws to deal with the difference between various types of deaths.
You stated that motivation was irrelevant. I pointed out that you were 100% wrong. You are implying something about the law taking into account all possible motivations. Since racially modivated killings were common and often purposefully overlooked by the authorities at the time of the writing of such laws, I would assert that your position is incorrect.
Whether Mr.Killer hunts down blacks for dating whites, or maybe for because you drink Coke instead of pepsi it should be treated the same.
A reasonable Coke drinker would not think that others would be likely to follow in your footsteps. Black people can reasonable expect that another black person will be murdered because they are black. The hate crime laws are essentially bundling murder with threatening others. Yes, it is murder in both cases, but in only one case is someone sending a credible message to a class of people regarding their future health. If soda killings became common, then I would expect that it would be covered by hate-crime laws, as well as be justified being covered by such laws.
Learn to love Alaska
Hate crime is such a laughably stupid concept I don't even know where to begin. First of all it puts us in the situation where you have to assume that every crime involving more than one race is now racially motivated. He robbed the store because it was a white owner and not a black owner. It blows my mind that court case after court case involving multiple races turns into this stupid racial issue and then the actual crime is left alone. We get lawyers doing the song and dance about how it was or wasn't racially motivated and that it deserves more or less punishment. Murder is Murder is Murder. Self defense is not murder, accidental death is not murder. I can't even count the number of court cases that turned a street brawl between black idiot A and white idiot B into some racial issue. Prove to me that EVERYONE in America that says "Thats gay" or "You are a fag" or "Don't be a jew" or "hey nigger" actually hates homosexuals, is antisemetic, and hates blacks and then we can discuss the sanity behind hate crime legislation. The fact is this hate crime shit totally detracts from the actual crime committed and it quickly becomes an argument about whether or not it was racial totally ignoring the fact that someone is dead or injured or whatever. This is little more than the guilty white syndrome shit that brought us such stunning victories as affirmative action and is just a continuation of thinly veiled racism. You want to hear some people pissed about affirmative action...you might here some racist rednecks bitch...but if you REALLY want to hear some pissed off people...go talk to successful blacks about how they are treated in college or on the job when everyone thinks they are there due to government programs. Treat all people as people and all crime as crime and don't allow anyone to play these stupid race cards if you want justice.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Ron Paul the individual is very much anti-choice, and is not quiet about that position. Ron Paul the Senator does not believe it is the federal government's role to allow or disallow abortion, but rather is a decision which properly belongs to the states. Every bit as importantly, his behavior in other cases where his personal beliefs conflict with his political principals is consistent with this explanation.
While I am pro-choice, I am also in favor of a smaller, more constitutionally limited federal government (with the roles abandoned by such a government taken over by the states). As such, Ron Paul's position resonates with me. I may not agree much with Ron Paul the person, but I would be quite happy to elect Ron Paul the Senator as President.
First of all it puts us in the situation where you have to assume that every crime involving more than one race is now racially motivated.
And because you are stupid is why you don't like it. There have been multiple killings in Texas in the past 10 years where the stated reason for the crime (from the people that did it bragging to others and sometimes recording it) was because they were black. You don't have to look for motivations when they are stated by those that did it. I guess you'd prefer if people that set fire to crosses in people's yards were charged with "improper fire" or other such trivial crimes, right? The KKK is a group of good ol' boys that should be supported and embraced by the community, and if one of the members of such an upstanding organization were to somehow be implicated in a crime, that doesn't mean any of the others would commit any crimes, or if they did that they were racially motivated at all. Let's go out of our way to make sure that people who try to terrorize specific groups don't have any hurdles to such intimidation. As long as they don't kill anyone, they should be fine, and if they do kill someone in a particularly brutal and public manner, it should be treated like all other homicides. Heck, it was probably an accident where the black man wandered into the street and was run over. Ten times.
You want to hear some people pissed about affirmative action...you might here some racist rednecks bitch...but if you REALLY want to hear some pissed off people...go talk to successful blacks about how they are treated in college or on the job when everyone thinks they are there due to government programs.
