Senator Reid is a conservative by Democratic standards, but he has been firm on the liberty side of things all along. On this he has not weaseled.
He has managed to stand up against telecom immunity, but that's about it.
There's a lot of talk about how Democrats are for restoring rights, but I think you'll admit they haven't fucking done so.
The President pro tempore of the Senate, thanks to how it's structured, holds enormous power to determine what bills get to the floor and what gets voted on and when and what committees things end up in.
However, if there is a bill that only 30 Republicans will vote for, a stupid bill that no one wants, but one that can be presented as a 'bad vote by my Democrat opponent' during a Republican's election in 2008, that will somehow make it to a vote. (And lose, of course, but that's not the point.) And yet if there's a bill that 58 people will vote for, and 42 Republicans against, those 42 will issue a 'pretend filibuster' avoiding cloture so the bill will never get voted on. Despite Reid having ways to spoil both those tricks.
I don't know what the fuck is wrong with him. He can stand there and vote for 'liberty' all he wants, but he was given the position so that he could actually get results, not run the Senate however the Republicans want. Good Democatic bills never go anywhere, bills that no one thinks are a good idea but are intended to politically help Republicans make it to the floor, and, more relevant to this article, stupid shit like this telecom immunity gets voted on again and again until it passes.
I mean, I thought the Republican abuse of the majority power in the Senate was bad when the Republicans were in power, but at least that made sense. Letting the Republicans run roughshod over the Senate now is just...mindblowing.
Those "not a real D's", what some are calling Blue Dog Democrats won their office because they were, in your words, "not real D's" Somehow, you'll have to come to grips with the fact that in many places in the country, Democrats are a distant second choice.
And I'm fairly sure I didn't imply those places didn't exist.
However, they aren't the places electing Blue Dogs. Those are the places that will continue electing Republicans regardless. We're nowhere near done flipping areas from R to D.
And of course, your claim that "anyone with a D next to their name got in" is silly tending toward stupid. If it was true, the house would be 100% "D"
Someday, someone will explain 'hyperbole' to you. Or, in fact, that you were looking at that backwards. I meant, in many races, that anyone with a D next to their name would have defeated the R incumbent. I didn't mean that all Democrats won, I meant that the sole qualification for being elected was often 'Not Republican'. And they were, and some of them clearly weren't very good choices. (Although some of them would have made quite good Republicans back when that party used to be sane.)
I'm not motivated to defend liberty? What? I'm complaining that Reid isn't motivated.
What gets the Democrats 'sodomized' by the right is the fact they refuse to ever actually take a stand.
When the Republicans are in power they rule with an iron fist, when the Democrats are in power the Republicans still manage to operate Congress. They can't pass bills as easily, but they still get them passed, and the Democrats somehow can't pass bills at all.
That is what is fucking wrong with Congress.
However, there's no 'flight of Americans from the Democratic party'. I don't know how you made that up. There is a flight to the Democratic party.
They're going after the telecoms via the civil courts because that's the only place that normal human beings can bring charges.
The Justice Department and the FBI should actually be investigating, but, guess what? They're not.
Remember, 'impeachment is off the table', thank you stupid fucking Democrats. Impeachment is the fucking table when the executive branch is breaking the law.
And even if it's not, it certainly should be the very first thing that showed up the second the executive branch decided not to cooperate with any investigation. Harriet Miers is almost 10 months late for her testimony because the executive branch has lied and claimed she has 'executive privilege'.
So, Congress is a bunch of cowardly asshats, and it's probably because a few of the Democrats knew what was going on also, and the executive branch won't investigate themselves. If it could get into court, the court has a chance of clearing it up, but private citizens can't file charges...but they can sue. See why the government wants telecom immunity? That is the one possible chance at this point.
In the end, I'm not that keen to see telecoms end up owing several hundred trillion dollars worth of damages to the people of the US, although I think it would be damned funny. But that's not the point of the suit. If the telecoms need debt forgiveness after all this comes out, I won't stand in the way, but right now this case is the only way to find out what's actually happening.
Incidentally, I wish libertarians would stop acting like 'cutting taxes' is some sort of 'policy'. Taxes should roughly match government expenses, slightly exceeding them in boom times and slightly below them in recessions. There's actually no possible debate about that, except maybe how much 'slightly' is. Plenty of debate over who and what to tax, but no debate on the actual amount of needed income, and thus no debate on the amount of income we actually need to collect in total.
You guys, however, like to pretend it's a 'policy decision', that any reduction is good and any expansion is bad, thus resulting in a rather horrible deficit at this point. A policy decision is less government in general, or in any specific. But any government program that exists must be funded to the amount that it is spending. It's not a damn choice, where we can just magically not collect money to pay for things.
No, the 'next administration' isn't really that important. What is important is the next Congress.
And last election, anyone with a D next to their name got in. This election, those Ds that aren't actually Ds have had primary challenges they're going to lose, and get replaced with real D.
The Republicans, right now, are pretending that it takes 60 votes to get anything they don't like through the Senate. Meanwhile, somehow, three or four Democrats caving to the Republicans give them 52 votes, which is somehow enough to pass things.
This is because the Senate Majority Leader is a complete fucking moron who lets the Republicans 'pretend' to filibuster every bill. Anyone but Reid in 2008, please.
But, anyway, if the same thing happens in 2006 that happened in 2006, and there's no reason to think it won't happen as strongly, all the fake Democrats in the House will be thrown out for real ones, and another 1/3rd of the Republicans in the Senate will be thrown out for Democrats.
...the next six months will be a desperate attempt for immunity for all sorts of crap, not just for the telecoms, and the two months after that will be near-total panic. The actual best thing we could do at this point is shut down Congress to keep them from bribing and forcing those bills through.
When was the last time Ahmadinejad or Iran started any kind of military action?
