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Democratic Super PAC Buys Newtgingrich.com
netbuzz writes "The purchase of newtgingrich.com by a Democratic Super PAC — and the use of it to highlight Newt Gingrich's political weaknesses — is either amusing or a dirty trick, depending on your politics and your view of the Republican presidential hopeful. In either case, however, it is a cautionary tale about the importance of controlling your brand online, a task that is about to get more difficult for everyone thanks to the impending expansion of generic top-level domains."
I think it's a bit of a dirty trick regardless of your politics.
In this day and age it is the responsibility of a public person (or a company) to protect their name, which includes domain names. The fact that Mr Gingrich has been in politics for a long time and didn't bother to purchase the domain says a lot about his understanding of how some things work in this day and age.
Then why the fuck should I vote for you?
In a world of gerrymandering, voter suppression, fake recall signatures, and the lies, damn lies, and statistics being pushed as fact by various players, dirty tricks are the new black.
who controls newtgingrich.xxx?
"amusing or a dirty trick, depending on your politics??"
I am not a fan for Newt Gingrich but this is a dirty trick.
People who want to learn about the candidate will want to go to their web site to see their official stance on things. This is an attempt to keep the public misinformed by the opposition.
Mr. Gingrich has a sorted political past, and if you go to the others web sites they will tell all about it. You really need to hear his side too for people to get a full picture of who you should be voting for.
Lets all complain how stupid the voters are and they don't do their research, then in the same breath we reward and pat on the back members of your political beliefs their attempt to misdirect the public to only see their views.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's perfect, since Gingrich never was a conservative, he is quite liberal or progressive or corrupt, take your pick.
You can't handle the truth.
Just tried the link http://newtgingrich.com/ and up comes freddiemac.com, which you may recall is the organization that paid newt 50,000 per hour for consulting. Now Newt considers this a feather in his cap and a good example of how his intellectual abilities are well appreciated. So it hardly seems like this is sandbagging him. He'd approve of this recommendation.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's sad what we have come to expect from politicians. On one hand, this is a dirty low down trick. On the other hand, Newt is a lying, cheating ass, so it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. But so are all the other Washington politicians, lobbyists and PAC executives, on both sides of the aisle. So on some primal level I get entertained when it happens to someone I don't like a lot, like when I'm watching professional wrestling or a soap opera. And this is where our government has degenerated to.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
And Gingrich should retaliate by buying barrackhusseinobama.com which appears to be for sale and posting licensed copies of all of the trashy tabloids that accuse Michelle of cheating with a Secret Service agent and Obama of being a homosexual coke fiend.
When a politician says he intends to pass Bill X, you expect him to pass Bill X. And yet these scumbags never do what they say.
Why should anyone be in the least bit shocked that politicians are being dishonest?
Have we really still not learned that as long as we maintain representative democracy, we will maintain corruption?
Is nobody yet ready for trying something new?
Try it a few times: http://newtgingrich.com/
There is already a law in place to deal with this.
Newt can own this domain by the end of the week, once he brings in a good lawyer.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
(Most of) the rest of the country doesn't have this amount of hate for each other. What happened to simply presenting your platform and letting voters decide?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Did they also buy up www.newtgingrich.xxx?
Then why the fuck should I vote for you?
Our form of government is intentionally set up to display adversarial behaviour. Unlike a monarchy where there is a single voice and perhaps no free press. In the US we set up a system where opposing parties could say whatg was wrong with the other team. Newspapers could shine sunlight and free speech assured no one could supress these opposition messages. It helps keep politicians honest and the people informed when they are not up holding the ideals they promote.
Your implied condemnation is not quite appropriate in this case. It's a good thing to have the opposition offer up the case for why the opponent is weak. Where it goes off track is when it mucks around in things that are salacious and irrelevant or distorts the truth. Pointing out that Gingrich favored freddies mac while being paid to do so, and then condemning when his payments stopped is fair.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How about it is an amusing dirty trick. I like the political horse race and I guess it is my spectator sport, but this is pretty dirty, but at the same time I find it amusing as hell. Gingrich isn't my candidate but tactics like this just distract from the real issues, but unfortunatly the 2 most important factors in an election tend to be BS and wedge issues to get your base out.
Time to offend someone
If you think it's evil to prevent fair competition in smartphones by patenting common functions with plenty of prior art ([1], [2]) to prevent fair competition, how is this any different? Why not allow people to make their choices based on the merit of the individual? Is it that the DNC thinks the average voter is too stupid and needs to be manipulated into voting the "correct way"? Do you really need to trick people to vote for you?
This reminds me of a unattributable quote I've heard more than once: "The difference between a conservative and a liberal is that a conservative is afraid that you don't understand what they are talking about, while a liberal is afraid you do."
When Glen Beck does not support a republican, you KNOW he cant win.
If some Republican group bought barackobama.com and used it to highlight his flaws, there would be loud and immediate outrage, and rightfully so. It doesn't matter which side you're on, this is NOT how to play the game. But because it's a Democratic PAC (surprises me that it's NOT MoveOn, actually), they'll probably get a pass. Why be outraged when they're "right"? Seems funny to me that while the Republicans are the ones commonly branded as fascist neo-nazis, you see a lot more Democrats using the "it doesn't matter how I win because I'm morally right and know better than you, end of story" argument.
That being said, why is this even necessary. Newt's a dickhead who's going to lose the election anyway. Not saying Obama is any better (keeping Guantanamo open, NDAA, etc), but it's not like we don't know how things are going to go in November, sadly enough...
Shortly before a San Francisco Mayoral election a friend by the name of Andy Hasse registered the .coms of all of the expected candidates. One such candidate, upon finding that his domain was cyberly squatted upon, asked what he could do about it. Andy pitched his web consulting services then was hired by that candidate to do his site.
