Slashdot Mirror
Obama Launches Change.gov
mallumax writes "Obama has launched Change.gov. According to the site 'Change.gov provides resources to better understand the transition process and the decisions being made as part of it. It also offers an opportunity to be heard about the challenges our country faces and your ideas for tackling them. The Obama Administration will reflect an essential lesson from the success of the Obama campaign: that people united around a common purpose can achieve great things.' The site is extensive and contains Obama's agenda for economy and education among many others. They first define the problem and then lay out the plan. Everything is in simple English without a trace of Washington-speak. The site also has details about the transition. According to many sources, Obama's transition efforts started months ago. The copyright for the content is held by 'Obama-Biden Transition Project, a 501c(4) organization'."
First Obama
Now you can be ignored by politicians faster and more efficiently than ever before!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Well posting this on slashdot should ensure that their servers get a proper stress-test.
The Long Now Foundation
I know this is probably gonna get me marked down from some of Obama's more, ehm, "faithful"--and I'm not excusing anything past politicians have done, in either party, oh no--but this seems too much like propaganda. "Ministry of Change", heh.
It also seems like he's unveiling things he didn't talk about that much:
The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nationâ(TM)s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.
Mandatory community service? Great, let's send a bunch of unmotivated kids to do stupid work. Hell, that kind of shit would have been a nightmare for me at that age when I had massive social anxiety and was extremely uncomfortable in such situations.
Of course, people will come out of the woodwork to say how because it's something that people "should" do (because helping people IS nice, after all...) that Obama should MAKE you do it. Please, someone explain to me how you justify that leap.
How the hell did they get a .gov domain considering that they aren't even in power yet? And even if they were, is this the kind of stuff .gov was created for?
It has been a long time since that has happend.
This is the first installment of the government run media machine and how they will humor your requests http://www.change.gov/page/s/yourvision
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
...now we'll see if we can get him to change his policy on Nuclear Power (a necessity for cleaner power), pay more attention to what the AMA has to say on insurance, convince him not to raise taxes in the middle of an economic crisis*, and plead with him to leave Griffin as head of NASA and keep him properly funded. Anything I'm missing?
While I'm being a little bit snarky, I think it's great that Obama has this outlet to let our voices be heard. I look forward to seeing if he listens. :-)
* The $250,000 bit doesn't matter. What's more concerning is when Bush's existing tax breaks expire. When Hoover raised taxes in 1932, it caused a complete economic collapse of an already precarious situation.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Shouldn't there be blogs and forums so users can actually communicate with each other and make their opinions known to each other? That would be a powerful force, as they could band together to keep Obama in line if he strays too far from his promises. The way it is set up currently, it simply is a bullhorn for Obama, while his users can "share their vision" with a recycle bin. I don't see much (yet) to get excited about. It reminds me of CNN's "talkback", which is heavily censored and filtered.
as well as many others, have fought important wars with drafted soldiers
"Mandatory community service? Great, let's send a bunch of unmotivated kids to do stupid work. Hell, that kind of shit would have been a nightmare for me at that age when I had massive social anxiety and was extremely uncomfortable in such situations."
so you have a problem with the fighting forces of world war i and world war ii? where we gave 18 year olds guns and made them serve on the front lines of mayhem and death? i'm just saying, you'd better have a problem with the idea of a military draft, for the sake of intellectual honesty
although, i've heard stories of many countries with mandatory military service as nothing more than a chance to learn smoking and peel potatoes. so mandatory civil service might prove stupid... or really good, can't tell
but i do like the idea of paying off part of your student loans this way. because it serves as a carrot and a stick. if your civil service effort is poor, you would be punished by having to still pay your loans in full, for example. this at least provides motivation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The government is paying a good chunk of your tuition in exchange for 100 hours of community service. Sounds like a fair exchange for me.
Do you know what this program is? The government lets you to earn college credit while you are in high school. Many of my classmates were able to graduate with a bachelor degree a year before us chumps who didn't take uncle sam up on the offer.
How do you know this? Maybe it would have got you over it sooner. In fact, I wager most of the people in head start did it to get away from their high school foes and sit around people who respected smarts.
If you dont want to do it, pay full freight on your college tuition instead! Nobody is pointing a gun at your head saying "cash this government check!!"
http://www.change.gov/americaserves
Classic double-think
"When you choose to serve -- whether it's your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood....
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.