Are you asking seriously?
Well, 'Iran' has never attacked anyone per se. But if by 'Iran' you mean 'Persia'...um...1826, I think. To regain land lost to Russia 50 years earlier. Russia started that series of wars, they'd had an on-again-off-again war for 100 years. And that attack was actually incited by Britian as part of their 'Great Game' with Russia which they fought throughout the middle east, a sort of proto-cold-war. And they had formerly done the same thing in 1804 for exactly the same reasons.
In 1735 it attacked India to get back some of its stuff and steal other stuff. I don't really understand what happened there, they weren't after territory.
Those three times are pretty much the only time Persia ever attacked anyone since it was formed in 1501. Iran, of course, was founded in 1921 and has never attacked anyone. (Except 'it' attacked itself and overthrew its own government in a civil war.)
RDA, up until about four years ago, was on Stargate SG-1, a show that required more action work than MacGyver ever did. He was running around big fields and alien hallways firing guns at things, instead of messing around with chemicals in a closet.
Unless something has happened to him since then (Wasn't he just in the second SG-1 direct-to-video film?), he clearly can do the role of MacGyver.
A good number of Al Qaeda members have entered Iraq through Syria. This much is documented. Syria and Iran are friends.
I thought us and Syria were friends? (Aren't they torturing people for us? Or did we stop outsourcing that?) A good deal of actual al Qaeda (Not the pretend one in Iraq, the actual one that attacked us) have left Afganistan through Pakistan, and I'm fairly certain we're friends with Pakistan, too.
What that actually demonstrates is that Syria can't control their Iraq border, nothing more and nothing less. And considering that Turkey has been complaining about Kurdish terrorists getting into to Turkey through the Iraq border, which we in theory should be stopping, I don't know that we're actually allowed to complain about terrorists slipping over lax borders.
Sunni and Shia are not such clear dividing lines as you seem to imply, they actually do work together when it is convenient.
Yes, but 'convenient to work together' rarely describes them during civil wars when they're on opposite sides. Sorta like how Virginia and Maryland work together but not, you know, during the Civil War. Iran is not supplying weapons to al Qaeda in Iraq, because it wants them to lose and the Shia government (Or some Shia government, at least) to (re)gain control of Iraq. So Iran can then ally with them.
I like that there's some deluded universe where Iran actually wants a war in Iraq. Um, no. The majority of Iraqis have no problem with Iran. The sooner the damn war is over and the majority actually control the country, the sooner Iran can make friends. The war is, if anything, delaying Iran's plans. They were happy in 2005, now they're just sorta tapping their fingers waiting for the killing to end.
I didn't even mention Iran supplying weapons to people in Iraq.
Can you not read your post? You said:
Iran backs a number of radical groups in the middle east, including...probably Al Qaeda in Iraq.
As for supplying weapons to Hamas, there's never been any evidence of that. At all. (Hamas doesn't need weapons supplied to it, it's the fricking 'government' of Palestinian.)
Hezbollah, yes. Iran supplies the Hezbollah militia. Hezbollah is Iran's attempt to take over Lebanon, not destroy Israel.
Interesting enough for two organizations that dislike Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas have a notably frigid relation, because that Hezbollah was founded when Israel invaded Lebanon because the PLO had taken up residence there. Hezbollah may dislike Israel, but what it really disliked was Israel and the PLO fighting their war inside Lebanon, and they aren't real fond of Palestinians in general, especially Hamas. There have been signs of this dislike chilling in recent years, but asserting that Iran is helping both is probably just wrong.
If Iran wanted to help Hamas, it would ask Hezbollah to do something, as Hezbollah has demonstrated it can enter and leave Israel secretly. (And, while it's there, kidnap Israeli soldiers for fun and profit.) If Hezbollah actually were to step in and help Hamas, they could really help Hamas. But Hezbollah's is not helping Hamas, their Israel policy is (was) "wave their hand in front of Israel's face and say 'I'm not touching you'". Until Israel punched them in the face in 2006.
After a quick search, I found this lovely gem.
Oh, well, if General Petraeus says it, it must be true. I'm sure that he could read the serial numbers of the rockets in the air and track them back to their source. But, more to the point, that's a Shia militia, not 'al Qaeda in Iraq'. And, although I'm sure you won't believe it, al-Sadr is actually famous for being the one militia leader who won't work with Iran, so it's more than likely the weapons were stolen or purchased on the black market.
And let's not forget the other rising regional power that is not that Muslim-friendly...India. A forward-looking Iran should be somewhat worried about India, especially if Pakistan ever does something stupid. (Which everyone is fairly sure it will.) Pakistan is a country with almost no borders, and it 'borders' both India and Iran, both of which have been trouble spots for decades. (Along with the Afghan border.)
And don't forget that it's angling for a piece of Iraq, and if it either literally ends up owning it, or just controlling it, that piece is going to be almost bang up against Saudi Arabia, which is its traditional regional enemy.
Some countries are paranoid, but everyone actually is possibly out to get Iran. It's sole regional ally is Syria, which it doesn't even border, and thus would make it rather difficult for Syria to help in an war. That's why it's working so hard to be friends with Iraq...not only would it get one new ally, it'd have a road to Syria. And, also a road/new pipeline route to the Mediterranean Sea...don't discount the value of that to shipping.
People act like it wants Iraq for the oil, but, honestly, it has oil. It wants Iraq to form a three-nation contiguous allies area. And, really, Lebanon also, but that's later. One that would cut the Arab Sunni Muslim world in half, with the oil nations on one side and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other. (And Turkey cut off up there at the top, but it already is cut off.)
That is what it's maneuvering for, and there's actually not a lot we can do to stop them. Iran won this game without doing a single thing, when we decided to install a representative government in Iraq, because that alliance is in the best interests of, and will be wanted by, a majority of Iraqis.