Andy was at the time a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz and was living the Bohemian lifestyle in The Mission District. He was just starting out. Imagine his great surprise - and mine as well - when Andy made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle when the Willie Brown campaign discovered that willybrown.com was owned by one of the staff for a competing campaign.
That was a long time ago; I'm not sure that the article would still be online. Let me check... Ah! Here We Go!
Willie Brown is to San Frasncisco politics as the Kennedys were once to American politics. While Willie has many supporters in San Francisco, it's quite definitely old-skool big-city machine politices.
I suggested that Andy take advantage of his fifteen minutes by offering him some free hosting. The Willie Brown website is no longer online, with the registrant being hidden by a private registration service. But based on the creation date, that domain just has to still owned by Andy.
Let's ask The Wayback Machine... Service With A Smile.
Sometime later an incredibly right-wing guy by the name of Dan Lungren was running for California State Attorney General. "Did you register Dan Lundgren's domain?" I asked Andy.
"Yup," he replied. "Com, Net and Org."
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Most people will just follow the indoctrination of their favorite TV station and/or what their local peers tell them. The few people who do actual research before they vote won't change their mind because of a single website. Does this really matter? I mean really?
I'm a proud liberal atheist ubuntu firefox users.
I've seen this tactic used by other groups. I'm not being rhetorical. Does it accomplish anything? It seems to me to be nothing more than expensive thumb nosing.
This seems utterly inconsequential to me. Who in the world sets out to find information about John Smith by typing johnsmith.com into the URL bar of a browser? Yes, there are plenty of people who don't really understand what a search engine is or how to use one effectively, and, yes, browsers' GUIs have recently started blurring the conceptual line between URLs and search terms. But is there really any likely path for users to get to newtgingrich.com other than having someone else say to them, "Hey, go to newtgingrich.com?"
Find free books.
welcome Newt Gingrich's popularity in the GOP primaries.
It will make it a whole lot easier to reelect President Obama. The only down side is that it will make his campaign staff fat and lazy, as they will not have to work to find baggage to pull up on Gingrich.
A total of three news stories in rotation, one months old, another years old. Interspersed with ads. This isn't political, it's just advertising.
Mitt won't win either. Enough Mormon fearing fundies and tea-bag purists will not vote for him in a general election that he is pretty much unelectable as a Republican nominee. So Newt sells more books and our nation is spared another Republican president. Win-win.
A lot will depend on how google handles it. If you google "gingrich" and hit "I'm feeling lucky" or just look at the first result returned, what page will it be?
No matter how bad newtgingrich.com turns out, it can't possibly be as bad as what you get when you google Santorum
https://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=santorum...
Or can it?
you could pretty much take the same content and put it up for every presidential candidate and nobody would know the difference.
We dont need big brother requiring you to prove you deserve the site name. Its free market capitalism as its finest.
No seriously this is why we need governmental oversight.
I see it as amusingly dirty.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Greek travel???
Do you know what Corporate Welfare is?
The Republicans are all for Big Government provided it benefit the rich.
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Just the owners of registered trademarks.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Gingrich - isn't he the one that stole Christmas?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Actually, Glenn Beck has been critical of Republicans a lot.
But only people who ever listen to the show know that.
When Gingrich dove head first into the presidential race, my dad was all aglow about him. "Finally, a president that knows how to work the system to get stuff done!" And I looked into it, and he was absolutely right. And thus, I won't be voting for Gingrich. It's not that he's not a good politician-- he's a very good politician. But that's what's bad about him. I don't want another system president. The problem with our government (and country) are the systems, and until they're broken and remade/reworked, we're going to continue to spiral downward. The fact that the democrats are doing this shows just how retarded and corrupt that system has become. It also shows how ignorant Gingrich is to technology. If he was serious about his presidency he would have at least reserved that domain-- though I don't just blame him, but his campaign manager. Gingrich does show that he has a 'good ole boy' mentality in this fail, however. Still, any manager these days should know how important the internet is to gathering any data about a candidate. There's really no excuse-- the second I was brought in to consider managing a campaign I would have locked up every newt/gangrich/dot/whatever domain I could find.
My degree is in Physics, but the two very most useful courses I studied during my University days were Anthropology of Religion as well as Social Psychology, both at UC Santa Cruz.
The text for the Social Psych class was called The Social Animal. I recommend it to every man, woman and child, because it will enable you to better understand how people actually work and think.
One point that was taught during the class is that the most effective way to persuade anyone of anything is to have someone they know personally relate their own experience. Thus one might totally ignore the fact that Consumer Reports says that a particular model of car is unsafe and is expensive to maintain, but purchase it anyway because your cousing has that same car and thinks its just dandy.
There's no point to making fun of people for being that way. It's one of the fundamental factors that makes us humans the way we are.
If you want to be effective working for or against a particular candidate, volunteer for their campaign, then speak personally to your friends and relatives about your candidate, or why you are voting against the opposing candidate. The only way we will ever get the money and television advertising out of politics will be if regular people such as you and I actually get involved.
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If this was the .XXX TLD you could understand a degree of ambivalence with respect to how it might look to own it, but to let newtgingrich.com or .net or .org out there? This isn't twitter, it's not like verification or a quasi-requirement to have "parody" can be enforced.
This is a presidential campaign - Newt is paying a lot of people a lot of money to think about how he is presented. Some one of those people should be feeling embarrassed right now - and not just about working for a Republican.
Sure, it is dirty. Politics are a dirty business though, and to be frank, the Super PAC just borrowed a page from the GOP playbook. No big deal. Both parties suck equally!
This is an attempt to keep the public misinformed by the opposition.
The domain is a redirect to various other sources (some call it "Newt Roulette") selected randomly from a set pool. I have tried it a few times and I haven't found anything that was truly misinforming, unless you consider news articles from recognized news sources to be misinforming.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
BOOM...... Headshot!
