Ahhhh, but neither the UN nor NATO are in the US Constitution
Oh, and before you try to say that they both involve treaties and treaties ARE in the Constitution.... Treaties do NOT trump our Constitution. Only the Congress has the Constitutional power to declare wars, and only congress has the power to allocate funds for wars. The President's "Commander in Chief" role was never meant to make him some sort of full-time military dictator, it was meant to mean that the buck stopped with him during Congressionally authorized and funded military actions; he's the commander and makes the decisions during hostilities. The nation realized in the post-WWII reality that enemies might attack and there might not be time to Consult congress, so we have all tolerated a bit of wiggle in the rules to say that the president can act without Congressional approval to deal with an actual or imminent attack. This was finally codified in the War Powers Act in the 70s. While every President since the act was passed has said he disagrees with the act and believes it unconstitutional, every one of them has never-the-less complied with the act.... up until Obamessiah. Nope. Barry don't play by them rulez. In fact, Obama has thus far refused to even tell the congress where he is getting the money to pay for Libya!!!! Congress never gave him any money for the action, and they have demanded to know where he is getting the money, the contractors are getting paid for the munitions, fuel, spare parts and so-on and the troops are getting their pay. For all any of us knows, Obama just has his tax-cheat treasury secretary printing funny money and paying with that.
Everything Bush said to congress in the famous/infamous speech was true.
Bush did NOT say Saddam had WMDs... he said that allied intelligence services were telling the US that Saddam had them (and this was absolutely true) If Bush had had those reports on his desk and decided not to act on them and then a US city was attacked, liberals would have been the first people to scream for his prosecution and they would have screamed that he was and idiot for not acting.
The fact that US and allied intelligence agencies were in error on the WMD claim does not, by some retroactive method make Bush a liar. In fact, Saddam had clearly intended that the world believe he had WMDs and he was apparently quite successful with his propaganda. Kinda ironic that he pushed that lie so hard in the hopes that the world would believe him... so the world believed him and attacked him for it. He did it to himself.
This same idiotic talking point keeps arising and it needs to be answered
1. Clinton pushed for and signed into law a bill that said that any woman who accused a man of sexual harassment could drag his butt into court and force him to testify under oath about his entire sexual history. Clinton did this as part of getting the "women's vote". Under this law, and average American man who, being dragged into court this way and asked about sexual matters decides to lie, can be convicted and jailed for perjury
2. Clinton was accused of sexual harrassment, and the woman who did it used his law to drag him into court and force him to testify about his sexual history in hopes that she could use that history to establish a pattern of behaviour
3. Clinton (at that time, the nation's highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, and also still a lawyer and member of the bar) lied under oath in that case (violating the very law he signed and that he would have happily applied to every other American man). Clinton and his advisors count on the idea that stupid men will think about their desire for sex with anything that moves and no questions being asked about it, and they know that these stupid men will side with Clinton. Smart men noticed that Clinton set them all up and applied a new set of unbalanced rules to them, but wiggled out of them himself with the use of his political power...and having escaped jail time he did not have an epiphany and say "golly that law was a bad idea! No man should face that! Let's repeal that law!" nope. He left that law in place and if you are a man, you could some day be bitten by it even if you have done nothing wrong.
4. Clinton then used his government position and power to have others lie to protect him in an attempt to limit the political damage (just as Nixon tried to use his power to coverup a break-in to limit political damage)
The concept that Clinton was impeached for "lying about sex" was a narrative advanced by the Clinton political team, and people who keep repeating it just show that they are part of the gullible portion of the population that the narrative was designed to influence rather than being a part of the public that actually paid attention to the details
Nice try. Yes, the world's whack jobs blame the US for all the deaths in Iraq, but sane people blame the actual killers, most of whom were either Iraqis or foreign fighters who entered the Iraq theater to join the jihad. Those fake left-wing tripe statistics you cite are completely bogus. They include many deaths that would have happened even had the US never invaded, they include hostiles the US killed after those hostiles attacked US forces, or the iraqi government or even civilians. Those numbers also fail to account for the number of people Sadam would have continued to kill had he been left in power. Additionally, Iraq transitioned into a civil war as various groups sought to take advantage of the chaos to advance their own agendas which were completely unrelated to the US actions. In this Iraqi civil war, most casualties were Iraqis (who were on both sides of the fight) just as in the US civil war which produced a frightful number of US casualties...that's just a trait of civil wars. In every case, the actual trigger-puller has the ability to choose whether to pull the trigger... so the Iraqis who chose to wage that civil war are responsible for their own actions.
when it comes to aggressive wars, it is absolutely reasonable to blame the aggressor for all the war dead, even those killed by the enemy, because without the aggressive war none of those people would have died
Ok, so Saddam is the one responsible: Saddam was the one who rolled into Kuwait igniting the gulf war, which ended not with a peace treaty but rather with a cease-fire agreement which included certain terms. Saddam then flagrantly violated the terms of that treaty for a dozen years which effectively nullified the cease-fire and technically legitimated ANY military response by the US and its allies ( a point the Bush administration made in the lead-up to the war, but most people fixated on the WMD claim ) I presume you will also agree then that all middle east casualties since 1948 have been caused by the muslims??? (they all joined together and attacked Israel and all the fighting since has been part of that same struggle...so by left-wing reckoning all deaths in the region, even from illness, are the fault of the countries who rolled their tanks against Israel)
The point I'm trying to make is that the US has responded to a terrorist act of death and destruction by indiscriminately raining down death and destruction a hundred or thousand-fold on innocent Iraqis
This is not a point, it is a bold-faced lie. As a vet, I find it extremely offensive. Yes, out of hundreds of thousands of Americans who have deployed there have been a few bad apples (a tiny percent) who have violated the rules of war and generally have been prosecuted for it by the US government, but as a general rule, American soldiers often put themselves in increased danger when they must in order to lessen the chances of harming civilians. Very few armed forces in world history (the British, the Australians, and the Israelis come to mind) have have shown such concern for the civilians on the other side in war. Name the date time and place where American policy was to "indiscriminately raining down death and destruction" on innocent Iraqis
If they bombed the US with drones would it be okay because it isn't "hostile"?
If they did this to us, it would indeed be an act of war, just as it is an act of war when we do it to others. Obama is in fact dragging the country into numerous illegal and undeclared wars, whereas Bush got permission from congress for his two wars. Obama is a leftist, so the ends justify the means and his words mean nothing more or less than what he means them to mean rather than what some stuffy old dictionary might say. You must be one of those nasty evil conservatives who think words have consistent meanings. Duh. Get a life. Move On dot org and all that. This is the 21st century now, so anything republicans do is evil and anything progressives do is cool! What is done is not what's important, it's who's doing it that counts! Obama is a demigod and everything he does is great! a red-and-blue poster told me so!