Ah yes, no one is more pissed off than the person that was almost eligible for aid but didn't get it because they didn't need it. I've spoken with a number of black people, even well educated and successful ones that didn't need affirmative action. For one, they all know that it doesn't get them a job. It's currently (and always was) illegal to hire someone just because they were black in order to fill some quota. Affirmative Action's first goal is to ensure that blacks aren't being denied opportunities because they are black. There are studies where Shaniqua and Jodie apply for the same job with the same resume, and Jodie is called in for an interview and Shaniqua isn't. Educated blacks know that such things still happen regularly, and they support AA because some errors one way and some errors the other way are much better than all errors being one and only one way. There is a wide separation between the races. Many whites came over here because they were well off and wanted more opportunities. Blacks generally came over because they were kidnapped and sold into slavery. AA is an attempt to help narrow the wide and widening gap between wealth of the races. However, AA is not related to hate crimes. Hate crimes have been around forever, and will continue to be around, even if not racially motivated. Crimes against gays, single mothers, doctors that provide contraception, and many other things that people single out as morally questionable are things which people have committed crimes against.
They weren't just crimes against a gay man, but their crime was aimed toward all gays. And you've already stated that motivation should be taken into account for punishment. So why do you get so upset when another type of motivation is enumerated?
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Cry me a river will you? Ahh yes, of course its all because I'm stupid that I don't fall for the bleeding heart crap. Do you really think that there are no laws to handle harassment? That I can legally go burn crosses or terrorize people without consequences without hate crime laws? You act like all KKK members are criminals, while they may be a rather loathesome and disgusting bunch, they most certainly are not all criminals, and thus enters the double edged sword of freedom of speech, the same applies for the kill whitey groups and the hate the jews groups. The hurdles are already there, their actions are already crimes, tacking on "thoughtcrime" as motivation to a crime is pointless. You act like I don't think they should be punished or charged with the crimes they committed. I am so fucking sick of hearing "its because I'm *some minority group*" These people need to fuck off and grow up already, oh my lord no...noone but minorities face opposition, and its only certain "protected" minorities that do!
I am so fucking sick of hearing this slavery bullshit. Yes it was horrible, it also happened a long fucking time ago, and why don't we go out together and count how many blacks came here in chains on boats today. Go listen to Bill Cosby (shock, a successful black man) talk about this stupid victim culture that we promote. Where are the Irish or Italians waving their flags of victim culture over being shit on as second class citizens? I'm not saying racism doesn't exist, I'm saying that over time people get over that stupid shit. Holding on to that victim culture crap only makes it drag on longer and further fans the flames of discontent. Did Martin Luther King whine about how they should get special protection and handouts? NO! He said treat us as equals. I don't care that idiot asshole redneck committed a crime against you because you were *insert minority*, I care that he committed a crime against you as a person, and the fact that we are both talking about committing crimes pretty much means that it was ALREADY A CRIME without this "hate crime" crap tacked on.
Your own racism is actually a bit shocking. "many whites came here because they were well off" Uhm...would that be the ones driven here by the potato famine? Or maybe the ones escaping from religious persecution (ironically to become the persecutors, but that is an entirely different issue), or maybe all the ones that came here to escape the concentration camps, the list goes on and on. What about the poor white kid college fund? Or do you believe that there are no impoverished white children that deserve an education. Even your example about Shaniqua and Jodie is based on Equal Opportunity which is a good idea with piss poor implementation, but the company in question is already in violation without any other hate crime nonsense involved.