What? he could have said that!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The real problem is that in order to put these checks into place, we'd need our current, mostly corrupt politicians to agree to them.
Exactly right. And therefore anything you can suggest as a solution is a 100% absolute non-starter. Period. So forget the current system: it is irrevocably broken, and no grandiose scheme is going to overcome the fact that power corrupts. Replacing politicians with new politicians just introduces new people to corrupt. Some politicians come into office with lofty ideals, but those are quickly and thoroughly crushed by the lobbyists and already-corrupt insiders.
So any new scheme needs to be able to come about without, or even despite, the politicians. Revolution is one option, but it is a horrible option, it is extremely unlikely to happen in any modern country, and it is impossibly unlikely to result in anything but new politicians coming to power.
So revolution is out. What does that leave? Try reading the "Transition" section of the Metagovernment project. It's a long and hard road, and it may not end in utter perfection, but it's better than being ruled over by utterly-corrupt politicians, is it not?
As dirty as this may seem it makes perfect sense to do. It points out that the men and women who attempt to run out country know nothing about technology and that they should not be allowed to handle it. It is a severe mismanagement by his campaign to allow this webpage to be purchased. It points out how SOPA needs to have more time in front of the congress so that out politicians can get a grip with the facts at hand. I do not support SOPA and i fear the ignorance of our elected officials will cause great harm to our right of free speech.
Democrats own newtgingrich.com and use it to criticize Newt Gingrich? They should run his campaign for him, and lobby to get Sarah Palin picked as his running mate while they're at it.
I think (in the general election) that what Romney loses in extremists he will more than make up for moderates (including moderate Democrats who voted for Obama last time).
Of course, Huntsman would be an even better general election candidate, but he really is unelectable in the primary.
Finally, keep in mind that Gingrich more-or-less invented the ultra-adversarial tactics that are causing the gridlock in D.C. that lots of citizens (including Republicans) are so pissed off about right now. Hopefully, folks keep that in mind on election day.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...it's not very important. In politics, we all choose the head we like most anyway.
I'd expect that to have come from someone like Andrew Jackson, by far one of the biggest badasses ever to serve as President of the US. Case in point: Some guy tries to shoot him (twice) in the US Capitol rotunda, so Jackson grabs his cane and beats the would-be assassin over the head until his aides restrain him.
Or maybe even George Washington, who was, after all, in the middle of more than a few battles.
I am officially gone from
Don't care. Blithering ideologues attacking another blithering ideologue. Waste of anyone's time. We already know the candidates are all sociopaths. Those who don't are just more blithering ideologues, and you can;t teach them anything, because they "know what they know".
Hell, it's the GOP's fault for pushing citizen's united. They made their beds, now they can sleep in them.
Surely any actual Democrat with a functioning brain stem (and that does exclude a number of them, admittedly) realizes that Newt Gingrich is a far more beatable opponent than many of the other Republican choices. If the people behind newtgingrich.com are really Democrats, they are doing something incredibly self-defeating by using their site to knock Gingrich down. They can save the smears for the actual election campaign - right now, it's in every Democrat's best interests to promote Gingrich's nomination, not prevent it. In fact, running an anti-Gingrich site would be so stupid for a Democrat that I think the people behind the site are actually closet supporters of Mitt Romney, or maybe Ron Paul. Wait - how about Michelle Bachmann supporters? Yean, Bachmann supporters - that's the ticket. I'll buy that conspiracy theory! :)
Her very first impression of the United States upon her very first visit here was the appalling condition of our roads. I was surprised at this, as I had always figured our roads were just fine, but upon my next visit to her home in Nova Scotia, I just had to agree. I later lived in Canada for several years and just had to agree that the roads everywhere I went were in immaculate condition.
Contrast this to the United States: in the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, the top deck of the two-deck portion of Interstate 880 through Oakland collapsed onto the bottom deck, killing I think sixty-nine people. Some poor woman had her legs pinned under many tons of concrete. The only hope of saving her life was to use a power saw to cut both her legs off without the use of any anesthesia of any sort.
More recently the bridge on an Interstate highway between Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota collapsed, killing I think eleven people in an incredibly cruel way by dropping their cars from a great height into a deep river.
The authorized widely broadcast requests that anyone that had ever taken photos of that bridge turn them into the civil engineering authorities for their post-mortem. Careful examination found that some of the bolts in that bridge had been stretched noticably out of place as long as five years before!
I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer. The fact that people get killed when people like him screw up is the reason that it would be a criminal expense for him to even claim to be a Professional Engineer without the proper license.
"That's impossible," he said. "Every bridge is inspected every two years."
I don't doubt that bridge was inspected every two years, but nevertheless it did fall down and kill a bunch of people.
If America were willing to tax itself enough to properly maintain its infrastructure, all those deaths and permanently crippling injuries just never would have happened.
I vastly preferred living in Canada for the specific reason that the Canadians are only too happy to tax themselves to provide for the common good. I always told people that Canada was the way America should be, and could be, but isn't.
I lost my immigration when Bonita divorced me. For quite a long time I wanted to return, and there are other ways I could still become a Canadian Landed Immigrant, and eventually a Canadian citizen.
One reason I don't, and chose eventually to remain in the United States, is so that I could work towards someday putting a stop to damnfool ignorant people such as yourself who are driving my Mother Country into the ground.
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The Republicans damn well knew that subprime loans were being repackaged into derivatives, but did nothing to stop that nonsense because the big investment firms were making money hand over fist as a result.
Do you have any concept of how many suicides have resulted directly from the subprime meltdown, or how many have died from exposure or from inadequately treated illnesses after having lost their jobs and homes?
If I were to knock over a liquor store for a couple hundred dollars, I'd be spending time behind bars and because of the popularity of background checks today, I would forever find it difficult to get any sort of decent paying work or housing.