However, Iran isn't going for nukes. There's nowhere it could use them.
And the NY Times article itself says that international inspectors see Iran's nuclear facilities, and you can also see the IAEA cameras mounted on the walls in the photos -- so these facilities are hardly as secret or mysterious as the NY Times makes them out to be.
No shit. Iran's going overboard trying to cope with two competing issues.
a) They want to comply with inspections at their nuclear facilities. Why? Because they're telling the truth. They're not making nukes, they're making reactors for energy.
I know that's hard for people to grasp who've been repeatedly fed the lie that they're lying, but Iran is being straight here. There's absolutely no evidence they're lying, and they fact they're still within the NPT instead of withdrawing from it, which they can trivially do, and kicking the inspectors out, which they can do, demonstrates that. Iran does not need or want nukes. They want nuclear power, and are going through exactly the proper channels to get it. (a)
More to the point, they're not going to nuke fucking Israel. They don't give a shit about Israel. If they did, their proxy Hezbollah would be a lot more active, instead of their current (Until the Lebanon invasion) 'let's poke Israel with a stick' game plan. Israel is a thousand fucking miles away inhabited by Sunnis. It's great to stir up anger at the US, and support for the administration, anti-Semitism is very strong there and Israel is a great target. But they're not going to nuke it, they don't want to nuke it, that would literally be insane. (And, no, they aren't insane.) Jerusalem is a holy city to them!
b)...which is all well and good, except the US is promising to bomb their nuclear facilities, and no one appears to be willing to challenge the US on their illegal threats. (Yes, threatening to attack other countries is illegal. Even if Iran is in violation of the NPT, there is no punishment...you just get kicked out.) So, under the NPT, they have an obligation to expose their facilities to IAEA inspectors, but, OTOH, revealing the location of those facilities gives the US a target.
c)...and, of course, refusing to comply, or withdrawing from the NPT so they don't have inspections, would allow the US to claim they're hiding something, and attack them away.
But they, being Persians, figured out a fourth way....they buried their facilities. So we know where they are, but can't get to them.
a) Incidentally, that should really make us think about our oil policy. Iran is building nuclear reactors because they expect the price of oil to skyrocket, and every gallon they don't use is a gallon they can sell to the world at a huge markup during the end days of oil. In thirty years, they'll be driving around in electric cars we bought them as they sell us oil making 5 dollars a gallon profit, and laughing all the way to being the richest country in the world.
Two religions, two organization funded by two countries and based in two other countries.
Now, which of these fucking attacked us?
Perhaps more to the point of whom we're current fighting, which of these is Israel's enemy? But I'm sure mentioning that we appear to be fighting Israel's enemies and not our own makes me anti-Semitic so I won't.
Also, the analogy isn't perfect because Hezbollah is, basically, a quasi-government entity....it's based solely in Lebanon, it defends itself. It's not some international conspiracy, despite various people trying to make it out to be a terrorist cell. It does, however, commit war crimes by attacking civilians, and it possibly has attacked the US on two occasions within Lebanon, when we were helping the other side of a war they were also engaged in.
It's rather like the militias in Iraq...in fact, it's exactly like them. A weak central government, so a strongman arises that provides defense, social services, collects taxes, etc. Everything a government does, in fact...the only reason we don't call them a government is that they're officially within the area of another government.
Iran was directly involved in bombing the Marine barracks in Beirut in the 80s,
I love it when people mention this like it was some random terrorist thing.
Israel invaded Lebanon, occupying it and causing a civil war to eventually happen. There was a war going on. The US picked a side, the Israel side, and stationed troops in a war zone, where they were attacked by fighters from the other side.
That's not 'destablizing' anything. Lebanon was destabilized by the PLO and Jordanian fighters, who were attacking Israel from it, and obviously the actual invasion by Israel made things 100 times worse. Iran (and Syria) had nothing to do with starting that clusterfuck, they didn't stick their finger into it until it was well underway.
And note I'm presuming that a) The bombing was indeed done by Hezbollah, which they denied, and b) Hezbollah was indeed under control of Iran, which they also denied. There's very good odds that bombing had nothing to do with Iran at all.
Attacking troops on the opposite side of a war is not terrorism. That's called 'war'.
Iran is not funding Al Qaeda in Iraq, you nimrod. AQI is Sunni.
Iran, which is Shia, is working with the legitimate government of Iraq, which is also mostly Shia. And they're also working with the Shia militias, which we don't like, but those militias are basically keeping law and order in certain parts of Iraq where government control is nonexistence. Those are the groups fighting AQI.
But, I'm sure 'using Iranian weapons' proves it. Despite the fact that, um, they aren't, and our government has actually never provided proof of that rather stupid claim. Even the people Iran is actually supporting aren't using Iranian weapons. People in Iraq are mainly using Iraqi weapons because we stupidly disbanded the military and didn't secure the weapon depots fast enough.
You're right about ETags. ETags are useful when you have cached, dynamically-generated content, and can't use Last-Modified. Well, you could use it, but handling faking that is more complicated than just running the end result through crc32().
Anything else and ETags are just just dumb. OTOH, they're not actually slowing anything down for the end user.
OTOH, YSlow's still stupid here, because it makes some crazy comment about server farms. Look, Yahoo, I don't know who you think is using this software, but 99.999% of the people using this outside of you guys do not have 'server farms'. Tell people to turn it off unless they need it, not if they're using a server farm.
And the same with CDNs. Really? They think normal websites should be using CDNs? Are they on drugs? And CDNs help very little with the actual 'speeding things up for the end user' when talking about images and stuff (As opposed to videos.), which is why people are using this software: They wish for websites they are in charge of to load faster for the end user. That's it, that's all. They want it to open in 8 seconds on dialup, not 22.
