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Obama Significantly Revises Technology Positions
method9455 writes "Barack Obama has edited his official website on many issues, including a huge revision on the technology page. Strangely it seems net neutrality is no longer as important as it was a few months ago, and the swaths of detail have been removed and replaced with fairly vague rhetoric. Many technologists were alarmed with the choice of Joe Biden before, and now it appears their fears might have been well founded." Update: 09/22 18:07 GMT by T : Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica passed on a statement from an Obama campaign representative who points out that the changes in wording highlighted by Versionista aren't the whole story, and that more Obama tech-plan details are now available in a PDF, saying "there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy - folks who want more information can click to get our full plan."
When are people going to learn to assess politicians and parties on their actions, rather than their promises? Those that might have really introduced change have already been weeded out. Vote for the puppet of your choice, folks.
Many have. Obama's tech-related voting record is certainly better than most candidates that come to mind. He's voted against telecom immunity, and FISA fairly vehemently in the past. Perhaps the vague language is merely a way to package both Biden/Obama's views into a single declaration? It was probably just a way to describe both of their technological goals without smearing their respective stances. Should that be the case, it's still the top of the ticket that calls the shots.
The problem is that you can't vote on actions until after they've been taken.
Personally, I'm in favour of a nice, simple system where if a politician makes a promise before an election and then breaks it, a court can remove him or her from office. I imagine we'd soon see some changes in the way manifestos were presented, and perhaps those who are not just puppets and actually intend to act according to their stated principles would get a bit more recognition since voting for someone based on their campaign pledges would actually mean something. Those who just say whatever the current audience wants to hear but never really promise anything would stand out by a mile.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Which is why I am voting 3rd party this election. I do not believe either major party candidate is worthy of my vote. Do I think the 3rd party types have any chance of winning? Not really, but if third party candidates took 20% or so of the vote away from major parties, it might force them to do a reality check.
I've also proposed this kind of system before (i.e. that a manifesto should be a legally-binding contract with the voters), but I suspect that the result would be candidates putting such fluffy terms in their pledges that the courts would never be able to determine whether they'd actually broken them or not.
Before New Labour (same as the old conservatives) came to power in the UK, they handed out 'pledge cards' with five election pledges on them. A very simple and powerful message. The Friday Night Armistice made a massive version of these, and each week in their first year crossed off the ones that they'd broken. It was depressing how quickly they all went away.
Democracy requires an informed electorate to function just as capitalism requires informed consumers. The same level of truth in advertising laws should apply.
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This is why I agree with notion that the president should have a line-item veto power, and I feel that way regardless who is in office
I disagree. We've already made the Executive Branch much more powerful than the Framers intended it to be. Signing statements, refusals to testify, appointments to un-elected Federal agencies that can impose laws (err, "regulations") on the citizenry, warfare without a declaration, international agreements that don't need to be ratified by the Senate, trade agreements that don't need input from Congress, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You really want to make the Executive even more powerful? Are you nuts?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Don your tinfoil hats, please...
It appears that the media have decided that it's time for Obama to lose the election. There is nothing in the news now directly about Obama, none of his own words, there is everything in the news about his campaign with words like "beleagured", "desperate", and this "vague rhetoric" stuff. Coming out of the Republican Convention there was the "rock star frenzy" about Sarah Palin, until facts started to reveal that she is really something of a Dan Quayle. There was a brief news cycle of fact discovery about Sarah Palin, and now things seem to be over to Dog Pile on Obama. By the way, notice how Iraq has pretty much disappeared from the news lately? The one thing I did hear is that the central government is beginning to arrest Sunnis, essentially dismantling the "Anhbar Awakening."
It's certainly good that we keep being told about our terrible Liberal Media, because I surely wouldn't have guessed it from what I've seen, lately.