Obama's chief of staff choice favors compulsory universal service
Obama and Hillary Call for a Draft Live on MTV
Text of H.R. 393: Universal National Service Act of 2007
Obama Calls For National Civilian Stasi
Constitution, what Constitution?
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Joe the Plumber has launched:
http://www.secureourdream.com/
Yes, sadly now that his dreams of owning a plumbing business have crashed to the ground, he decided to become a political watchdog and "take it to the streets."
Who knows what we'll be saying about him 4 years from now? A 1 year "Freedom membership" costs a mear $14.95 .
Freedom, who among us is against that?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I already liked the guy, but I'm honestly impressed by this. Any information from the government can be suspected as 'propaganda'. At least this site puts forth their agenda in an easy to navigate, plain English fashion.
As for the 'submit your own idea' functionality, I think it's a great move. Even if they ignore most/all of the suggestions, isn't that the same results as not asking for them in the first place? At worst this is a waste of time and at best it's a huge step forward in citizen understanding of and participation in government.
story summary: obama and team put up website communicating their efforts
take home message, pro obama: all the good i feel about an obama administration is taking effect
take home message, anti obama: all the bad i feel about an obama administration is taking effect
its just a communication tool folks. last i checked, communicating what you actually intend to do is never a bad thing
for those of you who don't like obama, think of it as your enemy telegraphing his punches, allowing you to prepare your rebutal, or providing a convenient record for you to accuse him of not doing what he promised to do. see? its good all around
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unlike claims by McCain, I've never heard Obama say he was against nuclear power. At some point, he might have said he was against some specific form of power plant design or something, but never against the concept. McCain must have lept on that statement and blew it up to make it sound like Obama was against all forms of nuclear power.
In fact, I think the "no more nukes" people have become such a small base that it would be politically safe to revisit nuclear power. Do you know anybody who is really against it? Most people I know are really concerned more about how to dispose of the waste, not really concerned about the power plant itself.
But that all said, if you could develop power sources that are cheaper per megawatt then nuclear power, why bother? From what I understand, wind power is going down in price per megawatt that it is almost competitive with coal!
I know you are new to politics so I thought I would let you know. Now that you have won, you can stop campaigning for about 3 years.
WHOO HOO! Change! We got change! Yes we can! F___ you, boss!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
A forum that citizens "talk back" to a presidential blog would be the largest community website on the planet. Could you imagine how many comments a single blog post would get? I bet a single blog post, especially if it was even slightly controversial, could easily generate thousands of comments. How would you design the UI to navigate 5,000 comments? How would you moderate it? How would you even design it? Nobody would interact on such a forum either, it would be one blog post and 5,000 direct replies. No threads, nobody talking to each other, nothing. Just 5,000 comments that all sound the same.
You can already see how this works by visiting the comments pages of any major national newspaper. Nobody reads other comments, and everybody replies directly to the article. You basically get pages of comments all talking to nobody.
Personally, I dont think it is possible to allow comments on a presidential blog. I dont even know if it would be productive. It would just be a mess.
Hey, I know where Africa is, and I can name the countries in NAFTA... and I'm running for US Senate as a Republican in 2010! :-)
We deserved to lose this last election, and its time to set aside our own bitterness over how the left wing trashed Bush, not act like kids in retaliation, and do everything we can to help Obama succeed. We can dicker over free enterprise vs the government when we all have jobs and this country is at peace.
This is my sig.
How can he make a proper uninformed rant if you expect him to read anything first?!?!?!
THIS.... IS.... SLASHDOT!!!
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
I already see a lot of posts about how this is a waste of time and how the government will never read the submissions and how this is a poor use of the .gov domain.
Even if all those things ARE true, isn't a webpage that encourages two-way communication between citizens and the highest level of government *LONG* overdue? Regardless of how you feel about Obama or how much you believe this website will help or how much you believe in the "change" message, I would think that slashdot readers - of all people - would agree that it's ABOUT TIME the Executive Branch implemented an idea like this.
I mean, think about it for a moment - I've been able to communicate with fantasy baseball experts, tech support workers, musicians, and videogame reviewers online for more than a decade. Yes this is the first time a president has thought to do something like this.
Regardless of how well it works, this IS a step in the right direction.
Having a .gov domain means it's a tax payer funded government web-site.
Um, no it doesn't. http://www.dotgov.gov/
As president, Barack Obama would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals who shouldn't have them. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent, as such weapons belong on foreign battlefields and not on our streets.