And those two things are rated 10 and 11, so people might actually think they're important, and spend time on the, only to discover those have nothing to do with the apparent speed of their website.
To speed things up, there are only two non-content pieces of advice in YSlow that are useful: Use gzip, and use an Expires header. (For repeated images especially.)
Plus the 'use less images/scripts', 'put scripts at the end', and 'minimize JS' are useful content advice. (Someone should write an apache module that runs JS through a code minimizer.)
I too wouldn't feel charitable towards them, but that doesn't mean I'd think it was acceptable behavior on the part of the committing the crime.
I mean, it's stupid to keep your car doors unlocked in big cities, and if someone's car was stolen in those circumstances I'd felt they sorta have themselves to blame...but the car thief should still go to jail. Easy crimes are still crimes.
Exactly, you managed to phrase it exactly the right way. Attorneys should not be able to select who is on their jury, they should only be able to decide who isn't.
Each should get one, maybe two, random no-explanation objections.
Jointly, they should be able to strike as many people as they want. Sometimes you get nutters raving about aliens and whatnot.
And finally, they should be able to strike as many people for specific reasons. Like 'Convicted of this exact crime before' and whatnot. (Although as many as possible of those people should be excluded from the pool or that specific case in advance with a questionnaire.
Jury selection, at this point, is as much a part of the trial as anything else, and it's half the reason that high-priced lawyers, who do very careful selection, tend to win cases, and court-appointed lawyers, who do the bare minimum, do not.
And, like many people, I've never been called for jury duty, despite the fact I've been registered to vote for almost a decade. I would enjoy doing it if they gave me an actual case, but I'd hate it if they just kept calling me into courtrooms, asking questions, and letting me go.
the missing e-mails have nothing to do with nefarious scheming
By itself, that might be a sane assumption...but when you consider their other email problem, specifically, that they conducted government business over the RNC's computer to avoid leaving tracks, well, no. It's pretty clearly an obvious plan to avoid any record of what they do.
That was actually a system problem that, rather importantly, did not ultimately result in any lost email.
Read it carefully, it says the backup wasn't storing email 'properly', whatever that means. I suspect format problems, the email system at the time was using a VAX. So they couldn't just 'restore' the email, they had to munge it to make it usable in whatever format Congress thought it was supposed to be in.
But in the end, all the email was recovered after a few months.
It is rather funny to read Republican complaints about a delay of months in turning over email in an investigation about Hillary Clinton possibly lying about firing people in the WH travel office, who are part of the WH staff and can be fired at will.
The WH claimed there were financial irregularities and that the FBI confirmed it, the people were quite correctly fired. The right claimed the Clintons made it up so family friends could take over or some really stupid nonsense, and used the FBI 'improperly'. The whole investigation was a precursor to Blowjobgate, where the Republicans do a bunch of investigating, throw wild accusations around, found nothing wrong, and finally get someone (Hillary, in this case) to state something (That she didn't have a lot to do with it.) and then investigate her for perjury. At worse, it was a little bit of attempted nepotism and then denial of said attempted nepotism...that showed up after it was realized that the WH travel office had been 'skimming'. Along with a bit of an overreaction of mass firing by the Clinton administration, which it corrected by rehiring the innocent people.
Yet the GOP is now blithely accepting the total loss of emails in an investigation of the politicalization of the justice department, which is, if not illegal, at least worth investigating, unlike some supposed issues in the WH travel office. And constantly refusing to investigate anyone for lying to Congress, which the Bush WH has done so repeatedly. (The most obvious, but not only, time is in the lead-up to Iraq, and it's worth noting lying during the State of the Union counts as lying to Congress.) And refusing to investigate nepotism and conflicts of interests, of which the current Administration has a lot more.
This is all getting silly. The way to backup government data is the way it's always been done: Operate competent IT departments.
The fact the Bush WH switched companies to ones that mysteriously did not make backups, and used the RNC email to operate entirely outside the law, is not a problem with the system. The problem with the system is that Congress did not impeach the lot of them when this was revealed. (The lack of impeachment is, in fact, the only current problem with the system.)
At least this administration hasn't had the FBI files of the opposing party "somehow" appear in the White House.
No, it's just wiretapped unknown phones and emails, for years, in violation of the law. Phones and emails that could trivially include the opposition party. The difference is, unlike the Clinton Whitehouse which operated in the open and within the laws allowing oversight, the Bush Whitehouse does not. Hence, the Clinton WH was caught.
And you probably want those same people to manage our health care!
Republicans: Proving, as they do every time they're in office, that the government is completely incompetent, intrusive, uncaring, and criminal, exactly like they've been saying. It's almost magic!
See, the thing is, we don't want Republicans managing health care either. (Of course, in actuality, we want doctors managing health care, and the government paying them for their services.)
They won't only not do that, their 'search' is checking your browser history and searching for all images, some of which they look at randomly.
It is possibly the stupidest 'search' in the history of mankind. Forget encryption, you can defeat it by clearing browser cache and compressing porn into a zip file and then renaming it so Windows won't search it.
Or, you know, keeping the stuff you want hidden on a frickin thumbdrive.
Most of the people who think Congress is doing a good job are Republicans, oddly enough. Statistically, Republicans hate just the Democrats in Congress, whereas the Democrats started off hating the Republicans but now hate the Democrats also.
And cables don't do crap. If you've never broken out the tabs that hold them... let's just say the slots aren't particularly secure. And the cables themselves can be cut even more easily, locks picked, etc.
The point of cables is to stop someone from grabbing your laptop and sprinting out the door of the coffee shop, not to secure it when you're not there.
Slashdot Mirror
Senator Reid is a conservative by Democratic standards, but he has been firm on the liberty side of things all along. On this he has not weaseled.