Just close your eyes and repeat "hope and change" "hope and change" over and over again and soon you will feel all warm and fuzzy inside... you might even get a thrill up your leg like Chris Mathews at NBC, or... you could learn a lesson and never again fall for an empty suit with a content-free slogan. You could even realize that when somebody has never done anything productive in his life and his only government experience consists of repeated votes of "abstain" in a legislature, he probably has no rudder and he may lack commitment to anything other than himself
BTW: That waterboarding == torture thing was part of the propaganda campaign that got you ready to support Obama; The US military has regularly waterboarded certain groups of its own personnel over the years as part of their training, and a number of left-leaning journalists had themselves waterboarded as part of their organized anti-Bush campaign. When is the last time a journalist had somebody poke out his eyes, break his bones, shove bamboo under his fingernails, burst his eardrums, dislocate his shoulders, or rig a car battery to his genitals??????? (well, ok, I admit there are probably a few journalists who would be up for that last one.... but generally speaking, journalists do not pay people to perform real acts of torture on them)
Hillary is an integral part of this administration! Hillary is part of the reason Obummer is using drones AND claiming the use of them is not military action. The fools in this amateur-hour show simultaneously want to be tough but they lack the guts to put troops on the ground. They want to go after the terrorists so they don't appear weak, but they have ruled-out putting any they capture into Gitmo, or overseas prisons, and they know congress will not allow them to import terrorists into the civilian system... so they go for the easy answer: kill them by remote control from drones. The administration knows it would lose a debate in congress, so it claims that no war is involved and it does not need congressional approval. Wake up! Hillary would do the same thing! She's in this up to her eyebrows!
There is no evidence that religious people in middle America are unwilling to pay for science or oppose the purchase and launch of weather satellites. Indeed, middle America happily paid for the Apollo moon program and took great pride in it. Many of the people who worked on the moonshot were religious from the lowest-level technicians working on hardware to the actual astronauts who took the journey. Did you realize how many of this nation's astronauts come from "fly-over country"??? Furthermore, much of the most-important science the modern world is built upon was produced by religious Christians and Jews. Does the name "Newton" ring a bell? Ever actually read the actual words of Kepler? (hint: he was religious so you probably think he was an idiot) Copernicus should also receive your disdain, I presume, given his position in the Catholic Church... Even the concept of "the big bang" was championed by a Christian and opposed by many secular scientists for years (because they were opposed to any theory that implied the universe had an origin). Try a little reading, you might be amazed at the things you can learn.
On the other hand, the anti-religious quack Holdren who is currently Obama's science advisor seems quite happy to destroy scientific and engineering activities at NOAA and NASA... and remember that He and Obama are the ones deciding on the allocation of the Funds congress provides... Not one single religious taxpayer in middle America has had any involvement in the policy decisions that have led to where we are now with the nation's weather satellites; these decisions are all being made in big cites on the coasts where people tend to be less religious. Anybody who wants to be seen as a champion of reason needs to do more than just attack religious people; he needs to actually deploy a little reason.
First, NOAA and NASA have developed a terrible institutional disease: they seek to put the newest most-cutting-edge sensors on every new probe. This means every new satellite is a handmade custom unit and it suffers from cost overruns and schedule slips as new technology encounters the inevitable development problems. It's nice to have better sensors, but let's face it.... we the taxpayers would have been better served if they had set-up an assembly line of the exact satellites we've been using, built a good production run of them (getting the production benefits of an assembly line) and then just pulled one from storage and launched it whenever one failed. We also would likely have been happy if NASA had built a dozen little Mars rovers like Opportunity and sent them to Mars at regular intervals to explore various regions. Instead, we watch as a perfectly good design has worked for years longer than predicted on Mars and now we will watch with trepidation as they launch the new billion-dollar boondoggle they're currently prepping. We will cross our fingers as it attempts to land.... and we will be angry and there will be investigations and recriminations if this hyper-expensive one-off rover fails.
Second, governments at all levels become arrogant and they like to lash-out at the taxpayers and voters when the people begin to complain about money. When a town has financial problems, it is far more likely to lay-off cops and firemen than administrators. When a state has tight budgets, the teachers, prisons, and parks are on the chopping block. When the feds are in trouble, the space program and weather satellites are threatened.... In each case, the government officials take an action that threatens the safety or national pride of the citizens in order to try to scare enough taxpayers into saying "ok, raise our taxes!" and they'll go right on building bridges to nowhere, tunnels for turtles, treadmills for shrimp, etc. and they'll keep sending billions every year to other countries that hate us....
Revenue to government in the US almost always rises. It rose through the eighties when Reagan cut taxes (unfortunately, congress increased spending faster than the revenue increases), money continued to flow into government during the Bush41, Clinton, and Bush43 years. Clinton grew the govenment faster than inflation, Bush43 grew it even faster in the aftermath of 9-11 as he created DHS and implemented Medicare part-D. Even under Obama, funds flowing into Washington are higher still (in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars) but government has grown even faster. The problem is that year-after-year politicians spend faster and faster and they scream about all the terrible things that will happen if we try to limit them. The politicians are usually not honest about the numbers, often claiming revenues have fallen when what has actually happened is that revenues have risen slower than the politicians expected and therefore have fallen short of expectations. Incidentally, there ARE places where revenue has actually fallen like California (where tax policy is so "progressive" that the upper-classes pay far more than their fair share... which seems to work wonders during boom times, but this backfires during economic downturns when many of those people see sharp income drops. During such drops, the upper classes stay comfortable atop their assets, but their income falls and hence their taxes plummet)
Government is incapable of rational action. Some activists/lobbyists push a policy (like banning real light bulbs) either because they have some utopian dreams or they stand to profit from the action, and meanwhile other parts of the government are warning of the hazards that will result. In the real-world, some rational cost-benefits analysis would occur and a rational path would be selected, but in government you simply write more rules for all the "little people" (anybody who pays taxes and has no lobbyist or leader) in "fly-over country" (everything between LA and NYC) and establish new agencies with lots of new employees to enforce the rules and warn people that what you are forcing them to do is stupid
Just take a look at what the EPA expects you to do if you break one of these super-deluxe wunder-bulbs: http://epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.html
Government's role is to set the standard, in this case, so many lumen per watt, or however they want to word it, and then let the industry innovate the best technology to meet that goal.
No. Not in the U.S. There is no Constitutional role for the federal government to set standards... though through the decades our politicians have stretched the commerce clause to cover anything they want to do and to many this is more of a commerce issue than most things are. (note: when the founders wrote the commerce clause, they made it rather clear in their other writings that they meant the classic use of "regulate" as-in "to make regular" rather than the modern version as-in "write rules everybody must live by")
The states have always been free to do this sort of thing, which is why California is free to drive itself into bankruptcy with every loony lefty thing it wants to try and states like Nevada, Arizona and Texas are free to welcome all the fleeing businesses. That was part of the genius that America used to be; each state as a laboratory. If some state tries some new standard and it works amazingly well, then other states are free to adopt it themselves, but if some state tries some over-the-top experiment and fails miserably, then the damage is limited and the other states are spared. Before the nation-wide teachers unions got a strangle-hold on public education, Americans knew this stuff... now it's not in the political interests of the teachers to properly educate students in history and civics.