Repeal the Tiahrt Amendment- This would be a very bad idea go read up on why the Tiahrt Amendment exists that information should remain unavailable to the public for privacy reasons if nothing else. Also the reasons given there are incorrect at best.
Making guns in this country childproof- Safe storage is a good idea, but I have yet to see a good safe storage law.
Making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent- This is very bad.
I prefer this guy because he is better than the alternative, but I knew this was coming and it concerns me.
Of course, I tried e-mailing them yesterday to point out that their privacy policy looks to not match their actions (as they're linking to Google Analytics, so the cookies used to tracking people _are_ being shared with another website), and the e-mail address _on_their_privacy_ page bounced with an authentication error.
So I e-mailed postmaster@ptt.gov, and got:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
land of the free. where freemen understand that freedom is protected by banding together, and fighting off threats to freedom. threats that exist abroad, in battle with evil ideologies that are antagonistic to freedom, or domestically, in poor areas of the country where freedom is threatened by economic misery
you are not free if you are poor. the battle for maintaining freedom is a domestic and a foreign battle. if you think it is only a foreign battle, you do not truly understand the nature of freedom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Deploy the Cheapest, Cleanest, Fastest Energy Source - Energy Efficiency.
I gather rhetoric rather than science is his key policy.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
I dunno, this seems like double-talk to me:
The first sentence is contradicted by the second. When you insist on extra conditions as prerequisites to trade agreements, such as good labor and environmental standards, you necessarily increase the cost of trade to whomever you're negotiating with. Thus, the likelihood of trade is decreased. Decreasing trade is the opposite of opening up foreign markets.
This is independent of the question of whether insisting on labor and environmental standards is good.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Screw this "community service" bullshit. We need paid employees to do these kinds of things. In fact, they should hire private contractors to hire people. Then I can pay for the people to do the work, people to manage those people, a corporate structure to make a prfit off of it, and a whole set of administrative personnel on the governmental side to administer the new contracts.
As it is, I don't pay enough taxes, and am just looking for ways Obama can liberate more money from my bank account. Besides, most children these days already have an empathy for others and a well developed sense of their need to contribute positively to their community. Nearly every teenager I meet marvels at the wisdom of their elders and can't seem to get their parents to stop enticing them to play video games or text to one another all day. Having them do community service would just eat into the quality time they spend with their parents and grandparents, learning fine, small town moral values.
The 100 hours a year in college might seem a bit high - I know it does to me - but on reflection it's like adding a 1 credit class each semester (3 hrs a week for 16 weeks twice a year). Many already do this. The "jump off a bridge" answer doesn't hold much water for me, so I won't cite the several "western" nations which require (up to 2 years?) of service from every citizen. I'm not 100% on board with this, but I generally like the idea. Then again, I'm not in school anymore, so it doesn't affect me as much.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Quit whining.
It is not "slavery" to be forced to participate, it is not unjust, it is not unconstitutional. You have a responsibility to participate in your country.
Yes, true, you could "choose" to live off the fat of the land and not participate in the past... but that didn't excuse your behavior.
This country only exists in the minds of the people, because they participate. If those who participate decide that everyone needs to get off their butts and do SOMETHING, then you either go with it, or you actually do something about it. Don't agree? Go read Plato, Socrates' reason for committing suicide. Read the federalist papers. Read something pertaining to civil responsibility.
My children participate in scouts and 4H, both of which require community service. As you progress to Eagle scout, those requirements grow. I am an assistant scoutmaster, as well as council member. My wife is into the women's organization in town. Easily, I would guess a large portion of americans could already justify more than 25-50 hours a year without changing anything.
Heck a 1 hour a week meeting would give you 50 hours.
meh
Two years of debates, at least 20 in the primary and three in the general. Unremitting press coverage. Two books, one specifically on Obama's political philosophy, written by the candidate in his own hand. Huge websites with encyclopedic overview of everything the candidate intends to do. This country's (to date) most expensive political television ad compaign, with issue ads, attack ads, 527s, the whole schmear.
I admit I am having trouble finding the "promise of improvement," but then again I can never see the Angeles national forest when I drive through it: there's too many trees on either side of the road and they obscure the view.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Except there is now an explicit Amendment to the Constitution outlawing slavery. See that is the correct way to change the law. If you want to allow the government to do things that the Constitution doesn't authorize, there is a system in place to change the Constitution.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
True believers seek redemption from the sin of death.