I had thought the media were trying to keep this a tight horse-race, because that enhances their own status and ratings, by keeping us watching. That doesn't appear to be the case. Coming into the conventions, we had a Democratic rock-star candidate against a Republican whose own party had very little enthusiasm for him. Coming out we have an invisible Democratic candidate and an energized Republican party, and as far as I can tell, it's largely done with media coverage.
Oh, and we haven't even see this year's "October Surprise" yet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It's a pity there's no realistic way that the voting system will be changed in the states.
It really is the case that when faced with 2 crap mainstream choices you can screw yourself by voting for someone you're really like to see in rather than the lesser of the 2 evils.
Here we have a vastly superior voting system called Proportional representation.
I'm probably going to make a mess explaining this.
It's a little more complex.
You number your choices 1,2,3,4,etc
so say there was 4 choices:
Rep:Jack Johnson:
Dem:John Jackson:
3rd party: Joe:
3rd party: Jill:
I just number them
Joe:1
Jill:2
John Jackson:3
Now say after the 1st count
Joe has 1000 votes
Jill has 2000 votes
John Jackson has 10000 votes
Jack Johnson has 11000 votes
Under your system Jack Johnson would get the seat and the people who voted for joe and jill would be screwed if John Jacksons policies were slightly better for them than Jack Johnsons.
Under PR the limit is 12001 votes to get the seat.
Now when it comes time to count the vote it's clear that Joe isn't going to get in no matter what so he's removed and all the votes for him move to second choices.
jill still isn't going to get in so her votes are moved to their second or 3rd choice.
most of the people who voted for joe or jill would prefer John Jackson over Jack Johnson which pushes John Jackson over the 12001 limit and he gets in.
Yay - rationalization that your "team" is okay, because, after all - they're your team.
Please folks, there's no way you're voting for a democrat and republican and *really* thinking you're going to get change. They're all part of the same party, they're all buddies, and they all have roughly the same goals - take lots of your money, waste it, pass laws to control your life, invade other countries.
The OP is correct, any candidate for change has already been eliminated (Ron Paul, Mike Gravel...)
Vote third party. Any third party, for that matter.
His blackness was questioned by other black people. I believe the quote was about him "lacking slave blood." [Charles Kenzie Steele, Jr.] And let's not forget that by having a white mother he is just as much white as black.
Funny how both sides can simultaneously make race an issue and denounce race as an issue.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Why would I feel betrayed? Bush wasn't part of the contract with America.
Bush has been a horrible president, and I'm voting third party. I've never much liked either of the mainstream parties or politics in Washington in general. If you want a real change, don't vote for Obama, vote for a third party.
Depends, if you vote Libertarian, i.e. Bob Barr, you're voting for Obama in a sense. If you vote for Nader, you're voting for McCain in a sense.
I'm not trying to be confrontational, but in this sad 2 party system - and yes it's still 2 party, the likely hood of a third party candidate getting the presidency is so unbelievable that it approaches zero.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Or, alternately, we could probably do without lawyers if we'd just simplify the damn legal code, and we could DEFINITELY do with fewer lawyers if we'd stop making stupid laws.
Take drug laws for example. The US annually arrests upwards of 800,000 people for marijuana violations alone. That means you're creating 1.6 million opportunities for lawyers (prosecutor and defense) on an annual basis. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather open up that industry to farmers, pot-bar/"coffee-house" owners, and other related private ventures, instead of creating jobs for lawyers, judges, police officers, and criminals.
There are countless such examples - marijuana was just the first one to come to mind because I was recently discussing the idea with some friends in law enforcement. Eventually it evolved into a discussion about law enforcement as a whole, and the general consensus seemed to be that we just have way too many pointless laws.
If you want to have a society in which law and order are taken seriously, it's much better to have a few very important laws which you enforce with a high degree of success rather than having a whole slew of laws, half of which you can't effectively enforce, and the other half of which you can only enforce sporadically because you're forced to waste resources on stuff that shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Not only does the current criminal code make law-enforcement less effective, but it makes the legal system unnecessarily complex, wastes taxpayer money on jobs that shouldn't even exist, and actually encourages crime.