Sen. Enzi has interests in utilities and natural gas and coal mining. Can't imagine why he'd care if people used less energy-efficient lightbulbs.
Typical lefty sliming. OK, if that's fair, then let me point out the following: GE stands to make a massive pile of cash off of their sales of CFLs, and they lobbied the Obama admin on many "green" energy issues, they have a very cozy set of ties to the Democratic party and Obama and are the corporate parent of NBC and MSNBC who shill for the Obama admin. Does this mean that GE's or Obama's positions on these issues are suspect or are evidence of corruption?
Personally, I do not assign a presumption of corruption just because somebody's beliefs and policy positions line-up with their own interests (after all, many of us invest in things and advocate for things we believe in) however I think the public are entitled to know the potential conflicts of interest of everybody on both sides of such debates rather than having just one-side accused like this. Yes, somebody opposing CFLs might stand to profit from removing the ban.... and somebody else might stand to profit from imposing the ban.... But in a nation with freedom and liberty, should we not prefer to have no bans on anything unless the ban is the only reasonable way to prevent significant harm? The bigger problem here is that when governments become so big and so powerful that they freely tamper with everything, there will then appear people who see ways to use that interference as a way to make money for themselves (as GE will do from the imposition of the ban) In fact, some people and businesses will find that they can more-easily make profits by getting the governments to eliminate competing products or technologies, and erecting enough regulatory burdens (that big existing companies can devote the manpower to comply with but upstart businesses will be unable to afford to comply with)
If CFLs are truly superior, then no subsidies are needed and no bans are needed... market forces will prevail and people will move to them. Any time somebody has to force you to give up product A to get you to use a product B, you are already facing all the proof you need that product B is inferior. This is exactly like the electric car... if and when it is the superior solution, people will switch to it (like they switched from VCRs to DVDs and DVRs, or from horses to cars, or steamships to planes...) but if subsidies or bans are involved then the product being pushed is either not yet ready, not the right replacement.
Wrong. Environmental activists in California have already started to ramp-up for a war against LEDs. They are complaining that LEDs are far more toxic than CCFLs and they are pushing to have them re-classified as hazardous waste.
Yes, some of us complained for very good reasons; certain applications of CFCs had NO viable alternatives. For example, there was (and still is) no viable replacement for the CFCs used to extinquish in-flight fires in aircraft engines. Once the zealots realized that legislation cannot change the laws of physics, they had to re-authorize the production of CFCs for this application. Of course, now these particular CFCs are much more expensive since they have such limited use and such heavy regulation, but what's just a tiny little bit more drag on the economy? It's only a little more paperwork and regulation on aircraft engine makers, and aircraft makers, and airline operators, and people who refurbish and/or scrap aircraft, etc. All the pin-pricks of regulatory drag will never actually add-up to anything that people will ever notice... right?...all the thousands of similar regs are having absolutely no impact on the economy and raising no hurdles to bar entry of new small businesses into various industries, right?
Many organiations prefer to have all systems running the same OS....... and even MS admits that many businesses see XP as the best and most stable version of Windows (it runs everything they need to run, runs on their hardware, and they are familiar with it) Many organizations avoided Vista and are taking a cautious approach to Win7. No conspiracy required to understand this
Or better yet, avoid running a double-decked stacked mess of problems....just drop the Linux part, and the virtual machine part, and run a clean copy of windows!
[begin sad sigh] The best solution would be to fix all the usability and compatibility issues with Linux so that Bill Gates would be saying "well, they could still run My Windows thingy in a VM on top of Linux...." [end sad sigh]
I wrote an article about this in 2005. Basically, the MS hegemony meant people learned where to click things, rather than what they do and the concepts behind them.
um, Hello, Mc Fly! average people who are just using computers as a tool to achieve some other primary task should only need to learn where to click things to quickly and easily achieve their desired ends. If you expect them to learn "what [those things] do and the concepts behind them" then you have confused end-users with geeks, hackers, programmers etc. and you will never understand why Micro$oft dominates the desktop.....sadly, this attitude will only help Micro$oft keep their death-grip on the average user.
Or maybe they just got tired of a bunch of unexplained problems, no documentation, no support, etc. and decided they were better-off in Widows land. If you have not had a bunch of problems with Linux, you are either a geek or you are not using Linux as a tool in some other, primary, activity. Dreaming of conspiracies may make you feel better, but it does not fix any problems and it will not get Linux onto one additional desktop.
missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability all sound like the complaints I've heard from users when asked to use a different system
They are also complaints you hear from people who are being told to use a product that has missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability
Rule #1: The customer is always right.
Rule #2: when Linux supporters say the customer/user is wrong, see rule #1
Many in the Linux community are more to the left on the political scale, so it is expected that they would see what you have typed as "political" and not a sign that anything other than the politicians need fixing...... but let me encourage you to think a bit differently about it and examine it from a different perspective:
It just might be that the more left-wing pols are more-inclined to "causes"...... and things like Linux and open-source are "causes" so they are more-willing to tolerate related problems as growing pains, or the usual fits and starts associated with grass-roots efforts. It also might be that the more right-wing pols tend to be more used to business, where the general rule is that you buy the tools that work......you expect the products you use to get the job done..... and you fire the people and drop the systems that do not.
In other words, rather than seeking comfort from a "political" explanation, the Linux community needs to face the issues, get the details on exactly what issues are driving the change......and fix the problems. The best solution would be to find out what the problems were and not just fix them, but think of solutions that make the Linux way of doing things far better (from the end-user-experience pov) than the Windows way. Unfortunately, having failed on the desktop there, Linux will have to be much better in the future to even get another chance.
And what if you are an organization that owns hundreds (or thousands) of a printer that Linux does not support? What if you listened to all the pro-Linux hype on the glorious inter-tubes-webby-thing and switched to that Linux thingy only to be told by your mid-level people that you have hundreds of scanners that are not supported, and hundreds of each of four different printers, three types of which are totally unsupported, while the fourth type prints some documents properly but screws-up others? And what if your mid-level people tried to install a new office app to help integrate an important activity on all your low-level employee desktops across your entire enterprise, but they came to you and told you that setting up the app up on one system takes two hours and the process needs to be duplicated across 10,000 machines?