He has managed to stand up against telecom immunity, but that's about it.
There's a lot of talk about how Democrats are for restoring rights, but I think you'll admit they haven't fucking done so.
The President pro tempore of the Senate, thanks to how it's structured, holds enormous power to determine what bills get to the floor and what gets voted on and when and what committees things end up in.
However, if there is a bill that only 30 Republicans will vote for, a stupid bill that no one wants, but one that can be presented as a 'bad vote by my Democrat opponent' during a Republican's election in 2008, that will somehow make it to a vote. (And lose, of course, but that's not the point.) And yet if there's a bill that 58 people will vote for, and 42 Republicans against, those 42 will issue a 'pretend filibuster' avoiding cloture so the bill will never get voted on. Despite Reid having ways to spoil both those tricks.
I don't know what the fuck is wrong with him. He can stand there and vote for 'liberty' all he wants, but he was given the position so that he could actually get results, not run the Senate however the Republicans want. Good Democatic bills never go anywhere, bills that no one thinks are a good idea but are intended to politically help Republicans make it to the floor, and, more relevant to this article, stupid shit like this telecom immunity gets voted on again and again until it passes.
I mean, I thought the Republican abuse of the majority power in the Senate was bad when the Republicans were in power, but at least that made sense. Letting the Republicans run roughshod over the Senate now is just...mindblowing.
Those "not a real D's", what some are calling Blue Dog Democrats won their office because they were, in your words, "not real D's" Somehow, you'll have to come to grips with the fact that in many places in the country, Democrats are a distant second choice.
And I'm fairly sure I didn't imply those places didn't exist.
However, they aren't the places electing Blue Dogs. Those are the places that will continue electing Republicans regardless. We're nowhere near done flipping areas from R to D.
And of course, your claim that "anyone with a D next to their name got in" is silly tending toward stupid. If it was true, the house would be 100% "D"
Someday, someone will explain 'hyperbole' to you. Or, in fact, that you were looking at that backwards. I meant, in many races, that anyone with a D next to their name would have defeated the R incumbent. I didn't mean that all Democrats won, I meant that the sole qualification for being elected was often 'Not Republican'. And they were, and some of them clearly weren't very good choices. (Although some of them would have made quite good Republicans back when that party used to be sane.)
I'm not motivated to defend liberty? What? I'm complaining that Reid isn't motivated.
What gets the Democrats 'sodomized' by the right is the fact they refuse to ever actually take a stand.
When the Republicans are in power they rule with an iron fist, when the Democrats are in power the Republicans still manage to operate Congress. They can't pass bills as easily, but they still get them passed, and the Democrats somehow can't pass bills at all.
That is what is fucking wrong with Congress.
However, there's no 'flight of Americans from the Democratic party'. I don't know how you made that up. There is a flight to the Democratic party.
They're going after the telecoms via the civil courts because that's the only place that normal human beings can bring charges.
The Justice Department and the FBI should actually be investigating, but, guess what? They're not.
Remember, 'impeachment is off the table', thank you stupid fucking Democrats. Impeachment is the fucking table when the executive branch is breaking the law.
And even if it's not, it certainly should be the very first thing that showed up the second the executive branch decided not to cooperate with any investigation. Harriet Miers is almost 10 months late for her testimony because the executive branch has lied and claimed she has 'executive privilege'.
So, Congress is a bunch of cowardly asshats, and it's probably because a few of the Democrats knew what was going on also, and the executive branch won't investigate themselves. If it could get into court, the court has a chance of clearing it up, but private citizens can't file charges...but they can sue. See why the government wants telecom immunity? That is the one possible chance at this point.
In the end, I'm not that keen to see telecoms end up owing several hundred trillion dollars worth of damages to the people of the US, although I think it would be damned funny. But that's not the point of the suit. If the telecoms need debt forgiveness after all this comes out, I won't stand in the way, but right now this case is the only way to find out what's actually happening.
Incidentally, I wish libertarians would stop acting like 'cutting taxes' is some sort of 'policy'. Taxes should roughly match government expenses, slightly exceeding them in boom times and slightly below them in recessions. There's actually no possible debate about that, except maybe how much 'slightly' is. Plenty of debate over who and what to tax, but no debate on the actual amount of needed income, and thus no debate on the amount of income we actually need to collect in total.
You guys, however, like to pretend it's a 'policy decision', that any reduction is good and any expansion is bad, thus resulting in a rather horrible deficit at this point. A policy decision is less government in general, or in any specific. But any government program that exists must be funded to the amount that it is spending. It's not a damn choice, where we can just magically not collect money to pay for things.
No, the 'next administration' isn't really that important. What is important is the next Congress.
And last election, anyone with a D next to their name got in. This election, those Ds that aren't actually Ds have had primary challenges they're going to lose, and get replaced with real D.
The Republicans, right now, are pretending that it takes 60 votes to get anything they don't like through the Senate. Meanwhile, somehow, three or four Democrats caving to the Republicans give them 52 votes, which is somehow enough to pass things.
This is because the Senate Majority Leader is a complete fucking moron who lets the Republicans 'pretend' to filibuster every bill. Anyone but Reid in 2008, please.
But, anyway, if the same thing happens in 2006 that happened in 2006, and there's no reason to think it won't happen as strongly, all the fake Democrats in the House will be thrown out for real ones, and another 1/3rd of the Republicans in the Senate will be thrown out for Democrats.
When was the last time Ahmadinejad or Iran started any kind of military action?
Are you asking seriously?
Well, 'Iran' has never attacked anyone per se. But if by 'Iran' you mean 'Persia'...um...1826, I think. To regain land lost to Russia 50 years earlier. Russia started that series of wars, they'd had an on-again-off-again war for 100 years. And that attack was actually incited by Britian as part of their 'Great Game' with Russia which they fought throughout the middle east, a sort of proto-cold-war. And they had formerly done the same thing in 1804 for exactly the same reasons.