Strong men and women who overcome all adversity in their path make history, they are the shining examples of how to be for all races and lifestyles. Those getting on soapboxes and crying about victimhood make them a pathetic joke and a disgrace to their *insert minority* and cause. The ones who give the bigots and the doubters the silent "fuck off" and proceed to greatness despite any obstacles put in their path by the small minded are the greatest people of all. Hate crime laws only continue to define various things as "that type of group" when the path to success is removing all definitions of those groups. I think the constitutional amendments for blacks and women are some of the dumbest pieces of legislation out there, because, while certainly well intentioned, it establishes that some minority group needs an amendment to be treated like everyone else. The original documents already claimed everyone was equal, why do we need amendments saying "yeah we fucked up, I guess everyone really is equal...oh...and I guess girls too", why not just enforce the original intent of all men are created equal and not be morons splitting hairs about the word "Man" as it has been widely accepted to mean all of mankind. We don't need more legislation, we need to enforce what we have.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Cry me a river will you? Ahh yes, of course its all because I'm stupid that I don't fall for the bleeding heart crap. Do you really think that there are no laws to handle harassment?
Let me sum up your arguments:
"I completely agree with you that there are and should be separate crimes and punishments for different motivations, but I think that minorities don't deserve any protection from activities like the Holocaust. It's their own damn fault for being so sensitive about being systematically exterminated and no such protections should exist here."
Learn to love Alaska
I'm not sure if you can't read, if you are just senseless, or going out of your way to obtuse. So in response, let me sum up your argument "I hate whitey and he is the source of all pain and suffering in the world, we should all have laws to protect us from the evil white man". I truely don't understand how the hell you equate my disagreement that committing a crime for "hate" reasons is any different than committing THE SAME CRIME for non "hate" reasons with approval of genocide. Or that you would be such a fool to think that things like genocide aren't already crimes without "hate crime" nonsense.
That being said, you obviously live in your own little world where the Holocaust happened AFTER the introduction of silly hate crime legislation. Further, the people responsible for it were convicted of their crimes against humanity and were sentenced to rot away in prison, contrary to your assertion that they got away with it. In fact you prove my exact point in that the system did a fine job of convicting those psychotic murderers and locking them up forever without the nonsense hate crime legislation we have seen in the last dozen years.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The problem with absolute lassiez-faire economics as espoused by Adam Smith, Ayn Rand and the Austrian school is that it assumes perfect market conditions - e.g. perfect information, and zero cost of comparison shopping. In practice, these do not exist. No one has the time to collect perfect information, and the cost of comparison shopping is most definitely non-zero (if nothing else, it costs me time). The lack of these two conditions in practice creates a power imbalance in favor of the producers, as they have more information about market conditions than the consumers they are selling to.
Also, in a free market, there is an incentive for producers to collude and form a cartel to increase their share of the economic gain.
Finally, this discussion ignores externalities like pollution and infrastructure costs entirely. The best practical way to "internalize" externality costs is through some kind of government intervention (usually taxes or user fees).
I'm not saying that government is the solution for everything. I am saying that there are certain instances where the "invisible hand" does not encourage necessary investment. In those cases, government should intervene.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I truely don't understand how the hell you equate my disagreement that committing a crime for "hate" reasons is any different than committing THE SAME CRIME for non "hate" reasons with approval of genocide.
Because of where you draw the line. You agree that THE SAME CRIME should be treated differently depending on motivation. Yet, you claim that it shouldn't be treated differently based on other motivations. So, why do you draw the line where you do? To go out of your way to be racially blind in a society that is so obviously not racially blind indicates that you are, in fact, not racially blind. You aren't interested in justice. Justice is where people are treated fairly. You don't want fair, you want an equity in applied after the system is obviously inequitable.
That makes you a racist. If you don't like that label, quit being a racist.
Learn to love Alaska
I am not even going to argue with you at this point. I only reply to congratulate you on the fact that I had to read "you go out of your way to be racially blind in a society that is not racially blind and that it indicates that you are in fact not racially blind" no less than 3 times in a sort of stunned awe of your logic. So I go out of my way to be something, and because noone else is, that makes me not be that something too? And then the idea that because I go out of my way to ignore someones race that it makes me racist... You sir have executed the most stunning display of circular logic beyond "the Bible is true because it was inspired by God, and I know it was inspired by God because the Bible said so" while at the same time performing a most amazing feat of doublespeak that would even put Karl Rove or Dick Cheney to shame. Bravo...Bravo... I have been entirely entertaining.