The entire attitude of the Linux community on matters like this is wrong. If something is a problem for the end-user, then it is a problem with Linux that needs to be fixed. All too frequently, the response of the Linux community to an end-user issue is to suggest some work-around...... it comes-off like a used car salesman who, having conned a person into buying a clunker, and being confronted with the fact that the car's air conditioning does not work, cheerfully suggests that there's a wrench in the glove box that the user can use to grasp the shaft that would normally host a knob and turn it many times to roll-down the window.
What follows will look like flamebait from a troll to anybody who wants to ignore the truth, but if the situation is ever going to improve, all of us who use Linux and want it to succeed need to stop ignoring reality. Linux users need to learn to take criticism properly. The simple fact is that for most non-geeks, Linux sucks (I have been using it for years and my business runs almost entirely on Linux, but even I find it almost more trouble than it's worth). If the end user has a problem with Linux, the proper response is to say "wow, we need to better understand the users and we need to fix these problems" rather than posting hostile messages on the web (not saying your particular post was hostile, but it often happens when people complain about Linux) that accuse users of being stupid, or posting responses to cries for help that amount to "RTFM!" or "use the force, read the source!"
You ask "what doesn't CUPS support these days?", and I say: all but one of the printers my business uses, and support for that one is flaky..... and why should I need one of the worst applications ever written (CUPS) anyway? I dare you to setup a PC with Linux and CUPS and then ask your parents to do something important with it. Odds are, they'll get frustrated and give up without ever getting a single page out of the printer. If they ever have to add a new printer, they'll never succeed. It's a clumbsy, non-obvious pile of junk that has a non-intuitive user interface. Printing in Linux simply stinks; half the time you get blank pages, or pages of garbage ASCII characters instead of the nice output that any idiot can get from Windows or a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. No average PC user thinks of firing up a web browser and entering a raw IP address into the URL line to get at the printer controls. In Windows, it's very easy to setup, control, and use printers. In Linux, printing appears to be an after-thought that was quickly hacked-in under extreme schedule pressure with the user interface being setup through the web browser because it was quick and easy for the programmers.
Linux audio similarly sucks (can we please have a single standard programming interface that supports both open- and closed-source applications equally well?!?!?!, scanners suck too (Sane was a good first try.... ten years ago). Have an all-in-one scanner-printer unit? Odds are you'll have troubles. The nearly religious fanaticism for "open" code is only making things worse.... I have nvidia cards in most of my systems and use the nvidia binary drivers (they work and make the Linux boxes every bit as good as any windows box for our custom in-house cad software) but now new Linux distros insist on including crappy open-source nvidia drivers and making it hard to use the good binary drivers from nvidia! Why? Was it because there was no way to make both options easy? Nah, apparently just because some jerks appear to have decided that "open" did not just mean free and open code shipped with Linux, but that actual hostility to non-open code was to be encouraged. When we upgraded some systems and ran into this issue, we had to waste a bunch of time spelunking on the internet trying to find the solution (why did we even have to look? adding support for the new drivers, even as the default, should not have made the newer Linux release even harder to use than a previous release for people who need the closed drivers) That just does not fly for end users, no matter how happy (in an obnoxious "my way or the highway" sense) it might make some coders with an open source purity test complex.
Maybe the Germans needed to add an app to some desktops. In Windows land, you stick an installer for the app on the machine, wait a few moments and you are ready to roll. In Linux land, you might get a tarball or RPM, stick it on the machine, find that there are 5942 dependency issues, you need 3 hours with a high-speed net connection to download and patch everything, need to change compiler versions, need to update glibc, need to update the Kernel, nee
1. A soldier hunts-down and murders innocent women and children. When the war is over and he is tried for war crimes he says "I LOVE women and children, I was just following orders!"
2. A Lawyer works to free a murderer who then goes on to kill more innocent women and children. When asked later, the lawyer says "I hated the guy, I was just vigorously defending my client's interest!"
3. A Lawyer who helps an evil regime justify genocide by finding legal loopholes later says "I oppose genocide, I was just serving my client (the state)"
What is the result in each of the above and why should the lawyers be viewed any differently from the soldier? Human beings have a remarkable capacity to find ways to justify personal support for evil, and sometimes even personal profit from that evil. The legal profession has perfected this human flaw. Take any side you can on any available case if that's what suits you and you can make some more dirty money doing it, but don't think everyone will respect you for such moral recklessness just because your profession has a self-serving slogan. If you are defending a murderer, face up to it and admit that you are advocating for a murderer. Do not dare to presume to be morally equivalent to the lawyer who is is prosecuting the murderer. BTW: I realize that some highly-educated lawyers are actually so dumb that they are fooled by their dumb uneducated clients......but the lawyers in the Arizona shooting case, for example, cannot possibly even pretend to think that the murders did not happen or that the cops got the wrong guy. Any decent lawyer can get off of a case (quit, arrange to get fired, etc) if he or she finds it sufficiently objectionable, so we the public are free to draw certain conclusions if a lawyer sticks with a particular side of a particular case.
Only a man with no soul can take either side of an argument when a matter of morals or principles is on the line.
Keep getting your news from Jon Stewart, Kos and HuffPo if you like, but your ignorance is astounding
She has spoken on the 10th ammendment and understands it very well
Palin never said she could see Russia from her house... People who think she did are outing themselves as people who get their news from Saturday Night Live. Palin said that Russia can be seen from Alaska (something I have personally observed) as a way to indicate that the governor of Alaska cannot be completely unaware of international matters because Alaska's proximity to Russia and shared waterways mean that issues related reach the governor's desk (as happens in other border states).
She did not draw crosshairs on ANYBODY. Her campaign put out a map with crosshairs on congressional districts JUST like the Democrats used bullseyes to mark congressional districts on the map THEY put out
Yes, when a crazy guy who was not a follower of hers and did not see her map shot somebody and all the liberal media outlets in the country accused her of being involved (Which is in fact a blood libel by the old definition.... people said "The Jews killed Jesus!" in order to damage the reputation of Jews by associating them with the death of a popular figure) she is in fact being vicitimized. If all the media outlets in the country started blaming you for the bombing at the Russian airport, because you posted something on the net (even though there is evidence of other motives and no evidence anything you posted was ever read by the murderer) you too would be a victim of a "blood libel".
She could easily have completed her time as governor, but the Democrats who hate her with such venom kept filing baseless ethics charges in Alaska which were taking lots of time and costing state taxpayers lots of money. She made her reasons for leaving very clear. The taxpayers of Alaska have been spared a lot of money and her opponents were caught off guard by the move. Was it the best move? Who knows given the circumstances.....but I bet you have never even managed half a term as governor, so I guess by your standards you are more vapid, incurious, etc than she is.