In 1735 it attacked India to get back some of its stuff and steal other stuff. I don't really understand what happened there, they weren't after territory.
Those three times are pretty much the only time Persia ever attacked anyone since it was formed in 1501. Iran, of course, was founded in 1921 and has never attacked anyone. (Except 'it' attacked itself and overthrew its own government in a civil war.)
RDA, up until about four years ago, was on Stargate SG-1, a show that required more action work than MacGyver ever did. He was running around big fields and alien hallways firing guns at things, instead of messing around with chemicals in a closet.
Unless something has happened to him since then (Wasn't he just in the second SG-1 direct-to-video film?), he clearly can do the role of MacGyver.
A good number of Al Qaeda members have entered Iraq through Syria. This much is documented. Syria and Iran are friends.
I thought us and Syria were friends? (Aren't they torturing people for us? Or did we stop outsourcing that?) A good deal of actual al Qaeda (Not the pretend one in Iraq, the actual one that attacked us) have left Afganistan through Pakistan, and I'm fairly certain we're friends with Pakistan, too.
What that actually demonstrates is that Syria can't control their Iraq border, nothing more and nothing less. And considering that Turkey has been complaining about Kurdish terrorists getting into to Turkey through the Iraq border, which we in theory should be stopping, I don't know that we're actually allowed to complain about terrorists slipping over lax borders.
Sunni and Shia are not such clear dividing lines as you seem to imply, they actually do work together when it is convenient.
Yes, but 'convenient to work together' rarely describes them during civil wars when they're on opposite sides. Sorta like how Virginia and Maryland work together but not, you know, during the Civil War. Iran is not supplying weapons to al Qaeda in Iraq, because it wants them to lose and the Shia government (Or some Shia government, at least) to (re)gain control of Iraq. So Iran can then ally with them.
I like that there's some deluded universe where Iran actually wants a war in Iraq. Um, no. The majority of Iraqis have no problem with Iran. The sooner the damn war is over and the majority actually control the country, the sooner Iran can make friends. The war is, if anything, delaying Iran's plans. They were happy in 2005, now they're just sorta tapping their fingers waiting for the killing to end.
I didn't even mention Iran supplying weapons to people in Iraq.
Can you not read your post? You said:
Iran backs a number of radical groups in the middle east, including...probably Al Qaeda in Iraq.
As for supplying weapons to Hamas, there's never been any evidence of that. At all. (Hamas doesn't need weapons supplied to it, it's the fricking 'government' of Palestinian.)
Hezbollah, yes. Iran supplies the Hezbollah militia. Hezbollah is Iran's attempt to take over Lebanon, not destroy Israel.
Interesting enough for two organizations that dislike Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas have a notably frigid relation, because that Hezbollah was founded when Israel invaded Lebanon because the PLO had taken up residence there. Hezbollah may dislike Israel, but what it really disliked was Israel and the PLO fighting their war inside Lebanon, and they aren't real fond of Palestinians in general, especially Hamas. There have been signs of this dislike chilling in recent years, but asserting that Iran is helping both is probably just wrong.
If Iran wanted to help Hamas, it would ask Hezbollah to do something, as Hezbollah has demonstrated it can enter and leave Israel secretly. (And, while it's there, kidnap Israeli soldiers for fun and profit.) If Hezbollah actually were to step in and help Hamas, they could really help Hamas. But Hezbollah's is not helping Hamas, their Israel policy is (was) "wave their hand in front of Israel's face and say 'I'm not touching you'". Until Israel punched them in the face in 2006.
After a quick search, I found this lovely gem.
Oh, well, if General Petraeus says it, it must be true. I'm sure that he could read the serial numbers of the rockets in the air and track them back to their source. But, more to the point, that's a Shia militia, not 'al Qaeda in Iraq'. And, although I'm sure you won't believe it, al-Sadr is actually famous for being the one militia leader who won't work with Iran, so it's more than likely the weapons were stolen or purchased on the black market.
And let's not forget the other rising regional power that is not that Muslim-friendly...India. A forward-looking Iran should be somewhat worried about India, especially if Pakistan ever does something stupid. (Which everyone is fairly sure it will.) Pakistan is a country with almost no borders, and it 'borders' both India and Iran, both of which have been trouble spots for decades. (Along with the Afghan border.)
And don't forget that it's angling for a piece of Iraq, and if it either literally ends up owning it, or just controlling it, that piece is going to be almost bang up against Saudi Arabia, which is its traditional regional enemy.
Some countries are paranoid, but everyone actually is possibly out to get Iran. It's sole regional ally is Syria, which it doesn't even border, and thus would make it rather difficult for Syria to help in an war. That's why it's working so hard to be friends with Iraq...not only would it get one new ally, it'd have a road to Syria. And, also a road/new pipeline route to the Mediterranean Sea...don't discount the value of that to shipping.
People act like it wants Iraq for the oil, but, honestly, it has oil. It wants Iraq to form a three-nation contiguous allies area. And, really, Lebanon also, but that's later. One that would cut the Arab Sunni Muslim world in half, with the oil nations on one side and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other. (And Turkey cut off up there at the top, but it already is cut off.)
That is what it's maneuvering for, and there's actually not a lot we can do to stop them. Iran won this game without doing a single thing, when we decided to install a representative government in Iraq, because that alliance is in the best interests of, and will be wanted by, a majority of Iraqis.
However, Iran isn't going for nukes. There's nowhere it could use them.
And the NY Times article itself says that international inspectors see Iran's nuclear facilities, and you can also see the IAEA cameras mounted on the walls in the photos -- so these facilities are hardly as secret or mysterious as the NY Times makes them out to be.