But the people who caused the subprime crisis are still running the big investment firms. How many of them have been prosecuted? The closest one I can think of is Bernie Madoff, but that was for running a Ponzi Scheme, not for defrauding investors.
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Hey, buddy. Wanna buy newtgingrich.xxx?
In good times when you cut taxes on business they expand and hire more people, that's basic right wing (Republican) mantra and history mostly supports it. Unfortunately the rules change during a recession. In bad times when you give a corporation more money they put it in the bank. (just like you would.) Why? In good times they expand production so they can sell more. In bad times they have piles of unsold merchandise, and hiring more people to make more (unsold) merchandise is just throwing money away.
Just the owners of registered trademarks.
Not so... It's "a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights" and trademarks do not require registration for the owner to have rights. See Lanham Act, sec. 43(a), which deals with rights in unregistered marks.
In fact, you could even just go to the UDRP:
Any of the following circumstances, in particular but without limitation, if found by the Panel to be proved based on its evaluation of all evidence presented, shall demonstrate your rights or legitimate interests to the domain name for purposes of Paragraph 4(a)(ii):
There are no rules against it, don't expect 'fair play' when we're talking about a position that makes you one of the most powerful men in the world.
by careful application of sophisticated software, these issues can be used to solve each other.
Bah ha ha ha! Oh, you idealists and utopians are so precious. So will the earth ponies run the servers and the unicorn ponies write the code? Where do the pegasus ponies fit in? Oh, I know, they can deliver the endless patches.
Make the case that this site is contributing to copyright infringement and use SOPA to take it down.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
You clearly don't understand how much Obama is despised. They will vote for the Republican candidate regardless of who he is. The only question is whether the swing voters will. It is not at all clear how this presidential election will go. Anyone predicting the outcome today is a charlatan and a fool.
Just wondering.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Perhaps slightly off topic, but what are the odds this has been done on most of the current representatives in congress? Given the recent news regarding SOPA and whatnot, it seems that the majority of them are clueless on how the internet works (and therefore less likely to have websites registered under their names). Would be some delicious irony if a bunch of them had their own domain names bought up and ended up losing re-election time (possibly as a result of an anti-site being set up).
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Can you cite more than two examples in the entire country of crumbling infrastructure costing lives? The I880 Cypress Viaduct was built in the 1930's and has been gone for 22 years.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
USA politics ... as bad as iOS fanboy v Android fanboy...
I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer
Since when? Professional Engineers, in the United States (and many other countries), who are licensed engineers. They have an engineering degree, have met specific work requirements, and passed a professional examination. (Two exams if you count the EIT -- Engineer in Training exam.) A Professional Engineer (P.E.) does not have to be a civil engineer and that would be news to every P.E. in this office
I'm a Canadian citizen who immigrated to the United States to be with my wife. If you ever go into politics, we should talk. I have a feeling we'd have a lot of views in common.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I just listen to what Media Matters tells me about Glenn Beck in stead of actually listening to him, it is far easier that way because I don;t have to think.
Nope, it's not on the first page, so they're just wasting their time and money.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer.
Bzzzt, wrong. A professional engineer is a certification, you could be a practising Chemical Engineer or Mechanical Engineer and gotten your professional engineer certification.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer
No, absolutely incorrect. There are plenty of civil engineers that don't have a PE license, and plenty of electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. that do.
No, its not. The U.S. Government isn't the product of a design effort with a coherent objective. Its the product of centuries of individual compromises on specific issues between not merely diverse but -- from the outset -- radically opposed priorities.
It was designed at the outset (of the Constitutional system) both to run fast and have strong central power (one of the main motives for revising the Articles of Confederation to produce the Constitution) and to be hamstrung and dependent on the States. There are features -- in the text of the Constitution (original and in amendments), in the statute law, in the case law, in the bodies of federal regulations and other binding executive acts -- that represent far extremes and every conceivable point in between, implemented on narrow issues over the whole history of the Republic, with little in the way of rationalization over time.
To say that the US government is designed to do any one particular thing (other than be the US government) or to implement any one particular philosophy of the role, scale, or model of government is, well, fundamentally wrong and more misleading than useful.
The authorized widely broadcast requests that anyone that had ever taken photos of that bridge turn them into the civil engineering authorities for their post-mortem.
Interesting. Usually we just arrest people on suspicion of terrorism if they take pictures of bridges.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
If you do become Canadian, just make sure you give up your US citizenship or you''ll end up paying taxes in both countries. The US continues to tax US citizens even when they don't live in the US (and have no representation nor consume US resources.)
Given that this is mostly a prediction ... citations are a bit hard to come by. If it's about the voting down, here's an example : http://thinkprogress.org/progress-report/the-tea-party-tax-increase/ (the article is written as if the bill being downvoted was actually not a tax increase, but read on to see how little thought "thinkprogress" assumes in it's readership. You can just feel the crybaby frustration dripping between the sentences).
If the tea party attitude lowers the deficit, they will have turned out to be really good. If not, well ... Given what is already happening with the current government bungling ... I'm going to go with less money in the hands of the government being a good thing.
I don't think noscript is available for Mobile Safari. Is there some way I could prevent some newbie Slash coder's half-baked idea of Javascript from totally borking my Slashdot experience on both my iPhone and my iPad?
I'd be happy to file proper bug reports, but most of these bugs have persisted for so long I have a hard time accepting that they have not already been reported.
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So do the House Democrats. So do the Senate Democrats. So do the Senate Republicans. So does the President.
Democrats, disagree with Republicans, on other policies aside from the payroll tax holiday extension, some of which are directly related (e.g., offsetting tax increases or spending cuts to account for the lost revenue expected from extending the payroll tax holiday) and some of which are tangential but which parties are trying to use the popular payroll tax holiday as a lever to force the other side into agreeing to (e.g., accelerating approval timeline for the Keystone XL pipeline.)