You libs need a new line of attack that involves facts and reality....monkeys fling poo, people should engage in actual discussions
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhhh, but neither the UN nor NATO are in the US Constitution
Oh, and before you try to say that they both involve treaties and treaties ARE in the Constitution.... Treaties do NOT trump our Constitution. Only the Congress has the Constitutional power to declare wars, and only congress has the power to allocate funds for wars. The President's "Commander in Chief" role was never meant to make him some sort of full-time military dictator, it was meant to mean that the buck stopped with him during Congressionally authorized and funded military actions; he's the commander and makes the decisions during hostilities. The nation realized in the post-WWII reality that enemies might attack and there might not be time to Consult congress, so we have all tolerated a bit of wiggle in the rules to say that the president can act without Congressional approval to deal with an actual or imminent attack. This was finally codified in the War Powers Act in the 70s. While every President since the act was passed has said he disagrees with the act and believes it unconstitutional, every one of them has never-the-less complied with the act.... up until Obamessiah. Nope. Barry don't play by them rulez. In fact, Obama has thus far refused to even tell the congress where he is getting the money to pay for Libya!!!! Congress never gave him any money for the action, and they have demanded to know where he is getting the money, the contractors are getting paid for the munitions, fuel, spare parts and so-on and the troops are getting their pay. For all any of us knows, Obama just has his tax-cheat treasury secretary printing funny money and paying with that.
More leftist tripe
Everything Bush said to congress in the famous/infamous speech was true.
Bush did NOT say Saddam had WMDs... he said that allied intelligence services were telling the US that Saddam had them (and this was absolutely true) If Bush had had those reports on his desk and decided not to act on them and then a US city was attacked, liberals would have been the first people to scream for his prosecution and they would have screamed that he was and idiot for not acting.
The fact that US and allied intelligence agencies were in error on the WMD claim does not, by some retroactive method make Bush a liar. In fact, Saddam had clearly intended that the world believe he had WMDs and he was apparently quite successful with his propaganda. Kinda ironic that he pushed that lie so hard in the hopes that the world would believe him... so the world believed him and attacked him for it. He did it to himself.
Saddam is the one who lied the world into a war
This same idiotic talking point keeps arising and it needs to be answered
1. Clinton pushed for and signed into law a bill that said that any woman who accused a man of sexual harassment could drag his butt into court and force him to testify under oath about his entire sexual history. Clinton did this as part of getting the "women's vote". Under this law, and average American man who, being dragged into court this way and asked about sexual matters decides to lie, can be convicted and jailed for perjury
2. Clinton was accused of sexual harrassment, and the woman who did it used his law to drag him into court and force him to testify about his sexual history in hopes that she could use that history to establish a pattern of behaviour
3. Clinton (at that time, the nation's highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, and also still a lawyer and member of the bar) lied under oath in that case (violating the very law he signed and that he would have happily applied to every other American man). Clinton and his advisors count on the idea that stupid men will think about their desire for sex with anything that moves and no questions being asked about it, and they know that these stupid men will side with Clinton. Smart men noticed that Clinton set them all up and applied a new set of unbalanced rules to them, but wiggled out of them himself with the use of his political power...and having escaped jail time he did not have an epiphany and say "golly that law was a bad idea! No man should face that! Let's repeal that law!" nope. He left that law in place and if you are a man, you could some day be bitten by it even if you have done nothing wrong.
4. Clinton then used his government position and power to have others lie to protect him in an attempt to limit the political damage (just as Nixon tried to use his power to coverup a break-in to limit political damage)
The concept that Clinton was impeached for "lying about sex" was a narrative advanced by the Clinton political team, and people who keep repeating it just show that they are part of the gullible portion of the population that the narrative was designed to influence rather than being a part of the public that actually paid attention to the details
the US has killed hundreds of thousands
Nice try. Yes, the world's whack jobs blame the US for all the deaths in Iraq, but sane people blame the actual killers, most of whom were either Iraqis or foreign fighters who entered the Iraq theater to join the jihad. Those fake left-wing tripe statistics you cite are completely bogus. They include many deaths that would have happened even had the US never invaded, they include hostiles the US killed after those hostiles attacked US forces, or the iraqi government or even civilians. Those numbers also fail to account for the number of people Sadam would have continued to kill had he been left in power. Additionally, Iraq transitioned into a civil war as various groups sought to take advantage of the chaos to advance their own agendas which were completely unrelated to the US actions. In this Iraqi civil war, most casualties were Iraqis (who were on both sides of the fight) just as in the US civil war which produced a frightful number of US casualties...that's just a trait of civil wars. In every case, the actual trigger-puller has the ability to choose whether to pull the trigger... so the Iraqis who chose to wage that civil war are responsible for their own actions.
when it comes to aggressive wars, it is absolutely reasonable to blame the aggressor for all the war dead, even those killed by the enemy, because without the aggressive war none of those people would have died
Ok, so Saddam is the one responsible: Saddam was the one who rolled into Kuwait igniting the gulf war, which ended not with a peace treaty but rather with a cease-fire agreement which included certain terms. Saddam then flagrantly violated the terms of that treaty for a dozen years which effectively nullified the cease-fire and technically legitimated ANY military response by the US and its allies ( a point the Bush administration made in the lead-up to the war, but most people fixated on the WMD claim ) I presume you will also agree then that all middle east casualties since 1948 have been caused by the muslims??? (they all joined together and attacked Israel and all the fighting since has been part of that same struggle...so by left-wing reckoning all deaths in the region, even from illness, are the fault of the countries who rolled their tanks against Israel)
The point I'm trying to make is that the US has responded to a terrorist act of death and destruction by indiscriminately raining down death and destruction a hundred or thousand-fold on innocent Iraqis
This is not a point, it is a bold-faced lie. As a vet, I find it extremely offensive. Yes, out of hundreds of thousands of Americans who have deployed there have been a few bad apples (a tiny percent) who have violated the rules of war and generally have been prosecuted for it by the US government, but as a general rule, American soldiers often put themselves in increased danger when they must in order to lessen the chances of harming civilians. Very few armed forces in world history (the British, the Australians, and the Israelis come to mind) have have shown such concern for the civilians on the other side in war. Name the date time and place where American policy was to "indiscriminately raining down death and destruction" on innocent Iraqis
If they bombed the US with drones would it be okay because it isn't "hostile"?
If they did this to us, it would indeed be an act of war, just as it is an act of war when we do it to others. Obama is in fact dragging the country into numerous illegal and undeclared wars, whereas Bush got permission from congress for his two wars. Obama is a leftist, so the ends justify the means and his words mean nothing more or less than what he means them to mean rather than what some stuffy old dictionary might say. You must be one of those nasty evil conservatives who think words have consistent meanings. Duh. Get a life. Move On dot org and all that. This is the 21st century now, so anything republicans do is evil and anything progressives do is cool! What is done is not what's important, it's who's doing it that counts! Obama is a demigod and everything he does is great! a red-and-blue poster told me so!