No shit. Iran's going overboard trying to cope with two competing issues.
a) They want to comply with inspections at their nuclear facilities. Why? Because they're telling the truth. They're not making nukes, they're making reactors for energy.
I know that's hard for people to grasp who've been repeatedly fed the lie that they're lying, but Iran is being straight here. There's absolutely no evidence they're lying, and they fact they're still within the NPT instead of withdrawing from it, which they can trivially do, and kicking the inspectors out, which they can do, demonstrates that. Iran does not need or want nukes. They want nuclear power, and are going through exactly the proper channels to get it. (a)
More to the point, they're not going to nuke fucking Israel. They don't give a shit about Israel. If they did, their proxy Hezbollah would be a lot more active, instead of their current (Until the Lebanon invasion) 'let's poke Israel with a stick' game plan. Israel is a thousand fucking miles away inhabited by Sunnis. It's great to stir up anger at the US, and support for the administration, anti-Semitism is very strong there and Israel is a great target. But they're not going to nuke it, they don't want to nuke it, that would literally be insane. (And, no, they aren't insane.) Jerusalem is a holy city to them!
b) ...which is all well and good, except the US is promising to bomb their nuclear facilities, and no one appears to be willing to challenge the US on their illegal threats. (Yes, threatening to attack other countries is illegal. Even if Iran is in violation of the NPT, there is no punishment...you just get kicked out.) So, under the NPT, they have an obligation to expose their facilities to IAEA inspectors, but, OTOH, revealing the location of those facilities gives the US a target.
c) ...and, of course, refusing to comply, or withdrawing from the NPT so they don't have inspections, would allow the US to claim they're hiding something, and attack them away.
But they, being Persians, figured out a fourth way....they buried their facilities. So we know where they are, but can't get to them.
a) Incidentally, that should really make us think about our oil policy. Iran is building nuclear reactors because they expect the price of oil to skyrocket, and every gallon they don't use is a gallon they can sell to the world at a huge markup during the end days of oil. In thirty years, they'll be driving around in electric cars we bought them as they sell us oil making 5 dollars a gallon profit, and laughing all the way to being the richest country in the world.
When the conversation turns to attacking Saudi Arabia, let me know.
Sunni:al Quadi:Saudi Arabia:Pakistan
Shia:Hezbollah:Iran:Syria
Two religions, two organization funded by two countries and based in two other countries.
Now, which of these fucking attacked us?
Perhaps more to the point of whom we're current fighting, which of these is Israel's enemy? But I'm sure mentioning that we appear to be fighting Israel's enemies and not our own makes me anti-Semitic so I won't.
Also, the analogy isn't perfect because Hezbollah is, basically, a quasi-government entity....it's based solely in Lebanon, it defends itself. It's not some international conspiracy, despite various people trying to make it out to be a terrorist cell. It does, however, commit war crimes by attacking civilians, and it possibly has attacked the US on two occasions within Lebanon, when we were helping the other side of a war they were also engaged in.
It's rather like the militias in Iraq...in fact, it's exactly like them. A weak central government, so a strongman arises that provides defense, social services, collects taxes, etc. Everything a government does, in fact...the only reason we don't call them a government is that they're officially within the area of another government.
Iran was directly involved in bombing the Marine barracks in Beirut in the 80s,
I love it when people mention this like it was some random terrorist thing.
Israel invaded Lebanon, occupying it and causing a civil war to eventually happen. There was a war going on. The US picked a side, the Israel side, and stationed troops in a war zone, where they were attacked by fighters from the other side.
That's not 'destablizing' anything. Lebanon was destabilized by the PLO and Jordanian fighters, who were attacking Israel from it, and obviously the actual invasion by Israel made things 100 times worse. Iran (and Syria) had nothing to do with starting that clusterfuck, they didn't stick their finger into it until it was well underway.
And note I'm presuming that a) The bombing was indeed done by Hezbollah, which they denied, and b) Hezbollah was indeed under control of Iran, which they also denied. There's very good odds that bombing had nothing to do with Iran at all.
Attacking troops on the opposite side of a war is not terrorism. That's called 'war'.
Nope.
The idiom of 'wiping things off maps' doesn't even exist outside of the western world.
Iran is not funding Al Qaeda in Iraq, you nimrod. AQI is Sunni.
Iran, which is Shia, is working with the legitimate government of Iraq, which is also mostly Shia. And they're also working with the Shia militias, which we don't like, but those militias are basically keeping law and order in certain parts of Iraq where government control is nonexistence. Those are the groups fighting AQI.
But, I'm sure 'using Iranian weapons' proves it. Despite the fact that, um, they aren't, and our government has actually never provided proof of that rather stupid claim. Even the people Iran is actually supporting aren't using Iranian weapons. People in Iraq are mainly using Iraqi weapons because we stupidly disbanded the military and didn't secure the weapon depots fast enough.
You're right about ETags. ETags are useful when you have cached, dynamically-generated content, and can't use Last-Modified. Well, you could use it, but handling faking that is more complicated than just running the end result through crc32().
Anything else and ETags are just just dumb. OTOH, they're not actually slowing anything down for the end user.
OTOH, YSlow's still stupid here, because it makes some crazy comment about server farms. Look, Yahoo, I don't know who you think is using this software, but 99.999% of the people using this outside of you guys do not have 'server farms'. Tell people to turn it off unless they need it, not if they're using a server farm.
And the same with CDNs. Really? They think normal websites should be using CDNs? Are they on drugs? And CDNs help very little with the actual 'speeding things up for the end user' when talking about images and stuff (As opposed to videos.), which is why people are using this software: They wish for websites they are in charge of to load faster for the end user. That's it, that's all. They want it to open in 8 seconds on dialup, not 22.