The Senate, by an 89-10 vote, approved a 2 month extension of the payroll tax holiday along with a comprise mechanism for covering the cost of the short extension and with some agreements on some of the peripheral issues, to address the fact that the expiration of the tax holiday was rapidly approaching and to provide some time for more negotiations to reach a compromise on the remaining details to accompany a longer-term extension.
The Senate has already debated a full year tax break and failed to reach a consensus on the funding and other peripheral issues. They already know where the positions are of everyone in the Senate are right now on those issues, and know that neither the version of those issues in the House bill nor any other version has sufficient support to pass the Senate right now. Which is why, after extensive discussion and negotiation around the full-year extension requested by the President, the Senate passed the interim 2 month extension to provide time to reach a deal on a longer term extension, a goal which has nearly-universal support in the Senate, but where key differences on implementation details remain that would be fatal to any particular bill until they are resolved.
If America were willing to tax itself enough to properly maintain its infrastructure, all those deaths and permanently crippling injuries just never would have happened.
Taxes are only half the story—it also matters how you spend them. Case in point is Montreal, which has had a couple of overpasses collapse in the past 5 years (one causing some fatalities) and has structural deficiencies in its most important transportation links: the Champlain bridge and Lafontaine tunnel. I can't think of any other Canadian cities that have infrastructure in as poor condition as Montreal (to be fair, it's also one of the oldest cities in the country). Yet the province of Quebec has the highest income tax in the country (24% on income over $78,120; Federal income tax is 29% of taxable income over $128,800, for comparison), the second highest sales tax (5% Federal + 9.5% Provincial), and also receives transfer payments from the Federal government. I'm not really sure where all the money goes.
(Canadian tax info from: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/ndvdls/fq/txrts-eng.html)
I'm an American living in Waterloo, Ontario. I don't know when you lived in Canada, but I can assure you that the roads in Waterloo suck just as much as bad roads in the U.S. The taxes in this little burg are the highest in Ontario. I get less services here, than what I got when I lived in the Midwest. It's incredibly expensive to live here. I can't WAIT for the day my husband finds another job back in the U.S.--anywhere in the continental 48 would be fabulous.
There is a damn good reason that at one time it was forbidden to lend money for interest, no matter how small that interest might be. That was considered the Sin of Usury.
Many who received subprime loans did not have the means to pay anything down at all on their principle. To enable loan approval, their payments were so small that with the usual interest rate, their principal was actually steadily increasing, rather than decreasing.
Of course that cannot go on forever, so eventually their promissory notes called for much larger "balloon payments" that only at that later time would reduce the principle.
Variable-Rate Mortgages were created for the purpose of allowing people who were just starting out to get into a home of their own, with the interest rate increasing after they had been working in their careers long enough to receive raises in pay that would then enable them to afford the balloon payments. But those kinds of Variable Rate Mortages do pay down the principle. It's just that the interest rate is reduced for a few years.
There's a proper name for the kinds of loans where the principal grows, but I don't recall what it is.
The people to whom those loans were made were not financially sophisticated enough to know what they were getting into. I know from my own experience of Beneficial Finance being bound and determined to give me a usurous second mortgage so they could foreclose on my home, despite having already been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for that exact kind of behaviour, that lenders are not always honest.
Lenders are required to provide loan recipients with disclosure terms documents, but the two that I received from Beneficial required quite close examination for me to be able to determine that if I signed them, I would lose the only home I ever owned.
Those kinds of increasing-principal loans, if not already illegal, absolutely should be. Most of not all who purchased homes with that kind of fraudulent financing are now homeless and on the street.
Why aren't the responsible financiers doing hard time in Federal ass-pounding penitentiaries?
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Seriously: would it be so bad if this happened to EVERY politician?
I think it would be great. If you want to see some honest truth about a politician, just go to their website... it would be a refreshing change of pace.
Are you high, drunk or both? Canadian roads are NOT immaculate. I lived in Quebec for 8 years, and I've never seen such horrid roads. To boot, I was paying over 50% in income taxes. Naturally, the construction unions blamed the weather, that they were doing the best they could, yet.. in Ontario, the roads were better, even though the weather was similar, if not the same. Either way, there are PLENTY of states where the quality of asphalt, in general, eclipses that of any road I ever found in Canada. High taxes haven't solved that or their pathetic health care system. I'd love to say I've been a benefactor of both, but victim is the more appropriate word.
The Democratic Super-Pac can't have a legal claim to the name "Newt Gingrich" unless someone there is also named Newt Gingrich - he is a well-known personality, and it will be a trivial matter to get this out of their hands.
I'm old enough to remember the case regarding weber grills (a retailer registered weber.com to sell weber grills on-line, IIRC, before it ever occured to the grill maker to create a website) but my memory fails me regarding the ultimate outcome of the case... It now belongs to Weber, but not sure how that happened...
Ken
Do you have any concept of how much the American taxpayer still spends on missile defense research? This despite the fact that every single time there is an actual field test, they fail to shoot down the incoming target?
Do you have any concept of how much was spent to develop the B-1 bomber, which is such a poor weapon that it did not see action in any of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan?
The latest news is that America's latest development fighter jet kills its own pilots by cutting off their oxygen supply. The account I read of one such death was quite chilling. That plane is equipped with emergency oxygen, but to deploy it, the pilot has to pull on a metal ring with forty pounds of force. That's quite hard to do when your oxygen supply has been cut off.
A woman I once dated was a US Air Force Brat. Her father told her that USAF once got the idea that they could improve flight crew morale by issuing them all real sheepskin jackets just like in The Good Old Days. They issued a request for bids, but were dumbounded at how much those jackets would actually cost.
It seems that they dug up some manner of MIL-SPEC leather tanning process out of an old archive somewhere, that turned out to be from the United States Civil War. Back in those days you tanned leather by burying it under big heaps of cow manure then leaving it there for weeks.