Just close your eyes and repeat "hope and change" "hope and change" over and over again and soon you will feel all warm and fuzzy inside... you might even get a thrill up your leg like Chris Mathews at NBC, or... you could learn a lesson and never again fall for an empty suit with a content-free slogan. You could even realize that when somebody has never done anything productive in his life and his only government experience consists of repeated votes of "abstain" in a legislature, he probably has no rudder and he may lack commitment to anything other than himself
BTW: That waterboarding == torture thing was part of the propaganda campaign that got you ready to support Obama; The US military has regularly waterboarded certain groups of its own personnel over the years as part of their training, and a number of left-leaning journalists had themselves waterboarded as part of their organized anti-Bush campaign. When is the last time a journalist had somebody poke out his eyes, break his bones, shove bamboo under his fingernails, burst his eardrums, dislocate his shoulders, or rig a car battery to his genitals??????? (well, ok, I admit there are probably a few journalists who would be up for that last one.... but generally speaking, journalists do not pay people to perform real acts of torture on them)
Ha Ha Ha
Hillary is an integral part of this administration! Hillary is part of the reason Obummer is using drones AND claiming the use of them is not military action. The fools in this amateur-hour show simultaneously want to be tough but they lack the guts to put troops on the ground. They want to go after the terrorists so they don't appear weak, but they have ruled-out putting any they capture into Gitmo, or overseas prisons, and they know congress will not allow them to import terrorists into the civilian system... so they go for the easy answer: kill them by remote control from drones. The administration knows it would lose a debate in congress, so it claims that no war is involved and it does not need congressional approval. Wake up! Hillary would do the same thing! She's in this up to her eyebrows!
There is no evidence that religious people in middle America are unwilling to pay for science or oppose the purchase and launch of weather satellites. Indeed, middle America happily paid for the Apollo moon program and took great pride in it. Many of the people who worked on the moonshot were religious from the lowest-level technicians working on hardware to the actual astronauts who took the journey. Did you realize how many of this nation's astronauts come from "fly-over country"??? Furthermore, much of the most-important science the modern world is built upon was produced by religious Christians and Jews. Does the name "Newton" ring a bell? Ever actually read the actual words of Kepler? (hint: he was religious so you probably think he was an idiot) Copernicus should also receive your disdain, I presume, given his position in the Catholic Church... Even the concept of "the big bang" was championed by a Christian and opposed by many secular scientists for years (because they were opposed to any theory that implied the universe had an origin). Try a little reading, you might be amazed at the things you can learn.
On the other hand, the anti-religious quack Holdren who is currently Obama's science advisor seems quite happy to destroy scientific and engineering activities at NOAA and NASA... and remember that He and Obama are the ones deciding on the allocation of the Funds congress provides... Not one single religious taxpayer in middle America has had any involvement in the policy decisions that have led to where we are now with the nation's weather satellites; these decisions are all being made in big cites on the coasts where people tend to be less religious. Anybody who wants to be seen as a champion of reason needs to do more than just attack religious people; he needs to actually deploy a little reason.
First, NOAA and NASA have developed a terrible institutional disease: they seek to put the newest most-cutting-edge sensors on every new probe. This means every new satellite is a handmade custom unit and it suffers from cost overruns and schedule slips as new technology encounters the inevitable development problems. It's nice to have better sensors, but let's face it.... we the taxpayers would have been better served if they had set-up an assembly line of the exact satellites we've been using, built a good production run of them (getting the production benefits of an assembly line) and then just pulled one from storage and launched it whenever one failed. We also would likely have been happy if NASA had built a dozen little Mars rovers like Opportunity and sent them to Mars at regular intervals to explore various regions. Instead, we watch as a perfectly good design has worked for years longer than predicted on Mars and now we will watch with trepidation as they launch the new billion-dollar boondoggle they're currently prepping. We will cross our fingers as it attempts to land.... and we will be angry and there will be investigations and recriminations if this hyper-expensive one-off rover fails.
Second, governments at all levels become arrogant and they like to lash-out at the taxpayers and voters when the people begin to complain about money. When a town has financial problems, it is far more likely to lay-off cops and firemen than administrators. When a state has tight budgets, the teachers, prisons, and parks are on the chopping block. When the feds are in trouble, the space program and weather satellites are threatened.... In each case, the government officials take an action that threatens the safety or national pride of the citizens in order to try to scare enough taxpayers into saying "ok, raise our taxes!" and they'll go right on building bridges to nowhere, tunnels for turtles, treadmills for shrimp, etc. and they'll keep sending billions every year to other countries that hate us....
Revenue to government in the US almost always rises. It rose through the eighties when Reagan cut taxes (unfortunately, congress increased spending faster than the revenue increases), money continued to flow into government during the Bush41, Clinton, and Bush43 years. Clinton grew the govenment faster than inflation, Bush43 grew it even faster in the aftermath of 9-11 as he created DHS and implemented Medicare part-D. Even under Obama, funds flowing into Washington are higher still (in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars) but government has grown even faster. The problem is that year-after-year politicians spend faster and faster and they scream about all the terrible things that will happen if we try to limit them. The politicians are usually not honest about the numbers, often claiming revenues have fallen when what has actually happened is that revenues have risen slower than the politicians expected and therefore have fallen short of expectations. Incidentally, there ARE places where revenue has actually fallen like California (where tax policy is so "progressive" that the upper-classes pay far more than their fair share... which seems to work wonders during boom times, but this backfires during economic downturns when many of those people see sharp income drops. During such drops, the upper classes stay comfortable atop their assets, but their income falls and hence their taxes plummet)
Government is incapable of rational action. Some activists/lobbyists push a policy (like banning real light bulbs) either because they have some utopian dreams or they stand to profit from the action, and meanwhile other parts of the government are warning of the hazards that will result. In the real-world, some rational cost-benefits analysis would occur and a rational path would be selected, but in government you simply write more rules for all the "little people" (anybody who pays taxes and has no lobbyist or leader) in "fly-over country" (everything between LA and NYC) and establish new agencies with lots of new employees to enforce the rules and warn people that what you are forcing them to do is stupid
Just take a look at what the EPA expects you to do if you break one of these super-deluxe wunder-bulbs: http://epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.html
Government's role is to set the standard, in this case, so many lumen per watt, or however they want to word it, and then let the industry innovate the best technology to meet that goal.
No. Not in the U.S. There is no Constitutional role for the federal government to set standards... though through the decades our politicians have stretched the commerce clause to cover anything they want to do and to many this is more of a commerce issue than most things are. (note: when the founders wrote the commerce clause, they made it rather clear in their other writings that they meant the classic use of "regulate" as-in "to make regular" rather than the modern version as-in "write rules everybody must live by")
The states have always been free to do this sort of thing, which is why California is free to drive itself into bankruptcy with every loony lefty thing it wants to try and states like Nevada, Arizona and Texas are free to welcome all the fleeing businesses. That was part of the genius that America used to be; each state as a laboratory. If some state tries some new standard and it works amazingly well, then other states are free to adopt it themselves, but if some state tries some over-the-top experiment and fails miserably, then the damage is limited and the other states are spared. Before the nation-wide teachers unions got a strangle-hold on public education, Americans knew this stuff... now it's not in the political interests of the teachers to properly educate students in history and civics.