I find it kind of shocking how a good portion of slashdotters don't care much for Obama. But what is more shocking, is that these same semi-intelligent people think they can predict the future. quit your shit talking, and wait 4 years until we know for certain how things are going to pan out. you're not fucking Nostradamus.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
i grew up rural, and i live urban now. i shot shotguns in the swamp behind the house with my granddaddy, a mile from our nearest neighbor, at gamebird and targets. i understand the need for your own form of protection when the police are half an hour away
now, living in an urban environment, i see the other side of guns. guns are not only tools of virtue. they are frequently tools of mayhem. guns are not always in the hands of those who intend good, nor is there some magic wand which can tell who should or should not have a gun. such that in an urban environment, it makes sense to let the police be armed, and everyone else to have suppressed gun ownership, amongst common people. it simply cuts down on needless death
and, as a side issue: no, arming only the police is not a formula for fascism. in fact, it is those who appeal to visceral force, who appeal to the gun, who are more likely fodder for embryonic fascist movements, not the police. really, read your history. random guys in the country is not a protection from fascism, it is the soil in which fascism grows
back to the larger point: gon control is the approach to guns as it exists in europe. europe is mostly urban. meanwhile, the usa has mostly been rural throughout its history, but is shifting to majority urban in recent years. therefore, it is natural that attitudes towards guns will shift from a rural attitude to an urban attitude, and experience a watershed moment in the coming years against gun ownership
and its simply a rural versus urban dynamic. currently, there are people dying in urban centers for the sake of a rural legal approach to gun ownership. in the future, there will be people dying in rural areas for the sake of an urban approach to gun ownership. its the majority deciding the legal approach. and either rural, or urban folk, suffer for the benefit of the other. for those of you want to keep your guns, urban blood is on your hands. for those of you who wish to curtail guns, rural blood will be on your hands. simple as that really
personally it would be ideal if you could own a gun in the country, but not in the city. but this is nearly impossible to enforce
and finally, the second amendment referred to posses in the countryside against native americans and british and french colonial forces. its completely taken out of historical context in reference to modern gun ownership needs, really folks. i don't know why the second amendment is so depended upon as a some sort of supporter of your right to have guns. are you the minutemen? the second amendment does not support the concept you think it does
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Looks like he's at least getting some decent web developers behind him.
Well, let's see:
Interesting commented-out content:
This isn't good HTML. It's HTML copied from several other sites and cobbled together by an amateur. Lame.
Blacks voted 88% for Kerry, it's not -that- big of a shift, and a lot of it has to do with new voter registrations, as well - new voters were pretty consistently pro-Obama.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
You should always vote for the best person.
People with small minds vote based on race. So do your best to put them in the minority.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
How can you stereotype the entire 95% of Blacks as anti-White, and in the same breath say that all 64.5% of Hispanics and Asians are completely racially unbiased? How do you support these claims? You also seem to be neglecting the percentage of Whites who voted against a Black candidate. Let's say (and I think this is reasonable in our country) that 25% of McCain voters are anti-Black. How does that change your final vote estimate? This racism deal goes both ways.
I'd rather let a thousand guilty men go free than chase after them.
Welcome to Slashdot - where everyone is an armchair economist.
no, what you really have is the desire that you don't have to help the poor at all
why should you care, right?
well, poverty is the breeding ground for ideologies which are antagonistic to freedom. they also breed unorganized threats to your freedom, such as petty crime like theft and robbery
the poor who live near you, tax you, no matter what. in direct and financial ways, or in indirect, existential ways. you can choose the nature of how they tax you (government programs with explicit policies that you have control over as a citizen of a democracy), or choose to have the poor tax you with random criminal acts and ideological movements hostile to the notion of freedom
you are taxed by the poor in your world no matter what. you do not get to choose not to be taxed, because taxes on your freedom will play out in one way or another by the poor. you simply have a choice about the nature in which the poor tax you. government programs that benefit the poor and lift them out of poverty is the best form of taxation, the CHEAPEST form of taxation (financial or otherwise) before you
choose wisely
most of us understand the value of altruism, how it actually helps us out in the end, instinctively. others, like you, have to be dragged kicking and screaming to common sense
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One of the interesting things about political correctness is that even racists do not want to appear racist.
Instead, they are amateur sociologists who only care about the aspects of sociology that justify racial disparity.