Happily they revised the specification, but the fact that the USAF would issue such a specification when soliciting bids indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with the US military's procurement process.
Don't even get me started about all the contracts that were let to Halliburton and the like without any manner of competitive bidding. Just don't.
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Your argument is moot. We tax ourselves enough to fix every bridge/road/highway/tunnel in the entire world twice-a-year, but only 1% goes to the Department of Transportation. There are plenty of valid arguments out there for taxing more but please don't give me the 'we need better infrastructure' bit.
Also you can tax the rich all you want but history shows at the end of the day the government will pull in 18% of the GDP as revenue. No matter what the tax code has been they always end up with the same amount of income. They have to spend as much as they take in. Period. The worst part is that for the past 20 years roughly 10% of the GDP is actually them overspending; so think about that after ten years of that - they have pumped in an entire year of GDP of 'fake' demand. Money getting moved around creating jobs that are unsustainable - unless we borrow even more. Think about that - the housing market - electronics - services; anything and everything has been inflated by their overspending.
So here we are - best case scenario we smarten up and cut back by about 10% on government spending every year for 10+ years (under what they take in that is). Things will continue to get worse but we'll make it. The other scenario is we continue to play 'kick the can' or default. Some could argue the government should default as it was their fault for getting in this mess - but think about who gets affected; social security, medicare, infrastructure, pensions, etc... Do the banks or the rich lose anything? Those that benefited most by the pumping of the money in the system. Kicking the can is just as bad - as the fall becomes much much worse the longer we put it off. Oh, and it is all just math - nothing to do with political views - the math will balance out there is no question.
didn't he spend an ass bag of money on his online pressence early on basically bankrupted his campaign on it. some web developer conned him good
I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer. The fact that people get killed when people like him screw up is the reason that it would be a criminal expense for him to even claim to be a Professional Engineer without the proper license.
No, a Professional Engineer in one licensed in his/her state. Most engineers are not, whether they are Civil Engineers, or any other type. Most of the Professional Engineers that I have met were Mechanical Engineers, as it happens, but could be Chemical, Electrical, Nuclear, Welding, Aeronautical, or whatever other type you can remember. However, it would be a criminal offense for your friend to claim to be a Professional Engineer in any of the subtypes other than Civil, just as my friends could not legally claim to be Professional Civil Engineers.
Minor nit-pick: "Professional Engineer" is NOT the proper term for a Civil Engineer. A Professional Engineer can be ANY type of engineer who has passed the Professional Engineer licensing exam. My wife is a Professional Engineer and is a Mechanical Engineer. "Professional Engineer" is a license, not a specialty. Civil Engineering is a specialty in engineering.
It tells me that someone on Newt's team blew it, and it makes me wonder about the caliber of people with which he's surrounded himself. Whenever you have something coming to the forefront of public consciousness, whether it be a movie, a candidate, a new company or a major product, you automatically lock down domain names for reasonable variations of the name in question. If someone already owns the domain, you bribe or sue them into submission. This is not rocket science.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Whois says that the domain was created on Aug. 20, 2003. Newt's had 8 years to take care of this and as someone else pointed out, he may have the law on his side if he wants to argue that it's cybersquatting and he should be given it. It wouldn't surprise me at all for such a case to result in him getting control of the domain for free. But I can't feel sorry for him as he could have dealt with this years ago.
newtging.rich
Interesting how you call it stealing.
Its actually pay to play. If you don't like paying taxes and living in a country with a high standard of living, I suggest you move to that Libertarian paradise of Somalia. You want the benefits, you have to pay. And the more benefits you receive, the more you pay.
By not paying you're the one whose actually stealing.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
There is a truth in advertising law in the states. Any company can be fined or officers jailed unless their ads are truthful. Deception is not tolerated. The only exception? Politicians. Friggin' weird.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
And Mr. Gingrich missed one more:
http://newtgingrinch.com/
And just in time for XMas too.
I'm from Canada so I don't know all the details but I don't hear people talking about the effective (as opposed to real) corporate/rich people taxes.. close all the loopholes any maybe raises wouldn't be required?
How about newtgingrich.xxx? It sounds appropriate!
Her very first impression of the United States upon her very first visit here was the appalling condition of our roads. I was surprised at this, as I had always figured our roads were just fine, but upon my next visit to her home in Nova Scotia, I just had to agree. I later lived in Canada for several years and just had to agree that the roads everywhere I went were in immaculate condition.
You've never been to Montreal, then?
I don't know what timeframe you're referencing, but there was definitely a time when the mayor of Montreal kept deferring road repairs for YEARS. If you know anything about the effects of winter weather on roads, you already know the damaging effects, in part due to the weather, in part due to possible trapped pockets of moisture under the asphalt and changing temperatures, in part due to salt/sand/snowplows.
And then there's the insufferable traffic on the roads (mainly highways) around Toronto. No shortage of highways, but for some reason, not the best design. Certainly the amount of traffic flowing daily has long since exceeded the design specs. I remember in the late 90's, afternoon rush hour would start showing signs from about 1:30pm onwards. Planning a "quick trip" from suburbia to downtown Toronto? No problem, assuming you've got a couple hours to burn.
In contrast, the highways around Dallas largely seem to facilitate traffic flow rather nicely. Oh, and I'm always pleasantly surprised to hear about this new section or that new section of highway being completed ahead of schedule.
Canada's got some great stuff. I do miss the general predictability of my kin. I don't miss the long winters, and I definitely don't miss the car cancer (the effects of salt/sand/moisture on a car).
Adapted from Wiktionary:
corvée, corvee
From French corvée, from Late Latin corvada, corrogata, from Latin corrogare (to entreat together).
Noun
Corvée could also be compulsory military service. Some have already argued that this is effectively what is happening in the US.