Sen. Enzi has interests in utilities and natural gas and coal mining. Can't imagine why he'd care if people used less energy-efficient lightbulbs.
Typical lefty sliming. OK, if that's fair, then let me point out the following: GE stands to make a massive pile of cash off of their sales of CFLs, and they lobbied the Obama admin on many "green" energy issues, they have a very cozy set of ties to the Democratic party and Obama and are the corporate parent of NBC and MSNBC who shill for the Obama admin. Does this mean that GE's or Obama's positions on these issues are suspect or are evidence of corruption?
Personally, I do not assign a presumption of corruption just because somebody's beliefs and policy positions line-up with their own interests (after all, many of us invest in things and advocate for things we believe in) however I think the public are entitled to know the potential conflicts of interest of everybody on both sides of such debates rather than having just one-side accused like this. Yes, somebody opposing CFLs might stand to profit from removing the ban.... and somebody else might stand to profit from imposing the ban.... But in a nation with freedom and liberty, should we not prefer to have no bans on anything unless the ban is the only reasonable way to prevent significant harm? The bigger problem here is that when governments become so big and so powerful that they freely tamper with everything, there will then appear people who see ways to use that interference as a way to make money for themselves (as GE will do from the imposition of the ban) In fact, some people and businesses will find that they can more-easily make profits by getting the governments to eliminate competing products or technologies, and erecting enough regulatory burdens (that big existing companies can devote the manpower to comply with but upstart businesses will be unable to afford to comply with)
If CFLs are truly superior, then no subsidies are needed and no bans are needed... market forces will prevail and people will move to them. Any time somebody has to force you to give up product A to get you to use a product B, you are already facing all the proof you need that product B is inferior. This is exactly like the electric car... if and when it is the superior solution, people will switch to it (like they switched from VCRs to DVDs and DVRs, or from horses to cars, or steamships to planes...) but if subsidies or bans are involved then the product being pushed is either not yet ready, not the right replacement.
Wrong. Environmental activists in California have already started to ramp-up for a war against LEDs. They are complaining that LEDs are far more toxic than CCFLs and they are pushing to have them re-classified as hazardous waste.
Yes, some of us complained for very good reasons; certain applications of CFCs had NO viable alternatives. For example, there was (and still is) no viable replacement for the CFCs used to extinquish in-flight fires in aircraft engines. Once the zealots realized that legislation cannot change the laws of physics, they had to re-authorize the production of CFCs for this application. Of course, now these particular CFCs are much more expensive since they have such limited use and such heavy regulation, but what's just a tiny little bit more drag on the economy? It's only a little more paperwork and regulation on aircraft engine makers, and aircraft makers, and airline operators, and people who refurbish and/or scrap aircraft, etc. All the pin-pricks of regulatory drag will never actually add-up to anything that people will ever notice... right? ...all the thousands of similar regs are having absolutely no impact on the economy and raising no hurdles to bar entry of new small businesses into various industries, right?
Many organiations prefer to have all systems running the same OS....... and even MS admits that many businesses see XP as the best and most stable version of Windows (it runs everything they need to run, runs on their hardware, and they are familiar with it) Many organizations avoided Vista and are taking a cautious approach to Win7. No conspiracy required to understand this
Or better yet, avoid running a double-decked stacked mess of problems....just drop the Linux part, and the virtual machine part, and run a clean copy of windows!
[begin sad sigh] The best solution would be to fix all the usability and compatibility issues with Linux so that Bill Gates would be saying "well, they could still run My Windows thingy in a VM on top of Linux...." [end sad sigh]
I wrote an article about this in 2005. Basically, the MS hegemony meant people learned where to click things, rather than what they do and the concepts behind them.
um, Hello, Mc Fly! average people who are just using computers as a tool to achieve some other primary task should only need to learn where to click things to quickly and easily achieve their desired ends. If you expect them to learn "what [those things] do and the concepts behind them" then you have confused end-users with geeks, hackers, programmers etc. and you will never understand why Micro$oft dominates the desktop.....sadly, this attitude will only help Micro$oft keep their death-grip on the average user.
Or maybe they just got tired of a bunch of unexplained problems, no documentation, no support, etc. and decided they were better-off in Widows land. If you have not had a bunch of problems with Linux, you are either a geek or you are not using Linux as a tool in some other, primary, activity. Dreaming of conspiracies may make you feel better, but it does not fix any problems and it will not get Linux onto one additional desktop.
missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability all sound like the complaints I've heard from users when asked to use a different system
They are also complaints you hear from people who are being told to use a product that has missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability
Rule #1: The customer is always right.
Rule #2: when Linux supporters say the customer/user is wrong, see rule #1
Many in the Linux community are more to the left on the political scale, so it is expected that they would see what you have typed as "political" and not a sign that anything other than the politicians need fixing...... but let me encourage you to think a bit differently about it and examine it from a different perspective:
It just might be that the more left-wing pols are more-inclined to "causes"...... and things like Linux and open-source are "causes" so they are more-willing to tolerate related problems as growing pains, or the usual fits and starts associated with grass-roots efforts. It also might be that the more right-wing pols tend to be more used to business, where the general rule is that you buy the tools that work......you expect the products you use to get the job done..... and you fire the people and drop the systems that do not.
In other words, rather than seeking comfort from a "political" explanation, the Linux community needs to face the issues, get the details on exactly what issues are driving the change......and fix the problems. The best solution would be to find out what the problems were and not just fix them, but think of solutions that make the Linux way of doing things far better (from the end-user-experience pov) than the Windows way. Unfortunately, having failed on the desktop there, Linux will have to be much better in the future to even get another chance.
And what if you are an organization that owns hundreds (or thousands) of a printer that Linux does not support? What if you listened to all the pro-Linux hype on the glorious inter-tubes-webby-thing and switched to that Linux thingy only to be told by your mid-level people that you have hundreds of scanners that are not supported, and hundreds of each of four different printers, three types of which are totally unsupported, while the fourth type prints some documents properly but screws-up others? And what if your mid-level people tried to install a new office app to help integrate an important activity on all your low-level employee desktops across your entire enterprise, but they came to you and told you that setting up the app up on one system takes two hours and the process needs to be duplicated across 10,000 machines?
The entire attitude of the Linux community on matters like this is wrong. If something is a problem for the end-user, then it is a problem with Linux that needs to be fixed. All too frequently, the response of the Linux community to an end-user issue is to suggest some work-around...... it comes-off like a used car salesman who, having conned a person into buying a clunker, and being confronted with the fact that the car's air conditioning does not work, cheerfully suggests that there's a wrench in the glove box that the user can use to grasp the shaft that would normally host a knob and turn it many times to roll-down the window.