They are also amateur historians who only care about Nazi and Confederate history.
There are also the amateur biologists who love to discuss genetic inferiority, and how that observant the 16th century slavers must have been to have cracked the genome 500 years ago...
And now, we have amateur political scientists who specialize in the unfairness of black people getting elected.
<sarcasm>It's amazing that so many of these people are self-taught. </sarcasm>
Anyone watch the news and see all the stories of the happy people who say that they are are finally on equal ground? The people saying that now they can be anything they want to be. Why they sudden change of mind? People were not thinking that way before? Those people who were thinking that because they are of a certain race (or not a different one) they are limited to do this small list of jobs are only defeating themselves. Why couldn't they think like that before the election? It is sad, truly sad. Those people were keeping themselves down and not realizing it. All the kids saying that now that can be anything even president, they always had that choice. They, like everyone else, has to work for it. Not everyone is born into huge piles of money and has everything they want handed to them.
I'm assuming that's tongue-in-cheek, but just to be clear: the Metagovernment has no political agenda other than to maximize participatory democracy by presenting a vastly superior alternative to representative democracy. Communists, capitalists, conservatives, liberals, libertarians, etc. are all welcome and encouraged to participate. Even authoritarians are welcome to participate, though theirs is a philosophy that is rather contradicted by the Metagovernment's basic principles.
Unlike the elite-driven corporate government we have today....
Do you honestly believe internet-based polling is less or more prone to corruption?
You want to end corporate-driven governments? Simply ban the flow of money from corporations to government events (such as elections). Moving voting to internet doesn't help at all. If anything it makes things worse.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
African Americans deserved an erudite and experienced leader and they got one in Barak Obama. He got a proportionally higher amount of the AA vote than did John Kerry or Bill Clinton. African Americans have been voting democratic for years well over 70% in most areas, this is nothing new. What saddens me is that the high black voter turn out brought to light some of African American's prejudices against homosexuals where the high black turnout passed 3 anti-civil rights measures regarding gay marriage. It is time now to start examining the anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, anti-Hispanic and anti-homosexual prejudices of African Americans. Rev. Jesse Jackson has always been a bigot about most of these issues, many black church leaders the same and what the black community needs now is someone who can help them with introspection because they are going to have a lot more attention paid to them with Obama as president.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
So if you are not a middle or high school student, the mandatory requirement does not apply to you. As for college students, this is tied to the $4,000 tax credit. If you don't want that money every year, you can choose not to do community service.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on the Obama-Biden long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief.
Because it's so wrong to make "excessive...profits". Speaking of which, who defines "excessive"? Will companies now have to look at ways to reduce their incoming, so that they don't make "too much" money? /that's/ gonna help the economy in the long run. Oh, hey, by the way, who funds the permanent tax relief, since this is only a 'down payment'?
Words have killed far more people than guns ever have, and you, Mr. Slashdot User, are just as connected to child pornographers as legitimate gun owners are connected to criminals - they use the same tool.
It's a lot scarier when applied to you, isn't it?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
They've:
There's hope yet :)
-- Sig down
you enjoy driving your car. good for you. i don't enjoy thousands of unnecessary traffic deaths in this country. and for that reason, i have no problem taking away your toys. deal with it, child
~43.6k deaths from traffic accidents in 2005.
~30.6k deaths from firearms in 2005.
Cite: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_10.pdf
Where have you been? Our dear and glorious leader Eric Raymond has redefined hacker politics, and we're now all moderate-to-neoconservative. Some of us reject left-right politics altogether, like Eric. And Dr. Breen.
If you thought there was whining aplenty about how there are no conservatives here before the election, you haven't seen anything yet. Soon enough, the vast majority of comments will be complaints modded +5 about how no one's left who's brave enough to stand up against the liberal menace, and if so, they're invariably modded down.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
you are saying ignorance about computers means you are low-income? Bush was hardly low-income, and ignorant as hell. And just what did the tubes guy make a year? You sir, are the elitist prick.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think we sell the Civil Rights movement a little short when we forget that racism was as acceptable fifty years ago as sexism was in medieval times. No, the movement didn't end racism, but it did at least make it unfashionable; racists at least had to pretend to be interested in "law and order" or "national security" or "enforcement of immigration laws" whatever the dogwhistle is this season.