And those two things are rated 10 and 11, so people might actually think they're important, and spend time on the, only to discover those have nothing to do with the apparent speed of their website.
To speed things up, there are only two non-content pieces of advice in YSlow that are useful: Use gzip, and use an Expires header. (For repeated images especially.)
Plus the 'use less images/scripts', 'put scripts at the end', and 'minimize JS' are useful content advice. (Someone should write an apache module that runs JS through a code minimizer.)
I too wouldn't feel charitable towards them, but that doesn't mean I'd think it was acceptable behavior on the part of the committing the crime.
I mean, it's stupid to keep your car doors unlocked in big cities, and if someone's car was stolen in those circumstances I'd felt they sorta have themselves to blame...but the car thief should still go to jail. Easy crimes are still crimes.
Exactly, you managed to phrase it exactly the right way. Attorneys should not be able to select who is on their jury, they should only be able to decide who isn't.
Each should get one, maybe two, random no-explanation objections.
Jointly, they should be able to strike as many people as they want. Sometimes you get nutters raving about aliens and whatnot.
And finally, they should be able to strike as many people for specific reasons. Like 'Convicted of this exact crime before' and whatnot. (Although as many as possible of those people should be excluded from the pool or that specific case in advance with a questionnaire.
Jury selection, at this point, is as much a part of the trial as anything else, and it's half the reason that high-priced lawyers, who do very careful selection, tend to win cases, and court-appointed lawyers, who do the bare minimum, do not.
And, like many people, I've never been called for jury duty, despite the fact I've been registered to vote for almost a decade. I would enjoy doing it if they gave me an actual case, but I'd hate it if they just kept calling me into courtrooms, asking questions, and letting me go.
the missing e-mails have nothing to do with nefarious scheming
By itself, that might be a sane assumption...but when you consider their other email problem, specifically, that they conducted government business over the RNC's computer to avoid leaving tracks, well, no. It's pretty clearly an obvious plan to avoid any record of what they do.
FYI, some of the email was never recovered, for pretty much the same reason as today.
Even if that's what happened (And it's not.), that doesn't change that fact that the WH decided to use RNC computers to avoid any trace at all.
That was actually a system problem that, rather importantly, did not ultimately result in any lost email.
Read it carefully, it says the backup wasn't storing email 'properly', whatever that means. I suspect format problems, the email system at the time was using a VAX. So they couldn't just 'restore' the email, they had to munge it to make it usable in whatever format Congress thought it was supposed to be in.
But in the end, all the email was recovered after a few months.
It is rather funny to read Republican complaints about a delay of months in turning over email in an investigation about Hillary Clinton possibly lying about firing people in the WH travel office, who are part of the WH staff and can be fired at will.
The WH claimed there were financial irregularities and that the FBI confirmed it, the people were quite correctly fired. The right claimed the Clintons made it up so family friends could take over or some really stupid nonsense, and used the FBI 'improperly'. The whole investigation was a precursor to Blowjobgate, where the Republicans do a bunch of investigating, throw wild accusations around, found nothing wrong, and finally get someone (Hillary, in this case) to state something (That she didn't have a lot to do with it.) and then investigate her for perjury. At worse, it was a little bit of attempted nepotism and then denial of said attempted nepotism...that showed up after it was realized that the WH travel office had been 'skimming'. Along with a bit of an overreaction of mass firing by the Clinton administration, which it corrected by rehiring the innocent people.
Yet the GOP is now blithely accepting the total loss of emails in an investigation of the politicalization of the justice department, which is, if not illegal, at least worth investigating, unlike some supposed issues in the WH travel office. And constantly refusing to investigate anyone for lying to Congress, which the Bush WH has done so repeatedly. (The most obvious, but not only, time is in the lead-up to Iraq, and it's worth noting lying during the State of the Union counts as lying to Congress.) And refusing to investigate nepotism and conflicts of interests, of which the current Administration has a lot more.
This is all getting silly. The way to backup government data is the way it's always been done: Operate competent IT departments.
The fact the Bush WH switched companies to ones that mysteriously did not make backups, and used the RNC email to operate entirely outside the law, is not a problem with the system. The problem with the system is that Congress did not impeach the lot of them when this was revealed. (The lack of impeachment is, in fact, the only current problem with the system.)
At least this administration hasn't had the FBI files of the opposing party "somehow" appear in the White House.
No, it's just wiretapped unknown phones and emails, for years, in violation of the law. Phones and emails that could trivially include the opposition party. The difference is, unlike the Clinton Whitehouse which operated in the open and within the laws allowing oversight, the Bush Whitehouse does not. Hence, the Clinton WH was caught.
And you probably want those same people to manage our health care!
Republicans: Proving, as they do every time they're in office, that the government is completely incompetent, intrusive, uncaring, and criminal, exactly like they've been saying. It's almost magic!
See, the thing is, we don't want Republicans managing health care either. (Of course, in actuality, we want doctors managing health care, and the government paying them for their services.)
They won't only not do that, their 'search' is checking your browser history and searching for all images, some of which they look at randomly.
It is possibly the stupidest 'search' in the history of mankind. Forget encryption, you can defeat it by clearing browser cache and compressing porn into a zip file and then renaming it so Windows won't search it.
Or, you know, keeping the stuff you want hidden on a frickin thumbdrive.
It's 'How to catch really stupid pedophiles'.
Most of the people who think Congress is doing a good job are Republicans, oddly enough. Statistically, Republicans hate just the Democrats in Congress, whereas the Democrats started off hating the Republicans but now hate the Democrats also.
And cables don't do crap. If you've never broken out the tabs that hold them... let's just say the slots aren't particularly secure. And the cables themselves can be cut even more easily, locks picked, etc.
The point of cables is to stop someone from grabbing your laptop and sprinting out the door of the coffee shop, not to secure it when you're not there.