What follows will look like flamebait from a troll to anybody who wants to ignore the truth, but if the situation is ever going to improve, all of us who use Linux and want it to succeed need to stop ignoring reality. Linux users need to learn to take criticism properly. The simple fact is that for most non-geeks, Linux sucks (I have been using it for years and my business runs almost entirely on Linux, but even I find it almost more trouble than it's worth). If the end user has a problem with Linux, the proper response is to say "wow, we need to better understand the users and we need to fix these problems" rather than posting hostile messages on the web (not saying your particular post was hostile, but it often happens when people complain about Linux) that accuse users of being stupid, or posting responses to cries for help that amount to "RTFM!" or "use the force, read the source!"
You ask "what doesn't CUPS support these days?", and I say: all but one of the printers my business uses, and support for that one is flaky..... and why should I need one of the worst applications ever written (CUPS) anyway? I dare you to setup a PC with Linux and CUPS and then ask your parents to do something important with it. Odds are, they'll get frustrated and give up without ever getting a single page out of the printer. If they ever have to add a new printer, they'll never succeed. It's a clumbsy, non-obvious pile of junk that has a non-intuitive user interface. Printing in Linux simply stinks; half the time you get blank pages, or pages of garbage ASCII characters instead of the nice output that any idiot can get from Windows or a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. No average PC user thinks of firing up a web browser and entering a raw IP address into the URL line to get at the printer controls. In Windows, it's very easy to setup, control, and use printers. In Linux, printing appears to be an after-thought that was quickly hacked-in under extreme schedule pressure with the user interface being setup through the web browser because it was quick and easy for the programmers.
Linux audio similarly sucks (can we please have a single standard programming interface that supports both open- and closed-source applications equally well?!?!?!, scanners suck too (Sane was a good first try.... ten years ago). Have an all-in-one scanner-printer unit? Odds are you'll have troubles. The nearly religious fanaticism for "open" code is only making things worse.... I have nvidia cards in most of my systems and use the nvidia binary drivers (they work and make the Linux boxes every bit as good as any windows box for our custom in-house cad software) but now new Linux distros insist on including crappy open-source nvidia drivers and making it hard to use the good binary drivers from nvidia! Why? Was it because there was no way to make both options easy? Nah, apparently just because some jerks appear to have decided that "open" did not just mean free and open code shipped with Linux, but that actual hostility to non-open code was to be encouraged. When we upgraded some systems and ran into this issue, we had to waste a bunch of time spelunking on the internet trying to find the solution (why did we even have to look? adding support for the new drivers, even as the default, should not have made the newer Linux release even harder to use than a previous release for people who need the closed drivers) That just does not fly for end users, no matter how happy (in an obnoxious "my way or the highway" sense) it might make some coders with an open source purity test complex.
Maybe the Germans needed to add an app to some desktops. In Windows land, you stick an installer for the app on the machine, wait a few moments and you are ready to roll. In Linux land, you might get a tarball or RPM, stick it on the machine, find that there are 5942 dependency issues, you need 3 hours with a high-speed net connection to download and patch everything, need to change compiler versions, need to update glibc, need to update the Kernel, nee
Self-serving disingenuous drivel
Consider:
1. A soldier hunts-down and murders innocent women and children. When the war is over and he is tried for war crimes he says "I LOVE women and children, I was just following orders!"
2. A Lawyer works to free a murderer who then goes on to kill more innocent women and children. When asked later, the lawyer says "I hated the guy, I was just vigorously defending my client's interest!"
3. A Lawyer who helps an evil regime justify genocide by finding legal loopholes later says "I oppose genocide, I was just serving my client (the state)"
What is the result in each of the above and why should the lawyers be viewed any differently from the soldier? Human beings have a remarkable capacity to find ways to justify personal support for evil, and sometimes even personal profit from that evil. The legal profession has perfected this human flaw. Take any side you can on any available case if that's what suits you and you can make some more dirty money doing it, but don't think everyone will respect you for such moral recklessness just because your profession has a self-serving slogan. If you are defending a murderer, face up to it and admit that you are advocating for a murderer. Do not dare to presume to be morally equivalent to the lawyer who is is prosecuting the murderer. BTW: I realize that some highly-educated lawyers are actually so dumb that they are fooled by their dumb uneducated clients......but the lawyers in the Arizona shooting case, for example, cannot possibly even pretend to think that the murders did not happen or that the cops got the wrong guy. Any decent lawyer can get off of a case (quit, arrange to get fired, etc) if he or she finds it sufficiently objectionable, so we the public are free to draw certain conclusions if a lawyer sticks with a particular side of a particular case.
Only a man with no soul can take either side of an argument when a matter of morals or principles is on the line.
...idiots like Gore and Kerry, and evil men like Bin Laden and Hussein that got us 8 years of Bush.
Keep getting your news from Jon Stewart, Kos and HuffPo if you like, but your ignorance is astounding
She has spoken on the 10th ammendment and understands it very well
Palin never said she could see Russia from her house... People who think she did are outing themselves as people who get their news from Saturday Night Live. Palin said that Russia can be seen from Alaska (something I have personally observed) as a way to indicate that the governor of Alaska cannot be completely unaware of international matters because Alaska's proximity to Russia and shared waterways mean that issues related reach the governor's desk (as happens in other border states).
She did not draw crosshairs on ANYBODY. Her campaign put out a map with crosshairs on congressional districts JUST like the Democrats used bullseyes to mark congressional districts on the map THEY put out
Yes, when a crazy guy who was not a follower of hers and did not see her map shot somebody and all the liberal media outlets in the country accused her of being involved (Which is in fact a blood libel by the old definition.... people said "The Jews killed Jesus!" in order to damage the reputation of Jews by associating them with the death of a popular figure) she is in fact being vicitimized. If all the media outlets in the country started blaming you for the bombing at the Russian airport, because you posted something on the net (even though there is evidence of other motives and no evidence anything you posted was ever read by the murderer) you too would be a victim of a "blood libel".
She could easily have completed her time as governor, but the Democrats who hate her with such venom kept filing baseless ethics charges in Alaska which were taking lots of time and costing state taxpayers lots of money. She made her reasons for leaving very clear. The taxpayers of Alaska have been spared a lot of money and her opponents were caught off guard by the move. Was it the best move? Who knows given the circumstances.....but I bet you have never even managed half a term as governor, so I guess by your standards you are more vapid, incurious, etc than she is.
You libs need a new line of attack that involves facts and reality....monkeys fling poo, people should engage in actual discussions
...If you smoke pot you're a fool...
There, much better. The rest of what you wrote looked like it was written by somebody who smokes..... oh, wait, ..... never mind....