Eric Raymond describes two kinds of racism, essentially the kind where you think you're racist and the kind where you don't. Being Eric Raymond, he goes on to claim that the latter isn't racism at all, and so racism is over, but hey, it's Eric Raymond. The distinction, I think, is a useful one--what was once as common and universal as the very air is now essentially vanished from our mainstream discourse.
Racism isn't over, not by a long shot, but damn, is it ever not as bad as it used to be.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It's not so much racism among black voters, as the racism of the Republican party. Hell, the Republicans would, if not for the racism thing, be a good pick for at least a portion of that voting bloc, as they frequently lean socially-conservative on plenty of issues. (Take Prop 8 in California, for instance.) But in attempting to appeal to their own racists--the white kind--who make up the party's base, they alienate everyone else.
Consider this: the election was heavily influenced by Latino voters, who were previously a very Republican constituency, especially in Florida. But due to the influence of Tom Tancredo, of Lou Dobbs, of Michelle Malkin, of the Minutemen and all their ilk, Latinos are now considerably more Democratic.
So, no, black people didn't vote for Obama because he was black. They voted for Obama because the other part is the party of white racists. I'm not saying that all or even most Republicans are racists, but there's one party that's made its bones by courting them, and there's one party that hasn't; it's not hard to tell which is which.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
To me, being a conservative means that I want my government to adhere to the Constitution, not change it as they see fit. The people calling themselves conservatives these days are the same ones who gutted the fourth amendment, held without due process and tortured people, gave the executive branch the authority to declare martial law in case of economic emergency, and let's not get into war for oil or economic bailouts.
I wish these people would stop calling themselves conservative. I have a better name for them.
Criminals.
^..^
From my Canadian POV, I see 3 main reasons why Mccain lost:
1. Palin.
2. The continuous attack ads made him seem like a jerk.
3. His "de-mavericking" over the past few years, leading people to ask "WTF does this guy actually stand for?".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Don't suppose you noticed, but African-Americans regularly give somewhere in the upper 80% range of their vote to the Democratic candidate. At worse, you could say that maybe 5-10% of African-Americans voted for Obama on the basis of skin color. Of course, it's equally possible that the additional enthusiasm about the election this year caused people who usually are apathetic voters to turn out, and it's generally accepted that Democrats flake out on voting more than Republicans (I don't know why, but it's fairly common for rain to depress Democratic turnout disproportionately; this is the opposite case).
As for the primaries, the positions were similar for both candidates (Hillary more centrist on positions aside from health care). I'm not inclined to be all that critical of voting for a candidate that inspires you, even if it is partially due to their skin color, if the substance of their positions is so similar as to be irrelevant. Given the equally tilted voting preferences by white voters in large sections of Appalachia, it's a bit hypocritical to attack the black voters alone.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
I hope it didn't, from either side.
I voted for Obama because I felt he was a better choice to lead the nation. A well-spoken and intelligent man who also shown on occassion to be shrewd politician.
That's why it bother me the level of celebration from some of the people (all white) I know that we finally have a black president. What does it matter if he's black? I didn't vote for or against him because of it, I don't feel better or worse about our future because of it. Tokenizing his win as finally filling some obviously unfilled niche is a disservice to his qualifications if that was the basis of anyones choice.
Of course the morning headline the next day on CNN was an expose that the poor blacks of Atlanta feel like they finally have a shot in life. Hint: they don't have any more or less of a shot than they did before because Barack Obama isn't a successful black man, he's a success in general. How much of one has been under debate for a while due to the cloud surrounding his academic career, but the point is he's accomplished more than most people of any race will thus far and making it about race cheapens everyone.
Apparently, you have no clue how web development works. Some of your criticism is valid, but some of it is plain inane.
1) Single pixel gifs and google-analytics are how people on a budget track website usage. You want to roll your own code - pay for it.
2) IE6 and IE7 is so different that it requires different CSS. We're hoping that people abandon IE6 ASAP so that we don't have to support that abomination anymore.
3) Commented out banner rotation is the quick way to deal with requests that say "Put this in now! But it's only temporary, so be ready to roll it back at a moments notice."
4) Lorem ipsum is the standard placeholder anytime anyone does any design work. Why? Because it is guaranteed public domain.
5) 20 errors in HTML validation? That's it? You might work flawlessly, but sometimes, flawless is what keeps you from putting out a working site on time.
6) Nothing on the page that could have been done better in HTML 3.1? Of course. Now you go develop it. Test it. Roll it out, and make sure it is easy to update in the future.