Just in case that isn't what you were attempting, I will go ahead and include the definitions of racism. The Merriam-Webster's Webster's Dictionary dictionary defines racism as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race, and that it is also the prejudice based on such a belief.[2] The Macquarie Dictionary defines racism thus: the belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others. So like I said before...with your "white people are rich immigrants" and your "black people are all poor kidnapped slaves" line of crap...you have proven yourself quite racist based on the actual definitions.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
There is more to the "balance" of gov't than just the internal divisions of Legi vs Judi vs Exec branches. Power is also balanced externally through federalism - the people are governed directly and simultaneously by two different entities, the state gov't and the federal gov't. Neither is superior or subordinate to the other, per se, because they have different realms of authority. There are certain areas of governance that the states cede to the USGov so that it can do its job effectively, but in theory, those responsibilities could be taken up again by the state if it were to secede.
This balance is seen directly in the structure of the federal gov't, by looking at how the Legi and Exec are chosen. In the Leg, Congress is bicameral. One house is enumerated proportionally by population and is chosen by directly popular vote so that We The People have a voice, but with a short (2-year) term knowing that people's opinions are fickle. The other is also selected by the people, but by proxy, through the legislatures of the states, and with every state having equal representation. That is, the state selects them, and the senators are accountable to the state government. Furthermore, state governors have the power to appoint a senator if there is a vacancy while the state legislature is in recess. Since the pool that selects them (state legislatures) should already represent "the best and wisest" of the general population, in theory the people elected Senators are rational, staid types that think long-term, not given to controversies of the moment, and for this reason are given longer (6-year) terms.
It's the nature of gov't to expand and perpetuate itself. Throughout history, virtually everyone realizes that gov't is a necessary evil. The philosophy at the time of the Founders believed that mankind had generally evil tendencies, so you needed to implement some kind of power establish rules and dole out punishments. But they realized that gov't is run by people who have the same evil tendencies, so gov't itself needs to be checked. How to do this? Federalism! Set two governments "against" each other. The people and the states see a mutual advantage in allying together in a Union, but that Union could itself become a detriment to any single state, and to protect against this the states have a voice at the table (in the Senate). No state is going to willingly sacrifice an equal seat at the table, and possibly become subordinated to another state or the national gov't, and no gov't is going to willingly give up any of its own authority over its citizens. This "tug of war" between the two, it was thought, should adequately protect the individual citizen from the excesses of either.
So when the 17th comes along and kicks one leg off the three-legged stool, the whole thing begins to topple. With Senators now a kind of super-representative, the state has no effective representation with which to counteract federal growth - the senators are now directly accountable to the populace. But they are not really accountable, because their district is the entire state - a Rep/Sen can be effectively held accountable by the 35k people in a House district (that was the original proportion), or the couple dozen (maybe a hundred or so) in a state legislature, but who honestly thinks that a Senator hears what any individual (out of the hundred thousands, or millions, in his state) says? A Senator knows that people have short memories (that's why the House has 2-year terms) so when election time comes around again, he goes on "good behavior" for the last 9 months and suckers us to vote for him again. Campaigning in a district with that many people takes a lot of time and money - this is why Senate races are disproportionately more expensive than House races. Where is that money coming from? Special interests and lobbyists, who take advantage of the 6-year term to get their will enacted. So if you want to get "big money" out of politics, if you see a "corporate stranglehold"
Constitutionally Correct
So I go out of my way to be something, and because noone else is, that makes me not be that something too?
Yes. When you go out of your way, you must acknowledge it, identify it, then act in a manner different from those around you. That indicates a conscious decision to make decisions based on that criterion. Even if the actions are balanced, they are still racist. You considered that in your mental process, so it was a factor. Even if the outcome is "fair", the mental process included race and thus was racist.
The worst racists are always the ones that claim they aren't.
Learn to love Alaska