Ummmmmm ... yes. Until such time as they start writing laws in a language that the average person can read and understand and so, can defend themselves
How about just smarter average people?
You'll have that sometimes...
But somehow it seems as though the democrats are failing at doing the same thing. Important bills (like FISA) that they should have been able to kill passed anyway.
If the republicans have the ability to stop things they don't like, why don't the democrats (with the same seat numbers) managed to do the same? The only reason I can think of is that they suck at standing together and being a useful opposition party.
The thing is, all this could be solved by adding a "Read More" link to expand out the section to include more detail. In its current version, it does look watered down to be more corporate-friendly even if that was not the intent.
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If you removed all lawyers and let all parties argue their own cases, you'd immediately see a drastic shift in power to the upper class and more educated, who would actually know the law, and have time to study and interpret it. The reason we have lawyers is so that EVERYONE has an expert on the law on their side.
Nice sentiment, but sadly, the upper class already has the power. I'm sorry, but a poor working man who is wrongly accused of murder has little chance of finding a lawyer who will get him off, whereas... well, OJ Simpson. An immigrant family-owned business has no real legal discourse if the large real estate conglomerate that leases the storefront of the business decides to screw over the family.
People talk about a health care disparity, which exists and must be fixed. There also exists a justice disparity that no one really seems to talk about. Given the proportion of politicians who made the practice of law their previous profession, I doubt this will ever change.
And one point that continues to irk me about Obama. As a soon-to-be doctor, one of the biggest issues that I'm concerned with is health care reform. Absolutely recognizing the need for universal health care and health care reform, I worry that many of the proposed changes will lead to short-term cost savings at the expense of long-term innovation. Looking at Obama's health care plan, he blames many elements for the outrageous cost of health care today-- the heartless insurance companies, the wasteful hospitals, the greedy drug companies. What party does Obama not even mention?
You guessed it.... the money-sucking lawyers. Coincidence?
I guess I'll take a little time to answer an AC.
I'll give one example - the Iraq War. There was little-to-no significant questioning of the Bush administrations "evidence" leading to the Iraq war, and after it came out that the evidence was defective, and very possibly cherry-picked, with some possibility of outright fabrication, there was still no investigation.
The nation has gone to war on false pretenses, done incredible damage to our prestige and trust overseas, and those who presided over it have received no significant account for their actions.
One way I heard it... Perhaps reporters may be left-wing, but somewhere up the management chain it turns solid right-wing.
The other way I've heard, from several sources, is that it's not a conspiracy, it's PROFIT. The media has become so revenue and profit oriented that investigative journalism has become a thing of the past. It's much cheaper and more profitable to accept press releases and report them as news.
In other words, in the USA the Press is broken, and has abdicated its duty, as conceived by the founders of our country.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Also that "soggy liberal nonsense" gave us 8 years of peace and prosperity under Clinton. And the last 7 years of non-"soggy liberal nonsense" has given us a list of foreign and domestic policy disasters that now include the worst stock crash since the Great Depression.
So for McCain to be change from GWB, and Obama to be more of the same - well, that actually doesn't logically connect in any way. Really, it doesn't.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Don't be too sure of that. The reports of inaccuracies, even reports of outright lies from the McCain campaign are increasing. In 2000, they were caught completely off guard by the Bush campaign's Hitler-esque tactics of lying blatantly and loudly. In 2004, they assumed that the same campaign wouldn't do the same bullshit again, and then there was the Swiftboat Veterans* for America.
In 2008, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, heck, even Saturday Night Live are laughing at the media's collective incompetence. I do think they've heard of the old Irish saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
No, don't use the Bush version. I don't want my IQ reduced by half.
* I have another name for those guys, but I'll restrain myself. If we get a Democrat in the Oval Office, I'll gladly call them what they are, since I won't be charged with sedition or disloyalty.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."