Yeah, the site ain't perfect. But it seems to me that you never developed a site that had to come in on budget and on time. The flaws you pointed out are nothing more than what is done every day in web development shops around the world. You want to fix it? I'm sure the site would love to employ a perfectionist know-it-all with zero work experience.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Obama did NOT run unopposed. Did you just not look at the words I typed? Have you bothered to do a cursory google search on the issue? He ran against Alan Keyes. What part of that do you not understand?
Look, it says so right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Illinois,_2004
There's two candidates. Barack Obama and Alan Keyes. So how did he run unopposed?
As to your second assertion that video link you posted is an hour long. Can you give the time in the video where they start talking about public service?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I've been thinking about this a little lately, and it occurs to me that perhaps "marriage" should be treated as a religious, rather than civil concept.
So the government could issue a "License of Union" but it would take a church to make it a "marriage."
I don't think it's unreasonable for a gay couple to want the same set of protections as a married heterosexual couple - inheritance, health benefits, tax benefits and implications, decisions about each other's health care, etc. But that doesn't necessarily have to be called "marriage." I understand that may be what the gay rights activists want, but you can't always get what you want.
Personally I just think people need to get over it. All the gay people I've known are just plain people, they just prefer that their partner have the same set of equipment in their pants as they do.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
The fed fixing the price of money isn't the problem, the problem is that the price of money is fixed on the idea that the market is going to do whatever is in the best interest of itself and those who work to prop it up, an idea Alan Greenspan got absolutely ridiculously wrong and idea he got from Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand seems to think that Greed isn't really what most social commentators says it is, which is a driving personal selfish motivator to gather as much wealth power and resources out of some sort of odd paranoid desire to control everything, and is instead just simply self motivation and ignoring all of that crap about people who just want every damn thing they can get their hands on.
The problem here is greed and conservatism. Plain and simple. Cue the dot com bubble. Markets took a dive, housing was one of the last few hot investments, banks were selling homes like crazy and eventually got the go ahead to start selling loans to people who may not normally be able to make good on their loan agreements prompting banks packaging mortgages together that wouldn't normally pass the smell test as the "security" part of a group of credit derived securities. Since the housing market was hot, everyone assumed that these securities would be secure. They weren't, the rug got pulled out underneath a lot of people who were told to get this kind of loan, then it rippled through the financial sector. The SEC should've stepped in, stopped this bullshit and moved on. Regulators should've stopped the subprime mortage trend back when they were in full swing and people were buying homes they needed but thanks to an artificial housing bubble, couldn't necessarily afford. The problem was was that there wasn't anyone at the high levels of the SEC or HUD who were even remotely concerned about regulation. If the housing bubble wasn't even allowed to start in the first place, we wouldn't have this kind of catastrophic meltdown.
When you put a bunch of people in charge of Government who aren't entirely enthusiastic about Government, it takes a shit in it's own pants and blames everyone it can.
The Fed's credit policy sure did influence things, because it was run by a Randian idiot like Alan Greenspan(seeing as how most of the loans that tanked this nation were done during his watch, he's partially to blame), not because of the general concept of the fed itself. The reason why we even have a fed is that banking crises like the one we went through happened all the damn time and there was nothing to keep the currency flow sane. The Fed only works when there's someone operating the Federal Banking system who actually believes in a Federally regulated banking institution.
Credit exists for a reason. It's not just money that's thought up out of thin air, it's a promise to produce back into the market system that which you have taken, and a little more with the end result being that you get what you want, and the creditor gets what it wants and that's made through your own work and effort. It's turning kinetic and mental energy into cold, hard, cash. Like short term business loans. You're selling widgets, and Part A costs you $7 per unit, and you get a very large order in. Your widget makes a nice profit, and while you're not able to afford enough of Part A right now, if you could build and fulfill your order of widgets then you would be able to easily, and you take out a loan to cover that operating cost you can't cover from cold hard cash in your own reserves. You fulfill your order, you pay back your loan and everything is nice.
The real destruction of money is the stopping of this credit cycle. Being greedy and trying to make it impossible to pay back any sort of credit is what destroys the system, but in a regulated market, you DO get your money back AND a profit, but just not as much profit as you could've gotten if you strung along consumers trying to get as much out of them as you could have. Like ARMs, Adjustable Rate Mortgages. They don't think you can pay back the loan, but if yo
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.