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US Open Government Sites To Close
SEWilco writes "US government sites which promote open government are going to shut down soon due to not enough funding being directed at them."
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Can we donate? I'm serious.
We need at least another $4 million just to keep USASpending.gov operating this year.
$4mil to keep a website going for one year? Think if I called them up and offered to do it for 3 they'd take it?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Ironic. Shut down the websites that watchdog government spending due to lack of funding. I'm shocked.
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
for social media propaganda and sockpuppet accounts... Eh.. whatever. The whole thing is such bullshit
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
When sites like WikiLeaks do that for you for free?
The specific people who are responsible for funding the Open Government sites are the members of teh majority of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Those are the people who have "given up". They haven't given up on protecting their friends from being taxed, though. "Open Government" is for dirty hippies, anyway, so why should they care, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Special interest groups own Washington. Consistent, open data and an informed public are usually at odds with these special interest groups. It was a milestone to get these initiatives started in the first place, but in this climate? I mean, NPR got cut, and while that might not sound like much, decent radio as we know it just DIED across most of rural America; and its the radio that often tied whole communities together.
There's a reason America has the best government money can buy.
No one should be immune to cuts. But should such information programs be killed off with nothing to replace them with? If nothing else, such websites help dispute so much of the opinionated pundit talk that Fox 'News' airs for hours and hours during Prime Time. There's those medical Death Squad panels you hear about, looking to save money by cutting medical support for old people, and then there's the facts.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
The Libya investment costed so far at least 186 millons, but having a friendly government there willing to share their oil with US corporations will return that investment several times in the next years.
Also investing in something like that, after all the money they invested in discrediting Wikileaks and anything they published, looks like a waste.
More like from the "We don't really want you watching and we're not really open and want to make it more difficult for you to monitor unecessary government spending department."
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
That's because people like you hate reason, are driven by emotion...
Rage is an emotion. It's that feeling you have when someone has offended you beyond your ability to understand. It often manifests as an intense desire to cause physical harm to the offending person(s), with little to no concern for any mitigating circumstances.
Perhaps the woman in question has a vision or coordination problem. Perhaps she's distracted thinking about other things. Perhaps you should have been a proper gentleman and made sure you were well out of her path, that she may go any way she likes. Perhaps, for a few fleeting moments, you could let a trivial inconvenience pass by you, and not demonize someone you know remarkably little about.
What moral principle says that someone should be so privileged that they can risk injuring others without even trying to be responsible and should never ever suffer any consequence of that?
That's a very good question. Why should anyone be given the ability to risk injuring anyone else, especially around the face, which is of high social importance?
Given that you've shown you know nothing about the other side of the story, and appear unable to empathize, why should you be the sole judge of who should be injured and who shouldn't?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Wait, what were all these things that he tried to push in his first term, other than health care (which, of course, wasn't a real health care solution but a way to force Americans to put more cash in the pockets of the health care industry)?
He promised that the first thing he would do is get us out of Iraq. He said "you can take that to the bank". Today, we're still in Iraq. And Afghanistan. And Libya. And tensions are brewing elsewhere.
He promised that there would be no more closed door negotiations, but he has had countless of them. Remember how he was going to let everything be viewed on CSPAN or whatever? Yeah, never happened.
He promised no more revolving doors. His administration wouldn't be the place government employees leveraged their positions to go get huge corporate payout gigs or for corporate execs to come to and do the bidding of industry under the guise of being the czar of one thing or another. And that's happened too many times to count, now.
Then there's the whole continuation of the idiotic Bush stimulus handouts. Wasn't one of the first things he did was sign a trillion dollar stimulus giveaway?
He's done very little and attempted very little. Why anyone expected something different, I don't know. It absolutely baffles me how all of these fucking morons come around every four years and say "so we've had 43 pieces of shit fuck things up . . . but THIS TIME it will be TOTALLY DIFFERENT and my vote is going to CHANGE THE FUCKING WORLD!".
No. The next president will be about the same. And the one after. And the one after. *shrug*.
Every fucking politician is a lying duplicitous scumbag, and we should be able to sue their asses when they break their promises.
Verbal contracts are binding in my state, I think campaign promises should fall under those rules.
this is precisely what republicanism and "shrinking the government" is all about. Of course, they are even more clever by slipping in all their favorite kickback schemes into the defense budget that no one dares touch for fear of being labeled anti-American. Its the perfect scam. No or a shrinking government lets them get away with anything they want and you and I get to pay for it in further reductions in regulations and services that may potentially save the lives of millions. Republicans are good at recognizing that millions can starve or die as long as they get their millions.
$4 million is what. 20 minutes in Iraq/Afghanistan? A day in the "War on Drugs"?
And yet somehow there's always funding to rain $600,000 missles down on some 3rd world nation. Oh, well. I guess they fund what matters to them.
Wikileaks has gone quiet because there has been a lot of real news lately. E.g. The Arab Spring, nuclear meltdown, et cetera.
You can safely assume that once the news gets back to 'What color underwear did Brittany Spears flash to Charlie Sheen', Wikileaks will be back in the news. As they have already told us, the next target is a major US bank. If Wikileaks were to release incriminating documents about, say, Bank of America, while a nuclear power plant is melting down, this would not get maximum exposure. Wikileaks knows that their maximum exposure will come when the 'news' is 'quiet'. After all, they can control the timing of their releases. Think about it.
One other note: most readers probably missed it, but just two weeks ago Wikileaks released another State Department cable that is causing a huge political kerfuffle in India - something to do with which Indian politicians bribed which other politicians, and how much it cost: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18india.html
I'd say that's hardly 'really quiet'.
I wasn't an Obama supporter; however, I have seen him do much more good than harm while having to take the blame for things beyond his control. I'm not just talking about the economic mess (which was years in the making and more in the fixing) but the OVERWHELMING CORRUPTION. Obama will probably sell the farm rather than let the republicans shut down government -- which is too bad because they are more nutty now than they were last time.... Now days we actually have some congressmen who believe the PR lies as truth (for example: Bachmann, MN -- and most the right has an open hatred for the other side and its hard to ignore so one expects some return hate...) You can't be a republican today without being apeshit or stupid.
The reason Bush was closer to a dictator was because he went with the flow. Obama is tacking against the flow and getting a little progress while moving mostly sideways and in some areas completely losing ground. One simply can not move in all directions at once. Especially if he is all alone-- his staff is not so hot either - I won't go into where he is just flat out wrong if not bought off. Healthcare was almost entirely him, his staff gave up and that says something good about him. He wouldn't have been allowed to get in if he was going to be a real threat... ANYBODY post-bush was going to be a fall guy, its just how it works (you think Rove and the smart guys really wanted/cared if McSame won? ever hear of a sacrifice?)
REAL Politics is about how to look like you enjoy eating shit while covertly tossing as much of it as you can onto your predecessor's pile.
You can be powerful if you have the powerful behind you; otherwise you are lucky to survive when they plow over you. A Taoist approach of using their power against them only works to an extent - even in martial arts, a powerful enough foe is going to fuck you up no matter how much you try to redirect and deflect their power. In these corporatist times that approach seems (to me) like just a stalling tactic at best. A serious fight is coming and absent a political forum it will become violent.... Unless they can continue to sucker people forever... like 1984; except we're always at multiple "wars", including between the 2 parties.
All we have now is the GOP completely playing politics to the point where they are purposely trying to ruin everything even their own ideas - just to harm Obama; they hate him more than Clinton (must be the skin color.) Its a false political war distracting from the real problems and Obama has openly been trying to stop it and failing to do so; he doesn't seem to realize no president that allows this propaganda warfare to continue can get us back on track. The corporations are raping us while this ship sinks and any disaster or infighting is to their benefit.
In my state, the idiot GOP is fighting to cut all the walnut trees down in the state parks to raise money! (naturally sold at a cheap price to donor who also is "over-regulated" as if this would do any real good.) They are also fighting on nearly every front to make us mirror 3rd world states like Georgia (US state; however, I wouldn't be surprised if that nation was in better shape.) - in many cases repeating the same policies that worked so well down south in all those welfare states. It has little to do with ideology and much more to do with the corps buying them off. The dems just play weak while the other side openly fights for some of the most blatant corruption in generations. Sometimes I wonder if democrats would be as stupid if their party was hijacked... I won't need to wonder for long, its been gradually happening for some time.
If you wanted an honest guy with no-compromise for corruption you are just asking for another martyr.
There is no hope for people who read/watch mainstream "press" in the USA. Turn off your telescreen.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No, you don't realize that all it takes to defund a programme is for the House to refuse to fund it.
FTFA:
You should notice that the House Republicans are busy shutting down the government, again, by refusing to govern.
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make install -not war
they'd find another "reason" to shut it down. I'd try to blame the Republicans, but Obama probably supports closing down such sites just as much. He's been following in Bush's shoes when it comes to accumulating power and using the cloak of "security" for justifying all sorts of b.s.
"To stop the terrorists."