(And what's up with Slashdot's CSS for the main page? All ordered and unordered lists are missing their numbers and bullets, but just on the main page -- they show up properly when I look at my posting history on my user page.)
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
They ought to be helping Gingrich win the nomination. What the fuck are they smoking? He is the GOP's worst candidate.
I get the feeling half the people in this thread don't even know who this guy is. Seriously, read Wikipedia. He was charged with 84 Ethics violations, fined $300,000, and eventually kicked out of the House (forced to resign) by his own party. I quote Wikipedia:
Republicans lost five seats in the House in the 1998 elections—the worst midterm performance in 64 years for a party that didn't hold the presidency. Polls showed that Gingrich and the Republican Party's attempt to remove President Clinton from office was deeply unpopular among voters.[75] Gingrich suffered much of the blame for the election loss. Facing a rebellion in the Republican caucus, he announced on November 5, 1998 that he would not only stand down as Speaker, but would leave the House as well. Gingrich made this announcement only a day after being elected to an 11th term from his district.
He's also a hypocrite:
In the mid-1990s, Gingrich began an affair with House of Representatives staffer Callista Bisek, who is 23 years his junior. They continued their affair during the Lewinsky scandal, when Gingrich became a leader of the investigation of President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with his alleged affairs.[143]
It's really not about how much Obama is despised. The Republican core will always vote Republican, and the Democratic core will always vote democratic. The thing that matters is turnout (your core needs to be inspired) and swing voters. And unfortunately swing voters are mostly people making an emotional decision at the last minute, and are not capable or thinking about more than one week in the future or analyzing more than one week in the past - if they could they wouldn't be swing voters.
The domains to all the combinations of my names are taken - should I start whining about it?
Just a small nit to pick with your post. Please do not confuse your fiends profession (Civil Engineer) with his being licensed (Professional Engineer or P.E.) to perform such work in a given state or states (reciprocity among state license boards). If you graduate from college with a BS in Civil Engineering, you are a Civil Engineer. Just as if you graduate from college with a Doctorate of Jurisprudence (JD), you are a lawyer. This doesn't mean you have passed the bar and can legally practice your craft. Also, many other engineering disciplines can attain licensure as a PE (mechanical, chemical, structural, etc.), so to say that Professional Engineer is the proper term for a Civil Engineer is not factually correct.
My apologies. I'm the AC above who posted about the PE/Civil Engineer issue without noticing your excellent repudiation first. Rest assured, I have been properly flogged for this egregious violation of protocol.
... in Canada, unless one has the very same kind of background that Professional Engineers in the US do, with a different kind of education - Software Engineering is NOT the same as Compute Science! - and having served an appenticeship, taken exams, and been accepted by a professional engineering society.
The Ontario Society of Engineers maintains a website about their many lawsuits against Microsoft and the various "certification" companies for violating Candian Law by issuing Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer certifications. The OSE always wins those suits, and Microsoft always loses them, yet Microsoft persists in issuing MCSE certs. I would not be at all surprised if the OSE were to eventually obtain an injunction that forbid MS from doing business in the province at all.
Even so, despite being completely self-taught and having neither a software engineering nor computer science degree, I persisted in advertising myself as a Software Engineer the whole time I was in Canada. I awaited with glee the first time I was challenged for this, but no one ever did. I even did a human-life critical gig for a Canadian government agency, and got a job as a "Computer Programmer" - but NOT "Software Engineer" - for an engineering firm.
At that firm I persisted in calling myself an engineer, despite their being a clear line drawn between who were the computer programmers and who were the engineers. Our engineers were mostly mechanical or electrical engineers. My whole point in being such a jackass about that distinction the whole time I was there was that, despite our consulting engineers being very good at their work, our Computer Programmers did not have the first clue as to how to code themselves out of a wet paper bag.
Human Machine Interface / Software Control And Data Acquisition software is some of the most human-life critical software there is. The Iranian Stuxnet worm that destroyed all those Uranium centrifuges attacked an HMI/SCADA product made by Siemens, one of our competitors.
I resigned in furious protest from the place because I was completely convinced their lax development practices were going to get someone killed someday. I remain convinced of that, but I'm not completely clear how to warn the authorities that they need to hunt down and destroy every installation of this company's products before the Iranians figure out how to get even with us for Stuxnet.
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I don't doubt that bridge was inspected every two years, but nevertheless it did fall down and kill a bunch of people.
If America were willing to tax itself enough to properly maintain its infrastructure, all those deaths and permanently crippling injuries just never would have happened.
This particular bridge seems to have been inspected annually in one form or another since 1994. The reports are still available on the Minnesota Department of Transportation's website. For a failure like this to happen there has to be a series of things that go wrong, but the initial cause in this case was actually a design flaw. While no amount of funding can prevent that, your general point is still valid: the US doesn't spend nearly enough money on its infrastructure, and if that keeps up there will be consequences sooner or later. Take a look at the "Infrastructure Report Card" to see why.
Of course the Bahamian government has to have some money for what few services it provides, so the only tax is an incredibly steep import duty. But many of the Bahamian people work around that by just not importing anything. Provided you live modestly and you enjoy seafood, you could live there your whole life without paying any taxes at all.
The Bahamas is one of the Caribbean Tax Havens. There are many financial firms that operate there to avoid the taxes they would pay in other countries. I wrote some quantitative investment software for a hedge fund there a while back.
The company owner wanted me to hire on as a permanent employee, and offered quite generous compensation, a housing allowance, a company-paid car and so on. My ex was quite excited at the prospect as she was an avid SCUBA diver.
But I took one look at the place and decided right then and there that I would not only never live in the Bahamas, but I would avoid even visiting it to the extent I possibly could.
The divide between rich and poor in the Bahamas is absolutely appalling. Very basic public infrastructure that most of us who live in industrialized countries take for granted is absolutely thrashed in the Bahamas because there is no money to maintain it. But here and there are completely private real estate developments where the infrastructure looks like its right out of Beverly Hills.
Even in the United States there are some communities where the Fire Department is not funded out of regular taxation. Instead one must pay a fee specifically for fire protection.
Not long ago I read quite a horrible news story about some guy who had not kept his fire protection fees up-to-date. When his house burned down the fire crew did show up, but only to prevent the fire from spreading to his neighbors home. Despite his desperate please, they made no effort at all to douse the flames that consumed his home, his possessions, and his memories.
That man's fate is what would befall us all if Ron Paul wins the presidency, and America loses all willingness to tax ourselves to provide for the common good. Rather than a nation whose prosperity is ensured in part by a well-maintained and extensive system of roads, the vast majority of us will live in horrible poverty, riding horsecarts perhaps on dirt roads, while only the very wealth can afford to pay road tolls.
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For the life of me I cannot understand why the Capital Gains Tax Rate is any less, let alone in any way different from the Income Tax Rates.
If one has the means to provide for oneself by investing in the stock market, why should one be required to pay significantly less taxes than those of us who provide for ourselves by working regular jobs?
Making more money available to the rich, or to large, powerful and highly profitable corporations, only enables them to build facilities in other countries.
My MacBook Pro was labeled as having been "Designed by Apple in California". But it was actually MADE in China. The very first Apple computers were made in Silicon Valley. It has been many years since Apple has had a manufacturing plant of any sort in the United States.
I'm self-employed, and hope to grow my business someday, but I am still of quite modest means. When I get to the point that I can hire employees, there is no way that I'll be contracting with an outsourcing firm in some other country. Instead I'll hire my employees from my local community.
It has been quite well established for DECADES that most new jobs are created by small businesses such as my own. All that making things easier for large business does is to make it easier for them to lay off their American workers when they move our jobs to other countries.
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You must not have ever worked for one.
A government-funded agency called the Manhattan Project avoided the need for one million American troops to give their lives by having a few hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki give theirs instead.
NASA put a dozen men and a few dune buggies on the moon in a government operation.
But on private industry's side, Enron manipulated what was intended to be a free market for electrical supply by creating rolling blackouts in California during its notoriously hot summer. I expect that more than a few elderly or sick people died when they couldn't run their air conditioners. It didn't work out so well though, as Enron when tits up after getting caught.
Or take the current economic crisis. created largely by "The Invisible Hand" developing a new form of investment vehicle that anyone with half a neuron knew was impossible to reliably valuate, with the result that Silicon Valley alone how has twenty-four thousand homeless people.
I don't live there anymore, but when I did, I used to see those poor fuckers all the time, smartly dressed and toting those rolling suitcases that are so popular, all night long on empty streets, because they had nowhere else to go. At least they were able to keep their fine luggage after their homes got foreclosed.
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Surprisingly, the Canadian tax rate is not hugely different that the US one - though they are difficult to compare on equal footing since there are so many differences in the details:
http://slumbuddy.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/comparison-of-us-and-canadian-tax-rates-for-2010/
I doubt many Canadians feel under-taxed, but they do seem to be getting much better value for their tax dollars than those south of the border.
Yes, but you get to deduct the taxes you pay to the other country so it's not as bad.
Sig is on vacation
Except for the republican president currently in the whitehouse. Hawkish, cuts deeper into civil liberties than ever before, promotes a healthcare bill that hands money to the private sector, doesn't press "liberal" issues he has direct control cover such as Guantanamo, DADT, Iraq war, and Afghanistan war. He doesn't use the bully pulpit to advocate for a balanced budget, which is different from even recent Democratic presidents (although ALL presidents of the past 30 years have been BIG spenders).
In October 2000, Madonna won her fight against a cybersquatter using the domain name madonna.com to operate a pornography website. The UN World Intellectual Property Organization found that site operator Dan Parisi "lacks rights or legitimate interests in the domain name." Parisi claims that he was in the process of handing over the rights to the domain name to a US hospital, Madonna Rehabilitation, which has the domain name madonna.org, when the case started.
I live in Washington state. I've done an Excel-sheet analysis of my out-of-pocket expenses and taxes from living in Vancouver (where I spent a lot of time in my childhood), and it turns out I actually come out ahead in Vancouver by a few percentage points (assuming similar housing prices).
And that's not counting the benefits of cheaper higher education for my children and better commute options.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
A Republican who is exposed as a hypocrite? The hell you say!
Where do you get the idea that he's their worst candidate? In the assemblage of clowns vying for the 2012 Republican nomination, he's the best candidate, if you're not some Tea Party mouth-breather. The rest of them are all unelectable nutjobs.
Newt is the "safety school" of the bunch, the one who will take the nomination if none of the lunatic fringe can build up a successful head of steam.
Glenn Beck is the Paris Hilton of political pundits, the few times I have seen his show he struck me as amazingly shallow. If he has spoken out against Republicans I can only imagine that it was when they were acting like responsible adults instead of spoiled children who have to have their way.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Actually, no. An engineer is a person who writes computer programs.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Cartoons from 2009 from Jos Collignon.
no comment.
http://www.innovationsinnewspapers.com/index.php/2009/01/22/the-best-of-the-best/
The Republican base is easily motivated by fear. Figures like Rush Limbaugh and Gleen Beck have the Republican base up in a frenzy over Obama. All that they would have to do is beat on the "If you don't vote for Romney (or Gingrich, or whoever) the secret Muslim will win" drum and the Republican base will turn out in droves.
Yes, it's a dirty trick. But really, if you're going to a site politician-name.com, the ".com" part tells you it's a business - so Newt would only need that site if his services are for sale :-) Of course, if they are, it's a trademark violation for the Democrats to be offering to sell you Newt's services...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks