If the U.S. federal government already had rules in place regarding energy efficiency standards for TVs, that would be true. However, at least I don't know of any federal regulations that exist. In the absence of federal law on regulating certain products, Congress has typically let states set their own laws. Once Congress passes federal legislation, states can't pass their own laws on that subject unless given explicit permission by the relevant federal law.
If California or any other state attempted to set fuel efficiency standards for automobiles over and above CAFE's requirements, an automaker would very likely be able to get such a state law overturned by the interstate commerce clause and/or the constitutional provision for federal law's precedence over state law.
In the case of the Clean Air Act of 1970, California's pollution laws were allowed to remain in place since the state enacted them before 1970, at least to the extent that they did not contradict the Clean Air Act. However, the Clean Air Act prohibits any other state from enacting their own pollution control legislation subsequent to the act aside from allowing states to adopt California's rules in as their own law to supplement the federal requirements.
The extra tiny cost is worth that warm fuzzy feeling, knowing that even if I were to *accidentally* put some unlicensed media on those disks, I don't have to worry at all about cheating those RIAA executives out of their second summer home.
Do you think that you're immune to RIAA action in the United States just because the media on which you're using for "accidental" copyright infringement was purchased in Canada? While the Canadian tax on media may provide for safe harbor in that country (I don't know that to be the case, but I'll assume it's true for the purpose of this post), saying that having a copy of Britney Spears' latest album (which you had not already purchased) fresh off BitTorrent on a CD is OK because you paid a tax on that CD in Canada is not going to get you very far in an American courtroom. From the MPAA/RIAA's perpsective, copyright infringement is copyright infringement, regardless of whether it takes place on media purchased in the U.S. or in Canada.
From a purely moral standpoint, your argument is solid. The **AAs are in fact compensated when you buy that media in Canada. However, for those Americans with any legal worries, I would suggest that you discuss the implications of putting unlicensed content onto media purchased (and on which the "pircay" tax appropriately was paid) in Canada with an American lawyer before trying to use the Canadian flag to shield your infrignement activities in the USA.
From the Telegraph article linked to by the parent:
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
This is effectively using a single data point (the month of October 2008) to argue that the theory of global warming is false. Claims like this are just a red herring on this issue. Episodes like this can be consistent with global warming, provided that averaged across time and space they are the exception rather than the rule.
The theory of global warming states that on average the world's temperature will rise as a result of increasing concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases generated by human activities. A downward tick in temperature over the course of a month or a year will not refute global warming, provided the world's average temperature resumes its increasing trend soon thereafter. Using local incidents to refute global warming is also spurious. Even in the long run, there may be parts of the world that will have a lower average long-term temperature as a result of changes in ocean or atmospheric currents. Such locations, provided they are not common enough to counteract increasing temeperatures in the rest of of the world, will not refute global warming.
An analogy that I like to use to people who don't understand this fact is that of a casino. Many patrons who play blackjack, slot machines, or other games against the house do leave the casino winners after a given session. However, to claim that these winning patrons are sufficient to dispute the claim that the games are in the house's favor would be ludicrous to almost anybody regardless of whether they've set foot in a casino. Yet the Telegraph and the parent poster are effectively trying to do the same thing by taking a very limited dataset and claiming that a theory is false based on that dataset. Using 1998 (in which one of the world's highest temperatures was recorded) by itself to claim that global warming is real and occurring would be equally specious.
In order to refute global warming, you would need either (a) to identify a cause dominant over increasing greenhouse gas concentrations that is demonstrably increasing the earth's temperature, or (b) a long-term data set of stable or decreasing temperatures in the presence of increasing greenhouse gas levels. In order to prove it, you need (a) a long-term dataset of both temperatures and greenhouse gas levels increasing, and (b) a sound explanation as to how the greenhouse gases are contributing to the increase in temperature (to establish causation). What "long-term" means depend on whether a person believes in global warming or is a skeptic, but most people would want at least 20 years worth of data, preferably more, before deciding on the truth or falsity of the theory. To use a single month or a year to make a claim on it is irrelevant to the discussion and such claims distract people from really finding out what's going on.
For the past six years we have looked for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq, to no avail. It appears as though you have found the WMD that we have been seeking. If you could please provide us the address of the Taco Bell and the source of Old Milwaukee, it would be greatly appreciated. This information will allow us to create a lasting legacy for our campaign to advance Freedom during our last 68 days in office.
Sincerely, George W. Bush, outgoing President of the United States of America
The point is being missed here: when the press is in the tank for a candidate and is not fair and balanced, everyone loses.
This case is pretty benign compared to some of the other issues for which the press has been "in the tank" for the past few decades. The media have had 20 years to report on unsustainable budget deficits, the massive Social Security and Medicare shortfalls we're on target towards realizing by 2020, human-induced climate change, the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, and other defining issues and have at best paid lip service to them. And the most glaring example of the press being asleep at the wheel (or worse yet, intentionally taking their eyes off the road) has been the leadup to U.S. military involvement in Iraq in 2002-03.
Perhaps if the views of Sen. Obama and other opponents had been better covered by the press before March 2003 we wouldn't invaded that country, or at least constructed a sounder policy and gathered more solid intelligence and used a better-considered strategy for an invasion. I remember virtually no coverage of Bush's opponents by the major media outlets leading up to the war. My reading of the mainstream media was that Bush had, in hand, evidence of Saddam Hussein's regime being in current possession of nuclear and biological weapons, or at the very least hard proof that he had the materials necessary to build them. Hindsight allows us to see that this the evidence was shaky at best that Hussein had any type of WMD since the end of the 1990-91 war. I understand the fact that in many cases this type of information needs to be classified, but all that the media would have needed latch on to an anti-war argument would be a public statement by a member of Congress or the Bush adminstration is "Based on the contents of the $Briefing_Name classified briefing, I do not feel that we currently have justification to initiate hostilities in Iraq." I'm sure such statements to that effect were made, but media coverage downplayed these statements and these statements did not lead to very many follow-up stories.
In the 1970s, the press was vital to uncovering the Watergate scandal and pressuring Congress to pass reforms in its wake. If President Bush or President-elect Obama were found to have engaged in similar behavior, I'm not at all convinced it would even make a big story these days. Unless the scandal involves sex or drugs, the media now tend to downplay stories involving political figures and other notable people (and when sex and drugs are involved, the story is often blown up out of proportion). I don't know what's changed since then. Is it the fact that now entertainment content and journalism are more closely tied together in the corporate world then they were 30 years ago?
I'm not sure what agenda the press has, but journalists used to feel a responsibility to tell a story how it is and give it the importance it deserves (i.e. putting it at the top of the front page or on the bottom-right corner of Page B14 as the story dictates). Sure, TV ratings and circulation numbers have always been important, but now it seems to be the only factor. As you've put it, the press has been "in the tank" for some time.
Though I really hate it when people put in unnecessary apostrophes. "CD's" for instance. Gack.
The use of an apostrophe after an abbreviation or acronym like "CD" to make a plural is borderline in terms of "correctness." Formerly, this use of an apostrophe was commonplace. Even as recently as 20 years ago I was taught to use the apostrophe that way in elementary school (as well as its other uses). Now it's considered unnecessary by most, but still acceptable by many people in the United States. (I don't know how this use is viewed in other parts of the English-speaking world).
Now using an apostrophe followed by an "s" to make a common noun plural is a different issue. I've only seen this online, where a sentence like "Lots of tree's and animal's live in the forest" can fit in well with the content of many sites. This usage makes me want to scream and I could imagine makes you nauseous. Then again, who could have imagined before the Internet and SMS the numeral "2" being ever used as a preposition?
Again, who is regulating these massage parlours? An ordinary business like a grocery store or a car parts factory cannot traffic people from China and keep them hostage. It would be difficult to explain to the tax authorities, health and safety inspections, the unions and all the rest of the framework society has developed to keep companies behaving responsibly.
In the U.S., it's same people that regulate the construction and agriculture industry, as well as retailers like Wal-Mart and various other businesses. While farmers, construction companies and stores do not usually import people illegally, they certainly often take full advantage of illegals that have entered on their own. Unhappy with what you're getting "under the table" and your working hours and conditions for putting up drywall, harvesting crops, or stocking shelves? Your boss is very willing to refer you to INS for these issues if you complain publicly or jump ship to a competitor. In the latter case, they'd be able to hit both your new employer and the employee for immgration issues by phoning in an anonymous tip.
I don't whether these Chinese women are smuggled in or sneak themselves into the U.S., but in either case I would hazard to guess that they're not exactly on a level playing field in terms of employment once they're here.
The actual votes are never counted while the polls are still open on election day for the very reasons you point out.
However, once all of a state's polls close, vote-counting starts and in many cases the results for more than half of that state's votes are counted within an hour. For states on the East Coast, that means that they can have preliminary or even substantially complete results available to the media while the polls in the central and western parts of the country remain open. If someone in Nevada who's decided to vote after work hears on the radio that either Obama or McCain has swept every state east of the Mississippi (scenario contrived to illustrate the point), my guess is he's going to be considerably less likely to bother stopping by his polling place on his way home.
I'm not sure what measures Canada, Australia, or other physically large democracies/republics have in place to try to address this issue. It's considerably easier to do keep these concerns at bay in Europe, where most countries either lie entirely in one time zone or straddle a single time zone boundary. If the U.S. had a truly national election, these problems would be much less pronounced. However, since there are really 51 state elections (since those in Washington, D.C. can vote for the president too) there's lots of synchronization issues in the system
As others have said here, there is no national election for the presidency. There are in practice 51 (including D.C.) state elections. (In theory, the actual election takes place several weeks later as the slates of electors chosen by each state cast their ballots, but many states bind their electors to follow the state's popular vote and most others do so as well). The reason why people waiting in line in Florida went home is that they were under the impression that enough votes had been counted to have given Gore and insurmountable lead in Florida; that Gore would have won even if every single absentee ballot was for Bush and everyone still left in line voted for him. And since Florida's results are all that a Floridian could influence by his or her ballot, they decided there was no incentive to cast votes either to Bush to try to come back or to vote for Gore to increase his margin.
When the media combined Florida's electoral votes (25, more than all but 3 other states) with the others that had either already counted their votes (most of the East Coast and some of the CST states) or that the media had decided were virtual slam-dunks for the Democrats to carry (such as California's 54 electors, which Gore did in fact easily win), they came up with a total of more than 270 electoral votes and made Gore the presumptive president-elect. At that point, some people either in line in the Central time zone or deciding whether to turn out to polls in the western half of the country decided not to bother voting since they felt that regardless of whether their state's electors went for Gore or Bush the election was already decided. The number of people that did this is unclear, but in Florida's case even a few dozen across the state would have proved a significant number.
If votes aren't counted immediately after the polls close, there needs to be safeguards in place to minimize the added opportunity of tampering during the time the polls close and the votes were actually counted (e.g. in 3 hours someone with access to a ballot box could add votes for his favorite candidate or even substitute a ballot box with a rigged one containing the same number of ballots). However, you make a very good point about having a uniform reporting time for elections. I suspect that because of the First Amendment the best way to actually make this happen is by having all polls across the country close at the same time. If polls in the East closed earlier, passing a law that says the media could not report election results until a certain time would likely result in a lawsuit infringing on free speech rights, though as a non-lawyer I'm not qualified to predict whether such a lawsuit would prevail. The closest parallel that I can think of the presently exists are the way in which government economic data like the monthly unemployment statistics are reported, where the report is indicated as "embargoed" until a pre-determined time (watching CNBC and others it's obvious they have the information beforehand, but make sure not to report it until the appropriate time). Perhaps a constitutionally valid law can be crafted using as a model restrictions on economic data?
If there's anything to be learned from the last elections, it's "don't count chickens before they hatch." In 2000, every major outlet that I heard (includes CNN, CBS, ABC) had awarded the election to Al Gore by 9:30 p.m. EST and having him take Florida by several percentage points. Voters in Florida and elsewhere left polling lines and went home; Republicans were resigned to the fact that Bush had lost and Democrats felt that their candidate was safely in without their vote. And then the real results came in. 2004 wasn't as dramatic, but Bush was still somewhat of an underdog entering the election.
Just because a candidate's deemed likely to win by the press or a website doesn't mean that it's destined to happen. If you haven't already, go to your polling place and put your choice for president, House of Representatives, and any other office on your ballot into the ballot box. That's the only way you can truly improve your candidate's chances.
If the Constitution and its amendment process were all about keeping those who weren't wealthy white males from entering the process, then how do you explain these:
* The 15th amendment, which provides for suffrage to blacks and other non-whites * The 19th amendment, which provides for suffrage to women * The 24th amendment, which by prohibiting poll taxes effectively providing for suffrage to all adult citizens * The 26th amendment, which guarantees the suffrage to all citizens 18 years and older
Not to mention that the Bill of Rights calls out rights of all people in the United States, period. "All people" includes not just all citizens, but legal immigrants, resident aliens, and temporary visitors. Rights such as freedom of speech and assembly were crucial to those "excluded" from the political process to create the impetus for these amendments, particularly the 19th and 26th amendments.
The U.S. has plenty of faults, particularly as seen since 2000. And it's understood by most here that health care falls fare short here compared to the rest of the industrialized world, and that it needs reform. However, I think to say that the Constitution as amended over the last 200 years is set up to exclude all but "white male landowners" from the political process is completely off the topic of health care, and is also pretty disingenous. I think you might hear dissenting opinions on your claim by people like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Barrack Obama, who is perhaps four days from becoming the first non-white president-elect in this country.
You don't indicate to where you emigrated, and I'm glad to hear that your life has improved since you left the U.S. But all is not lost for your family here. The U.S. is about as good a country as there is in putting its problems out in the open, and when push comes to shove we're good at working together to fix them.
Various federal court (including the Supreme Court) decisions interpreting the "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" clauses of the Constitution have firmly put these concerns under the purview of the federal government. Despite what many feel should be the case and what many of the authors of the Constitution had intended, that horse has been out of the barn since FDR's New Deal at the earliest. As for as meddling with our finances, the 16th Amendment opened that door almost 100 years ago.
Given the fact that the federal goverment has authority over health care, Congress really has the power to establish policy on it. However, in practice, the president is often writes up as many bills as any single member of Congress. It is fairly common for the president to provide text to a House or Senate member for submittal to the legislative process, or at least exert heavy influence over the text a bill in the early stages of ratification. This approach makes sense, as it would be a waste of time and a potential embarrassment to Congress push bills through that are known to be veto targets once they reach the president's desk. (Bills with enough congressional support to potentially override an expected veto are excepted in the previous sentence.) If the president is of the same party that controls Congress, his influence is even more significant as the de facto leader of his party.
The president's veto power and influence over his party in Congress make a candidate's answers on the health care issue or any other major policy issue very relevant to a voter making his or her choice Tuesday.
Not necessarily. For instance, since September, the rates that banks charge each other for overnight and short-term loans (6 months or less) as measured by LIBOR increased several percentage points (these rates have retreated somewhat, but are still well above the levels before the so-called credit crisis). Yet, at the same time, rates on 1- to 6-month Treasurys actually dropped, at one point to near zero for 30-day and 3-month bills. This is because the market viewed, rationally or otherwise, private banks to be tremendously riskier than the U.S. Treasury.
However, if the free market were allowed to move the prime rate up to its natural level rather than a fixed margin above the Fed funds rate, over time we would probably see what you describe. The rates on commerical paper (short term debt ranging from 30 days to several months) would probably rise to the point where they would become very attractive compared to a Treasury bill of the same term. (Even with a balanced budget, the Treasury would need to sell short-term bills to satisfy cash flow needs since tax receipts are not uniform across the year). For instance consider Coca-Cola as a company with a very stable financial outlook. Over the course of 3 months, the credit risk difference between a T-bill and Coca-Cola paper is almost negligible, so if there's a 5% difference in annual return in these instruments, all but the most conservative investors would invest in the Coca-Cola debt. Such a premium would tend to make the T-bill rates rise to attract capital, which would ultimately achieve what you suggested (if short-term Treasury yields increase, the longer term ones will also rise to account for the time value of money).
You're confusing two issues. One is the easy money policies and low short-term interest rates manipulated by the Federal Reserve; the other is the ability of Congress (through the Treasury) to borrow money from the market to finance deficits by selling long-term bonds. You are correct about the problems created by easy credit in the past 25 years, but this is unrelated to the federal debt or annual budget defecits. Easy credit was fueled by the Federal Reserve's policy of its target rate for short-term borrowing, which is directly tied to major banks' prime rates and the interest rates of many products like credit cards (cards with a "variable" rate) and adjustable rate mortgages. The Federal Reserve can influence overnight and other short-term rates in the private sector, but has very little power over the long end of the yield curve (5 to 30 years). Prevailing interest rates that were too low to compensate for the actual risks involved were a major cause of the private sector problems that have developed in the past year but are not really related to the fact that the federal government has been spending more than it has been collecting in taxes.
The free market effectively dictates what interest rate the government pays on its debt. Since the debt has grown for the past eight years, this indicates that this debt is long-term and thus its rates are effectively out of the hands of the Federal Reserve. Here are the results of a recent auction for 10-year Treasury notes. Even though the nominal interest rate was 3.5%, the Treasury was forced to accept less than full face value in principal for this auction so that the effective interest rate was about 3.72% (median out of a range bids of 3.64% to 3.79% that were filled). This would suggest that if the Treasury wanted to sell another similar quantity of notes at full face value immediately after this auction (before any new information on credit risk of these notes entered the market), the Treasury would have to set the nominal rate to 3.72% or perhaps slightly higher. If the U.S. Treasury was no longered considered the standard for a risk-free investment, debt auctions would either reflect a much higher interest rate to account for the risk or simply fail due to the lack of bids that the Treasury wanted to accept. The debt accumulated in the past 8 years is of concern because it's not clear how much more Treasury debt the market is willing to finance at the favorable rates the U.S. government has enjoyed for years. If the market forces long-term interest rates up, then the government would have to pay a much steeper price for continued deficit spending.
Some municipalities and even states like California have either already encountered this problem or are bracing for the onset of this problem. The reason why California asked the U.S. Treasury for loans recently is because the state feared it would not be able to sell new debt to the market without having to offer dramatically higher rates that the state was unwilling or unable to pay. While California was able to avoid having to take out a federal loan (their debt auction succeeded and yielded reasonable rates), it still needs to be concerned about having to finance any new deficits. For a state or a municipality, the federal government can conceivably be a lender of last resort. There is no such entity for the federal government; it's the biggest player in the world so there's no bigger potential savior it can approach to save it. So if the market's appetite for Treasury debt fades, the U.S. government is going to have some very tough decisions to make and a very short time to make them lest the government default on its debt obligations and trigger a unprecedented shock to the world's financial system.
There's a big difference between the Republican party as represented in Congress now (and during G.W. Bush's first term) than the Republican party in 1995 after taking control of Congress. The Republicans, led by people like Newt Gingrich, were for the most part actually fiscally conservative. After opposition from the Republicans in 1995, Clinton pretty much abandoned his health care platform; before that he and Hillary pushed hard for some form of universal health care. Clinton was also fiscally conservative compared to many in his party. Income taxes were relatively low during the Clinton years compared to most of the post-World War II era, with the wealthiest paying about a 39% marginal tax rate (compared to levels over 50% in the 1960s and 1970s, and modestly higher than our current top tax bracket and that under Reagan). Both Clinton and the Republican Congress deserve credit for not increasing spending after taxing in a dramatic increase in tax revenue and generating the first federal budget surplus in decades.
However, once G. W. Bush came along and new Republican leadership emerged in Congress, the party transformed to become as fiscally liberal, if not more so, than the Democrats. The only thing conservative about their fiscal policy was the choice of recipients of federal spending. Reagan had a similar fiscal policy, and the liberal Democratic Congress at the time went along with his approach of cutting taxes without adjusting spending patterns.
In Putnam County, early voters have the option of asking for either touch-screen machines or optical scan ballots -- paper ballots on which people mark in their election choices.
Why not give everyone the choice of either manually filling out an optical-scan ballot or using a voting machine to help fill one out for them? For many people, it will be much more intuitive or simply quicker to fill out a paper ballot rather than to go through a series of screens to vote. Since many will prefer to use the paper ballot, this will reduce the expense required to purchase the appropriate number of voting machines. And a well designed voting machine would be able to display a summary of candidates selected for confirmation by the voter before printing a ballot to reduce the occurrence of user error. When the voter is satisfied with his or her selections, pressing the "Print Ballot" button will print a ballot that would look identical to the manual paper ballot with the appropriate candidates' bubbles filled. The electronically-generated and manual ballots would be counted using the same process. You could even put Braille by each button and have a headphone jack so that a voter can hear "Press 1 for John McCain, Press 2 for Barrack Obama..." as he or she votes, followed by an oral summary of each selection before offering to print the ballot. With the exception of the blind (who already would need assistance to fill a paper ballot), voters could readily see if the machine switched their vote or spoiled the ballot (such as by filling in ovals for both McCain and Obama) before putting it into the box. Why can't we adopt a hybrid solution that can help reduce the number of spoiled ballots or misvotes (such as a inadvertently moving down a row when matching a candidate's name to his/her bubble on the ballot), cost less than an all-electronic solution and provide a verifiable paper trail at the same time?
The idea of an 8-hour day (and the 40-hour week) has only been around since about the beginning of the 20th century. It's mainly originated from workers' demands in response to conditions in which many factory owners required people to work 12 or more hours a day. Later, it was reinforced by legislation requiring overtime for hours in excess of 40 in an attempt to reduce unemployment. Before industrialization, there was little concept of a "standard" workday. Farmers worked however many hours were necessary to maintain their crops and livestock, even if it meant working from sunrise to after sunset. Shopkeepers in town set their hours according to their needs.
If DST weren't an issue, wouldn't it have been more natural to set an 8-hour workday to run from 8 AM to 4 PM rather than one hour later? In the northern tier of the contiguous U.S., it's common for the sun to set between 4 and 5 PM in the winter. And the sun is almost always up before 8, except for some places close to the Canadian border or near the western edge of a time zone. A workday ending at 5 instead of 4 would have made things somewhat more complicated in a society where electric lighting hadn't yet become ubiquitous. Does anyone know how the hours 9-5 got chosen rather than some other 8-hour span?
It looks like Cowboy Neal/Hanging Chad ticket will wind up with 27 electoral votes after taking 88% of 35 million votes cast in Florida. Any other states want to endorse his candidacy by putting their elections online?
I'm amazed that Americans don't seem to remember why this country even exists. Do they teach what led up to the Revolutionary War in the 37 states that weren't the original colonies? Or does history as taught in the rest of the U.S. begin with when that territory became part of the country? I can't imagine the history curriculum in Nebraska starting in 1803 (Louisana Purchase) or one in Texas beginning in 1836 (1845?) or one in Alaska commencing with "Once upon a time there was a man named Seward...".
As ignorant as some might seem, the vast majority of American adults have either a high school diploma or a GED, and virtually all of those have had a class in U.S. history. Such a class would at the least have to include the colonial history from the end of the (what Americans call, perhaps incorrectly) the French and Indian War of the 1750s, when the colonies began to behave as part of a larger unit within the British Empire. Even if people seem to don't care about the principles of the Founding Fathers, I can't believe most haven't been exposed to them and with a little discussion understand them. Hell, Joe Sixpack would probably now realize he's entitled to the Miranda rights if he's ever arrested; from there it's pretty easy to explain that those derive from the Bill of Rights and discuss what other rights are highlighted. I say highlighted rather than listed, since the 9th and 10th amendments effectively say that the rights of the people shall include but not be limited to those described in the preceding eight amendments. I think people need to realize that it's their rights on the line as opposed to "terrorists," "child predators," or whatever buzzword is being used by the media. If people can understand that it's now fairly easy to be labeled a terrorist or a child predator and that it's becoming easier over time to be labeled as such, they might start to wonder "Could I be considered a terrorist someday?" When enough people ask themselves that question, that's when the tide will turn.
The 1950s and 1960s featured some pretty blatant abuses. If terrorist databases existed then, I would think Martin Luther King's name would be in there as well as many of whom took part in his demonstrations. The FBI certainly kept a close eye on him and invaded his privacy and that of others considered a potential threat to the federal government. Anti-Vietnam protesters were in a similar situation. And when the extent of the Nixon administration's wiretapping and surveillance operations became clear, Congress put significant restrictions on the federal government's domestic surveillance authority so that it could not be abused by future administrations. There are enough people who remember Nixon to create a plausible effort to stop and reverse the abuses of power partaken by the Bush administration.
I think most in this country have some idea of our core principles, they just need to be reminded of them. And even though many of the rights called out by the Bill of Rights have been violated in recent years, the government has not been able to significantly squash our freedom of speech. With the freedom of speech, there's still plenty of reason to hope that with the right words people can be convinced to take back their other rights.
I wouldn't use Iraq as an example of how to defeat the U.S. armed forces in all-out war. A big part of the reason for what is happening in Iraq is that the U.S. Army is (for the most part) operating under rules of engagement that attempt to minimize the number of civilians killed. When you order soliders to make a good faith effort to verify that someone is both armed and hostile before engaging them, there will be times when soldiers will end up dead because their due diligence didn't identify a suicide truck bomber in time. If the Army operated under a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, there would be very few Iraqi threats to American forces. (If they did operate under such a mindset, however, there would be moral outrage both in the U.S. and abroad, and there would be a good chance exteral forces would enter to provide much bigger threats than occasional sniper fire or IEDs).
If political matters got to the point where the federal government actually sent regular troops (Army rather than National Guard) to suppress what they considered an insurrection, my guess is that there would be few if any rules of engagement. Such a move would represent a full declaration of war upon the region or group targeted. In that case, a few shotguns or hunting rifles will only offer a few moments of time and perhaps the satisfaction of taking down someone else with you. An incident that might offer a preview of such a move is General Sherman's campaign against the Confederacy late in the Civil War. Many in his troops' path had their homes and farms burned and their livestock killed, and anyone presenting even a hint of hostility toward them were immediately captured or killed.
If the Army or, heaven forbid, the Air Force gets involved domestically the game's already over. The appropriate time for citizens' arms is much earlier on, when the opposing forces are police officers or small groups of federal agents. At that point, it may very well be possible to get the state's National Guard on the citizens' side, or at least cause enough defections to reduce the Guard's effectiveness to respond to the situation. In order for armed resistance to succeed, however, it is imperative to have the moral high ground to gain as many allies and sympathizers as possible. Without that high ground, you may encounter the general population's support of the federal government's campaign to squash the movement at any cost. And that battle is a hopeless cause for those on the receiving end of Washington's force.
American Express has an idea where certain incentives in the CEO's pay package don't kick in unless the company outperforms its competitors or the market as a whole. That way, if good times flush the entire industry with cash and American Express is just along for the ride, the executives don't get a windfall bonus (though the base compensation is still at levels most of us on Slashdot can only dream about). If American Express turns a small profit (relative to what the company has posted in rich times) during this upcoming recession as the rest of the industry gets flooded in red ink, he'll be paid for his superior performance.
Most people won't begrudge a truly innovative CEO that provided long-term growth in shareholder value getting paid tens of millions for his performance. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are prime examples of being handsomely rewarded for creating billions of dollars of shareholder value and in the latter case returning Apple to profitability after years of what seemed to be a death spiral. What pisses people off and what capitalism is supposed to discourage is getting paid that kind of money for poor performance as a CEO's company gets clobbered by competitors and kareens towards bankruptcy. An untrained monkey probably could have run Countrywide better than Angelo Mozilo in the past five years. Yet he walked away with over $100 million in stock sales. Countrywide just happened to be in the right place at the right time and when the party ended the company was forced to sell itself at a steep discount to its onetime value under threat of bankruptcy. And was Bob Nardelli really worth almost a quarter billion for having Home Depot have its market share raided by Lowe's and others? The fact that pay packages have continued to grow almost incessantly for decades with little correlation to corporate performance seems to indicate that the invisible hand of capitalism isn't influencing executive compensation committees like it's impacted almost the entire rest of the economy.
American Express' approach may not be perfect, but at least it seems to be a good-faith effort to tie its CEO's pay to quantitative measures of long-term growth. Hopefully they prove to be a model for the rest of corporate America in terms of how and for what a CEO gets paid.
There's a couple of big obstacles you'd need to overcome to make your case. First, libel is more difficult to prove if the forum is not public. It's significantly tougher to win a libel claim if a jury sees that the false information was not intended for public consumption. There is a big difference between John Doe being labeled a terrorist in a database used internally by law enforcement versus a police officer or DA telling the local media that John Doe has been engaging in terrorist activities. The latter, without concrete evidence to support the claim, is clearly libel if the information is written (slander if it's verbal). The former is much harder to build a case on, particularly if the information as presented as something like "John Doe: suspected terrorist -- consult commanding officer before engaging". In this instance, even getting all of the facts required to make a case is easier said than done.
Another huge hurdle is the fact that as far as I know there's no clear definition of terrorism in the law. With our societal climate, a Muslim saying "Allah is great!" can be suspected by many here as a terrorist. Since the laws are so vague, going to a mosque for prayer or buying gas at a Citgo (owned by the Venezuelan government, which has not had many kind words for the U.S. in recent years) could be considered activities that support terrorism by a government official with a grudge against someone. Since there are so many things that can be legally considered terrorism these days, it is very easy for the government to rebut a libel claim by proving that a certain behavior like attending an anti-war protest did happen (in most cases admitted to those in question here) and stretching the anti-terrorism laws as far as necessary to include the act.
There's a lot of issues that the inclusion of these 53 names raises, but libel is pretty far down the list and would be a tough battle to win anyway. It would be a lot more productive to use this example to lobby for more precise definitions of terrorism in future legislation and for outlawing or at least greatly restricting the gathering and usage of databases like this one in the future. Winning a lawsuit only to be sent to jail shortly thereafter on a trumped-up charge related to having filed it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
Of course, if we would let everything and everyone fail outright in a horrific manner, maybe just maybe everyone would learn deep lessons.
Unfortunately the stakes are too big now to allow everything to fall outright. The last time just about everything failed was the 1930s. As badly as the U.S. was hit by the Great Depression, many other countries that relied on trade with the U.S. got hit even worse. Two of those countries were Germany and Italy. Economic turmoil played a large role in allowing Hilter and Mussolini to assume power and wage a war to restore what they considered their rightful role as a world economic and political power. Tens of millions ended up dead as a result. The unprecedented scale of Hitler's genocide and the Americans' introduction of nuclear weapons caused the world to get together afterward and vow to never allow such a scenario to happen again. Today, China's dependence exports to the U.S. and its rapidly growing military and desire to become a world power would be the foremost area of concern in the wake of a U.S. economic collapse; given existing military tension between the U.S. and China over Taiwan and other issues, these two countries creating a World War III scenario becomes a realistic possiblity if everything hits the fan.
Our current problems come from not only missing regulations, but also from half-baked degregulation attempts and ill-formed regulations. Passing new regulations rushed into effect for the sake of winning an election won't fix anything and can in fact make these problems even worse. Making a concerted effort to come up with the right regulations is the proper response.
The current economic situation of these banks is untenable, but the main players need to be either restructured or liquidated in a controlled manner. It may not even be possible to achieve this, but it's unconscionable not to try. It's regrettable to think that we're in a situation where the failure of a couple of major banks can cause a good chunk of the American financial system (and rippling through most of the rest of the world as well) to collapse, but that's where we're at right now. If this legislation is legitimately intended to futher this goal it's worthwhile. The bailout of AIG prior to this act was only for the purpose of keeping the company alive long enough to sell off many or all its assets at decent prices so that AIG didn't take its creditors down with it. I don't know but I hope this reasoning applied to the rest of the financial sector is the rationale behind the bill. If the bailout simply keeps unprofitable companies going indefinitely on the taxpayer's dime, then the bailout will be a failure and will only make the situation worse by pushing the U.S. government itself closer to failure (by running an unsustainable deficit) while not improving the financial health of our private sector.
The most troubling aspect of this bill is the fact that it didn't provide for the creation of a committee of financial experts to examine what parts of financial policy led to our current situation and what reforms would be required to prevent the recurrence of such a scenario. Like the 9/11 Commission, these members would operate with motives other than winning elections and would be tasked to generate a no-punches-pulled report on the flaws in our regulatory system, what policy holders messed up and details on those mistakes, and the measures necessary to correct the regulatory problems. U.S. policymakers did almost nothing in the wake of the savings and loan bailout of the 1980s and make only rudimentary reforms to corporate accounting practices after the accounting shenanigans that took place around the turn of the 21st century. Not only they not learn from these experiences, they actually consciously un-learned lessons from the Depression by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act and other deregulatory measures.
I hope that we haven't passed the point of no return and that we're doomed to a full-scale economic collapse,
what do we do with the date of the election, given these issues?
It's better to have a flawed election rather than none at all. There are mechanisms already in place where a candidate take court action to have an election voided if evidence is presented indicating that malfunctioning equipment and/or fraud significantly altered the results. If a judge voids an election, he or she will order a new one and perhaps specify conditions to better assure a clean revote. Such conditions can involve exclusion of questionable equipment or mandate tried-and-true voting techniques.
Postponing an election for any reason with the possible exception of a weather emergency opens the door to new abuses. Would you want the presidential election delayed because a shipment of paper ballots some small town got lost or ruined, considering how easy it would be to intentionally cause such a situation, and that there's no way to guarantee that the election couldn't be delayed again at the new date?
If anyone present would have voted against it, they would have made a motion for a roll call vote to get their objection on the record. As far as I'm concerned, those who weren't in attendance either supported it (with the exception of Sen. Kennedy and anyone else who may have a medical reason for absence) or didn't care enough to show up to fight it, and everyone that was on the Senate floor when this bill was considered voted "Yea."
And by the way, why is the Senate even considering such legislation right now when apparently most of those on Capitol Hill believes the United States is on the verge of a reprise of the Great Depression or even worse? With the exception of a handful of Republicans, nearly everyone in Congress agrees that the big Wall Street firms need to be bailed out ("rescued" according to the spin doctors); the disagreement is about the specific terms of the companies that accept the aid and who else should be bailed out as well, such as the Big Three carmakers, homeowners, regional banks, and so on. I disagree with the idea that we're on the verge of economic collapse absent a bailout bill. Times may be tough in the next couple of years, but so were the mid 1970s and early 1980s and we as a country got through them with little lasting damage. However, anyone in Congress who legitimately believes we're in such a situation should do everything possible to come up with a solution to resolve it. And "everything possible" doesn't include proposing or advancing irrelevant legislation on copyright or any other policy issue not involving the here-and-now. Any Senator involved in any action to advance this bill in the past week has no business being in office as far as I'm concerned.
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If the U.S. federal government already had rules in place regarding energy efficiency standards for TVs, that would be true. However, at least I don't know of any federal regulations that exist. In the absence of federal law on regulating certain products, Congress has typically let states set their own laws. Once Congress passes federal legislation, states can't pass their own laws on that subject unless given explicit permission by the relevant federal law.
If California or any other state attempted to set fuel efficiency standards for automobiles over and above CAFE's requirements, an automaker would very likely be able to get such a state law overturned by the interstate commerce clause and/or the constitutional provision for federal law's precedence over state law.
In the case of the Clean Air Act of 1970, California's pollution laws were allowed to remain in place since the state enacted them before 1970, at least to the extent that they did not contradict the Clean Air Act. However, the Clean Air Act prohibits any other state from enacting their own pollution control legislation subsequent to the act aside from allowing states to adopt California's rules in as their own law to supplement the federal requirements.
The extra tiny cost is worth that warm fuzzy feeling, knowing that even if I were to *accidentally* put some unlicensed media on those disks, I don't have to worry at all about cheating those RIAA executives out of their second summer home.
Do you think that you're immune to RIAA action in the United States just because the media on which you're using for "accidental" copyright infringement was purchased in Canada? While the Canadian tax on media may provide for safe harbor in that country (I don't know that to be the case, but I'll assume it's true for the purpose of this post), saying that having a copy of Britney Spears' latest album (which you had not already purchased) fresh off BitTorrent on a CD is OK because you paid a tax on that CD in Canada is not going to get you very far in an American courtroom. From the MPAA/RIAA's perpsective, copyright infringement is copyright infringement, regardless of whether it takes place on media purchased in the U.S. or in Canada.
From a purely moral standpoint, your argument is solid. The **AAs are in fact compensated when you buy that media in Canada. However, for those Americans with any legal worries, I would suggest that you discuss the implications of putting unlicensed content onto media purchased (and on which the "pircay" tax appropriately was paid) in Canada with an American lawyer before trying to use the Canadian flag to shield your infrignement activities in the USA.
From the Telegraph article linked to by the parent:
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
This is effectively using a single data point (the month of October 2008) to argue that the theory of global warming is false. Claims like this are just a red herring on this issue. Episodes like this can be consistent with global warming, provided that averaged across time and space they are the exception rather than the rule.
The theory of global warming states that on average the world's temperature will rise as a result of increasing concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases generated by human activities. A downward tick in temperature over the course of a month or a year will not refute global warming, provided the world's average temperature resumes its increasing trend soon thereafter. Using local incidents to refute global warming is also spurious. Even in the long run, there may be parts of the world that will have a lower average long-term temperature as a result of changes in ocean or atmospheric currents. Such locations, provided they are not common enough to counteract increasing temeperatures in the rest of of the world, will not refute global warming.
An analogy that I like to use to people who don't understand this fact is that of a casino. Many patrons who play blackjack, slot machines, or other games against the house do leave the casino winners after a given session. However, to claim that these winning patrons are sufficient to dispute the claim that the games are in the house's favor would be ludicrous to almost anybody regardless of whether they've set foot in a casino. Yet the Telegraph and the parent poster are effectively trying to do the same thing by taking a very limited dataset and claiming that a theory is false based on that dataset. Using 1998 (in which one of the world's highest temperatures was recorded) by itself to claim that global warming is real and occurring would be equally specious.
In order to refute global warming, you would need either (a) to identify a cause dominant over increasing greenhouse gas concentrations that is demonstrably increasing the earth's temperature, or (b) a long-term data set of stable or decreasing temperatures in the presence of increasing greenhouse gas levels. In order to prove it, you need (a) a long-term dataset of both temperatures and greenhouse gas levels increasing, and (b) a sound explanation as to how the greenhouse gases are contributing to the increase in temperature (to establish causation). What "long-term" means depend on whether a person believes in global warming or is a skeptic, but most people would want at least 20 years worth of data, preferably more, before deciding on the truth or falsity of the theory. To use a single month or a year to make a claim on it is irrelevant to the discussion and such claims distract people from really finding out what's going on.
Dear $RANDOMLUSER:
For the past six years we have looked for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq, to no avail. It appears as though you have found the WMD that we have been seeking. If you could please provide us the address of the Taco Bell and the source of Old Milwaukee, it would be greatly appreciated. This information will allow us to create a lasting legacy for our campaign to advance Freedom during our last 68 days in office.
Sincerely,
George W. Bush, outgoing President of the United States of America
The point is being missed here: when the press is in the tank for a candidate and is not fair and balanced, everyone loses.
This case is pretty benign compared to some of the other issues for which the press has been "in the tank" for the past few decades. The media have had 20 years to report on unsustainable budget deficits, the massive Social Security and Medicare shortfalls we're on target towards realizing by 2020, human-induced climate change, the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, and other defining issues and have at best paid lip service to them. And the most glaring example of the press being asleep at the wheel (or worse yet, intentionally taking their eyes off the road) has been the leadup to U.S. military involvement in Iraq in 2002-03.
Perhaps if the views of Sen. Obama and other opponents had been better covered by the press before March 2003 we wouldn't invaded that country, or at least constructed a sounder policy and gathered more solid intelligence and used a better-considered strategy for an invasion. I remember virtually no coverage of Bush's opponents by the major media outlets leading up to the war. My reading of the mainstream media was that Bush had, in hand, evidence of Saddam Hussein's regime being in current possession of nuclear and biological weapons, or at the very least hard proof that he had the materials necessary to build them. Hindsight allows us to see that this the evidence was shaky at best that Hussein had any type of WMD since the end of the 1990-91 war. I understand the fact that in many cases this type of information needs to be classified, but all that the media would have needed latch on to an anti-war argument would be a public statement by a member of Congress or the Bush adminstration is "Based on the contents of the $Briefing_Name classified briefing, I do not feel that we currently have justification to initiate hostilities in Iraq." I'm sure such statements to that effect were made, but media coverage downplayed these statements and these statements did not lead to very many follow-up stories.
In the 1970s, the press was vital to uncovering the Watergate scandal and pressuring Congress to pass reforms in its wake. If President Bush or President-elect Obama were found to have engaged in similar behavior, I'm not at all convinced it would even make a big story these days. Unless the scandal involves sex or drugs, the media now tend to downplay stories involving political figures and other notable people (and when sex and drugs are involved, the story is often blown up out of proportion). I don't know what's changed since then. Is it the fact that now entertainment content and journalism are more closely tied together in the corporate world then they were 30 years ago?
I'm not sure what agenda the press has, but journalists used to feel a responsibility to tell a story how it is and give it the importance it deserves (i.e. putting it at the top of the front page or on the bottom-right corner of Page B14 as the story dictates). Sure, TV ratings and circulation numbers have always been important, but now it seems to be the only factor. As you've put it, the press has been "in the tank" for some time.
Though I really hate it when people put in unnecessary apostrophes. "CD's" for instance. Gack.
The use of an apostrophe after an abbreviation or acronym like "CD" to make a plural is borderline in terms of "correctness." Formerly, this use of an apostrophe was commonplace. Even as recently as 20 years ago I was taught to use the apostrophe that way in elementary school (as well as its other uses). Now it's considered unnecessary by most, but still acceptable by many people in the United States. (I don't know how this use is viewed in other parts of the English-speaking world).
Now using an apostrophe followed by an "s" to make a common noun plural is a different issue. I've only seen this online, where a sentence like "Lots of tree's and animal's live in the forest" can fit in well with the content of many sites. This usage makes me want to scream and I could imagine makes you nauseous. Then again, who could have imagined before the Internet and SMS the numeral "2" being ever used as a preposition?
Again, who is regulating these massage parlours? An ordinary business like a grocery store or a car parts factory cannot traffic people from China and keep them hostage. It would be difficult to explain to the tax authorities, health and safety inspections, the unions and all the rest of the framework society has developed to keep companies behaving responsibly.
In the U.S., it's same people that regulate the construction and agriculture industry, as well as retailers like Wal-Mart and various other businesses. While farmers, construction companies and stores do not usually import people illegally, they certainly often take full advantage of illegals that have entered on their own. Unhappy with what you're getting "under the table" and your working hours and conditions for putting up drywall, harvesting crops, or stocking shelves? Your boss is very willing to refer you to INS for these issues if you complain publicly or jump ship to a competitor. In the latter case, they'd be able to hit both your new employer and the employee for immgration issues by phoning in an anonymous tip.
I don't whether these Chinese women are smuggled in or sneak themselves into the U.S., but in either case I would hazard to guess that they're not exactly on a level playing field in terms of employment once they're here.
The actual votes are never counted while the polls are still open on election day for the very reasons you point out.
However, once all of a state's polls close, vote-counting starts and in many cases the results for more than half of that state's votes are counted within an hour. For states on the East Coast, that means that they can have preliminary or even substantially complete results available to the media while the polls in the central and western parts of the country remain open. If someone in Nevada who's decided to vote after work hears on the radio that either Obama or McCain has swept every state east of the Mississippi (scenario contrived to illustrate the point), my guess is he's going to be considerably less likely to bother stopping by his polling place on his way home.
I'm not sure what measures Canada, Australia, or other physically large democracies/republics have in place to try to address this issue. It's considerably easier to do keep these concerns at bay in Europe, where most countries either lie entirely in one time zone or straddle a single time zone boundary. If the U.S. had a truly national election, these problems would be much less pronounced. However, since there are really 51 state elections (since those in Washington, D.C. can vote for the president too) there's lots of synchronization issues in the system
As others have said here, there is no national election for the presidency. There are in practice 51 (including D.C.) state elections. (In theory, the actual election takes place several weeks later as the slates of electors chosen by each state cast their ballots, but many states bind their electors to follow the state's popular vote and most others do so as well). The reason why people waiting in line in Florida went home is that they were under the impression that enough votes had been counted to have given Gore and insurmountable lead in Florida; that Gore would have won even if every single absentee ballot was for Bush and everyone still left in line voted for him. And since Florida's results are all that a Floridian could influence by his or her ballot, they decided there was no incentive to cast votes either to Bush to try to come back or to vote for Gore to increase his margin.
When the media combined Florida's electoral votes (25, more than all but 3 other states) with the others that had either already counted their votes (most of the East Coast and some of the CST states) or that the media had decided were virtual slam-dunks for the Democrats to carry (such as California's 54 electors, which Gore did in fact easily win), they came up with a total of more than 270 electoral votes and made Gore the presumptive president-elect. At that point, some people either in line in the Central time zone or deciding whether to turn out to polls in the western half of the country decided not to bother voting since they felt that regardless of whether their state's electors went for Gore or Bush the election was already decided. The number of people that did this is unclear, but in Florida's case even a few dozen across the state would have proved a significant number.
If votes aren't counted immediately after the polls close, there needs to be safeguards in place to minimize the added opportunity of tampering during the time the polls close and the votes were actually counted (e.g. in 3 hours someone with access to a ballot box could add votes for his favorite candidate or even substitute a ballot box with a rigged one containing the same number of ballots). However, you make a very good point about having a uniform reporting time for elections. I suspect that because of the First Amendment the best way to actually make this happen is by having all polls across the country close at the same time. If polls in the East closed earlier, passing a law that says the media could not report election results until a certain time would likely result in a lawsuit infringing on free speech rights, though as a non-lawyer I'm not qualified to predict whether such a lawsuit would prevail. The closest parallel that I can think of the presently exists are the way in which government economic data like the monthly unemployment statistics are reported, where the report is indicated as "embargoed" until a pre-determined time (watching CNBC and others it's obvious they have the information beforehand, but make sure not to report it until the appropriate time). Perhaps a constitutionally valid law can be crafted using as a model restrictions on economic data?
If there's anything to be learned from the last elections, it's "don't count chickens before they hatch." In 2000, every major outlet that I heard (includes CNN, CBS, ABC) had awarded the election to Al Gore by 9:30 p.m. EST and having him take Florida by several percentage points. Voters in Florida and elsewhere left polling lines and went home; Republicans were resigned to the fact that Bush had lost and Democrats felt that their candidate was safely in without their vote. And then the real results came in. 2004 wasn't as dramatic, but Bush was still somewhat of an underdog entering the election.
Just because a candidate's deemed likely to win by the press or a website doesn't mean that it's destined to happen. If you haven't already, go to your polling place and put your choice for president, House of Representatives, and any other office on your ballot into the ballot box. That's the only way you can truly improve your candidate's chances.
If the Constitution and its amendment process were all about keeping those who weren't wealthy white males from entering the process, then how do you explain these:
* The 15th amendment, which provides for suffrage to blacks and other non-whites
* The 19th amendment, which provides for suffrage to women
* The 24th amendment, which by prohibiting poll taxes effectively providing for suffrage to all adult citizens
* The 26th amendment, which guarantees the suffrage to all citizens 18 years and older
Not to mention that the Bill of Rights calls out rights of all people in the United States, period. "All people" includes not just all citizens, but legal immigrants, resident aliens, and temporary visitors. Rights such as freedom of speech and assembly were crucial to those "excluded" from the political process to create the impetus for these amendments, particularly the 19th and 26th amendments.
The U.S. has plenty of faults, particularly as seen since 2000. And it's understood by most here that health care falls fare short here compared to the rest of the industrialized world, and that it needs reform. However, I think to say that the Constitution as amended over the last 200 years is set up to exclude all but "white male landowners" from the political process is completely off the topic of health care, and is also pretty disingenous. I think you might hear dissenting opinions on your claim by people like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Barrack Obama, who is perhaps four days from becoming the first non-white president-elect in this country.
You don't indicate to where you emigrated, and I'm glad to hear that your life has improved since you left the U.S. But all is not lost for your family here. The U.S. is about as good a country as there is in putting its problems out in the open, and when push comes to shove we're good at working together to fix them.
Various federal court (including the Supreme Court) decisions interpreting the "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" clauses of the Constitution have firmly put these concerns under the purview of the federal government. Despite what many feel should be the case and what many of the authors of the Constitution had intended, that horse has been out of the barn since FDR's New Deal at the earliest. As for as meddling with our finances, the 16th Amendment opened that door almost 100 years ago.
Given the fact that the federal goverment has authority over health care, Congress really has the power to establish policy on it. However, in practice, the president is often writes up as many bills as any single member of Congress. It is fairly common for the president to provide text to a House or Senate member for submittal to the legislative process, or at least exert heavy influence over the text a bill in the early stages of ratification. This approach makes sense, as it would be a waste of time and a potential embarrassment to Congress push bills through that are known to be veto targets once they reach the president's desk. (Bills with enough congressional support to potentially override an expected veto are excepted in the previous sentence.) If the president is of the same party that controls Congress, his influence is even more significant as the de facto leader of his party.
The president's veto power and influence over his party in Congress make a candidate's answers on the health care issue or any other major policy issue very relevant to a voter making his or her choice Tuesday.
Not necessarily. For instance, since September, the rates that banks charge each other for overnight and short-term loans (6 months or less) as measured by LIBOR increased several percentage points (these rates have retreated somewhat, but are still well above the levels before the so-called credit crisis). Yet, at the same time, rates on 1- to 6-month Treasurys actually dropped, at one point to near zero for 30-day and 3-month bills. This is because the market viewed, rationally or otherwise, private banks to be tremendously riskier than the U.S. Treasury.
However, if the free market were allowed to move the prime rate up to its natural level rather than a fixed margin above the Fed funds rate, over time we would probably see what you describe. The rates on commerical paper (short term debt ranging from 30 days to several months) would probably rise to the point where they would become very attractive compared to a Treasury bill of the same term. (Even with a balanced budget, the Treasury would need to sell short-term bills to satisfy cash flow needs since tax receipts are not uniform across the year). For instance consider Coca-Cola as a company with a very stable financial outlook. Over the course of 3 months, the credit risk difference between a T-bill and Coca-Cola paper is almost negligible, so if there's a 5% difference in annual return in these instruments, all but the most conservative investors would invest in the Coca-Cola debt. Such a premium would tend to make the T-bill rates rise to attract capital, which would ultimately achieve what you suggested (if short-term Treasury yields increase, the longer term ones will also rise to account for the time value of money).
You're confusing two issues. One is the easy money policies and low short-term interest rates manipulated by the Federal Reserve; the other is the ability of Congress (through the Treasury) to borrow money from the market to finance deficits by selling long-term bonds. You are correct about the problems created by easy credit in the past 25 years, but this is unrelated to the federal debt or annual budget defecits. Easy credit was fueled by the Federal Reserve's policy of its target rate for short-term borrowing, which is directly tied to major banks' prime rates and the interest rates of many products like credit cards (cards with a "variable" rate) and adjustable rate mortgages. The Federal Reserve can influence overnight and other short-term rates in the private sector, but has very little power over the long end of the yield curve (5 to 30 years). Prevailing interest rates that were too low to compensate for the actual risks involved were a major cause of the private sector problems that have developed in the past year but are not really related to the fact that the federal government has been spending more than it has been collecting in taxes.
The free market effectively dictates what interest rate the government pays on its debt. Since the debt has grown for the past eight years, this indicates that this debt is long-term and thus its rates are effectively out of the hands of the Federal Reserve. Here are the results of a recent auction for 10-year Treasury notes. Even though the nominal interest rate was 3.5%, the Treasury was forced to accept less than full face value in principal for this auction so that the effective interest rate was about 3.72% (median out of a range bids of 3.64% to 3.79% that were filled). This would suggest that if the Treasury wanted to sell another similar quantity of notes at full face value immediately after this auction (before any new information on credit risk of these notes entered the market), the Treasury would have to set the nominal rate to 3.72% or perhaps slightly higher. If the U.S. Treasury was no longered considered the standard for a risk-free investment, debt auctions would either reflect a much higher interest rate to account for the risk or simply fail due to the lack of bids that the Treasury wanted to accept. The debt accumulated in the past 8 years is of concern because it's not clear how much more Treasury debt the market is willing to finance at the favorable rates the U.S. government has enjoyed for years. If the market forces long-term interest rates up, then the government would have to pay a much steeper price for continued deficit spending.
Some municipalities and even states like California have either already encountered this problem or are bracing for the onset of this problem. The reason why California asked the U.S. Treasury for loans recently is because the state feared it would not be able to sell new debt to the market without having to offer dramatically higher rates that the state was unwilling or unable to pay. While California was able to avoid having to take out a federal loan (their debt auction succeeded and yielded reasonable rates), it still needs to be concerned about having to finance any new deficits. For a state or a municipality, the federal government can conceivably be a lender of last resort. There is no such entity for the federal government; it's the biggest player in the world so there's no bigger potential savior it can approach to save it. So if the market's appetite for Treasury debt fades, the U.S. government is going to have some very tough decisions to make and a very short time to make them lest the government default on its debt obligations and trigger a unprecedented shock to the world's financial system.
There's a big difference between the Republican party as represented in Congress now (and during G.W. Bush's first term) than the Republican party in 1995 after taking control of Congress. The Republicans, led by people like Newt Gingrich, were for the most part actually fiscally conservative. After opposition from the Republicans in 1995, Clinton pretty much abandoned his health care platform; before that he and Hillary pushed hard for some form of universal health care. Clinton was also fiscally conservative compared to many in his party. Income taxes were relatively low during the Clinton years compared to most of the post-World War II era, with the wealthiest paying about a 39% marginal tax rate (compared to levels over 50% in the 1960s and 1970s, and modestly higher than our current top tax bracket and that under Reagan). Both Clinton and the Republican Congress deserve credit for not increasing spending after taxing in a dramatic increase in tax revenue and generating the first federal budget surplus in decades.
However, once G. W. Bush came along and new Republican leadership emerged in Congress, the party transformed to become as fiscally liberal, if not more so, than the Democrats. The only thing conservative about their fiscal policy was the choice of recipients of federal spending. Reagan had a similar fiscal policy, and the liberal Democratic Congress at the time went along with his approach of cutting taxes without adjusting spending patterns.
Here's something that intrigued me from TFA:
In Putnam County, early voters have the option of asking for either touch-screen machines or optical scan ballots -- paper ballots on which people mark in their election choices.
Why not give everyone the choice of either manually filling out an optical-scan ballot or using a voting machine to help fill one out for them? For many people, it will be much more intuitive or simply quicker to fill out a paper ballot rather than to go through a series of screens to vote. Since many will prefer to use the paper ballot, this will reduce the expense required to purchase the appropriate number of voting machines. And a well designed voting machine would be able to display a summary of candidates selected for confirmation by the voter before printing a ballot to reduce the occurrence of user error. When the voter is satisfied with his or her selections, pressing the "Print Ballot" button will print a ballot that would look identical to the manual paper ballot with the appropriate candidates' bubbles filled. The electronically-generated and manual ballots would be counted using the same process. You could even put Braille by each button and have a headphone jack so that a voter can hear "Press 1 for John McCain, Press 2 for Barrack Obama..." as he or she votes, followed by an oral summary of each selection before offering to print the ballot. With the exception of the blind (who already would need assistance to fill a paper ballot), voters could readily see if the machine switched their vote or spoiled the ballot (such as by filling in ovals for both McCain and Obama) before putting it into the box. Why can't we adopt a hybrid solution that can help reduce the number of spoiled ballots or misvotes (such as a inadvertently moving down a row when matching a candidate's name to his/her bubble on the ballot), cost less than an all-electronic solution and provide a verifiable paper trail at the same time?
The idea of an 8-hour day (and the 40-hour week) has only been around since about the beginning of the 20th century. It's mainly originated from workers' demands in response to conditions in which many factory owners required people to work 12 or more hours a day. Later, it was reinforced by legislation requiring overtime for hours in excess of 40 in an attempt to reduce unemployment. Before industrialization, there was little concept of a "standard" workday. Farmers worked however many hours were necessary to maintain their crops and livestock, even if it meant working from sunrise to after sunset. Shopkeepers in town set their hours according to their needs.
If DST weren't an issue, wouldn't it have been more natural to set an 8-hour workday to run from 8 AM to 4 PM rather than one hour later? In the northern tier of the contiguous U.S., it's common for the sun to set between 4 and 5 PM in the winter. And the sun is almost always up before 8, except for some places close to the Canadian border or near the western edge of a time zone. A workday ending at 5 instead of 4 would have made things somewhat more complicated in a society where electric lighting hadn't yet become ubiquitous. Does anyone know how the hours 9-5 got chosen rather than some other 8-hour span?
It looks like Cowboy Neal/Hanging Chad ticket will wind up with 27 electoral votes after taking 88% of 35 million votes cast in Florida. Any other states want to endorse his candidacy by putting their elections online?
I'm amazed that Americans don't seem to remember why this country even exists. Do they teach what led up to the Revolutionary War in the 37 states that weren't the original colonies? Or does history as taught in the rest of the U.S. begin with when that territory became part of the country? I can't imagine the history curriculum in Nebraska starting in 1803 (Louisana Purchase) or one in Texas beginning in 1836 (1845?) or one in Alaska commencing with "Once upon a time there was a man named Seward...".
As ignorant as some might seem, the vast majority of American adults have either a high school diploma or a GED, and virtually all of those have had a class in U.S. history. Such a class would at the least have to include the colonial history from the end of the (what Americans call, perhaps incorrectly) the French and Indian War of the 1750s, when the colonies began to behave as part of a larger unit within the British Empire. Even if people seem to don't care about the principles of the Founding Fathers, I can't believe most haven't been exposed to them and with a little discussion understand them. Hell, Joe Sixpack would probably now realize he's entitled to the Miranda rights if he's ever arrested; from there it's pretty easy to explain that those derive from the Bill of Rights and discuss what other rights are highlighted. I say highlighted rather than listed, since the 9th and 10th amendments effectively say that the rights of the people shall include but not be limited to those described in the preceding eight amendments. I think people need to realize that it's their rights on the line as opposed to "terrorists," "child predators," or whatever buzzword is being used by the media. If people can understand that it's now fairly easy to be labeled a terrorist or a child predator and that it's becoming easier over time to be labeled as such, they might start to wonder "Could I be considered a terrorist someday?" When enough people ask themselves that question, that's when the tide will turn.
The 1950s and 1960s featured some pretty blatant abuses. If terrorist databases existed then, I would think Martin Luther King's name would be in there as well as many of whom took part in his demonstrations. The FBI certainly kept a close eye on him and invaded his privacy and that of others considered a potential threat to the federal government. Anti-Vietnam protesters were in a similar situation. And when the extent of the Nixon administration's wiretapping and surveillance operations became clear, Congress put significant restrictions on the federal government's domestic surveillance authority so that it could not be abused by future administrations. There are enough people who remember Nixon to create a plausible effort to stop and reverse the abuses of power partaken by the Bush administration.
I think most in this country have some idea of our core principles, they just need to be reminded of them. And even though many of the rights called out by the Bill of Rights have been violated in recent years, the government has not been able to significantly squash our freedom of speech. With the freedom of speech, there's still plenty of reason to hope that with the right words people can be convinced to take back their other rights.
I wouldn't use Iraq as an example of how to defeat the U.S. armed forces in all-out war. A big part of the reason for what is happening in Iraq is that the U.S. Army is (for the most part) operating under rules of engagement that attempt to minimize the number of civilians killed. When you order soliders to make a good faith effort to verify that someone is both armed and hostile before engaging them, there will be times when soldiers will end up dead because their due diligence didn't identify a suicide truck bomber in time. If the Army operated under a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, there would be very few Iraqi threats to American forces. (If they did operate under such a mindset, however, there would be moral outrage both in the U.S. and abroad, and there would be a good chance exteral forces would enter to provide much bigger threats than occasional sniper fire or IEDs).
If political matters got to the point where the federal government actually sent regular troops (Army rather than National Guard) to suppress what they considered an insurrection, my guess is that there would be few if any rules of engagement. Such a move would represent a full declaration of war upon the region or group targeted. In that case, a few shotguns or hunting rifles will only offer a few moments of time and perhaps the satisfaction of taking down someone else with you. An incident that might offer a preview of such a move is General Sherman's campaign against the Confederacy late in the Civil War. Many in his troops' path had their homes and farms burned and their livestock killed, and anyone presenting even a hint of hostility toward them were immediately captured or killed.
If the Army or, heaven forbid, the Air Force gets involved domestically the game's already over. The appropriate time for citizens' arms is much earlier on, when the opposing forces are police officers or small groups of federal agents. At that point, it may very well be possible to get the state's National Guard on the citizens' side, or at least cause enough defections to reduce the Guard's effectiveness to respond to the situation. In order for armed resistance to succeed, however, it is imperative to have the moral high ground to gain as many allies and sympathizers as possible. Without that high ground, you may encounter the general population's support of the federal government's campaign to squash the movement at any cost. And that battle is a hopeless cause for those on the receiving end of Washington's force.
American Express has an idea where certain incentives in the CEO's pay package don't kick in unless the company outperforms its competitors or the market as a whole. That way, if good times flush the entire industry with cash and American Express is just along for the ride, the executives don't get a windfall bonus (though the base compensation is still at levels most of us on Slashdot can only dream about). If American Express turns a small profit (relative to what the company has posted in rich times) during this upcoming recession as the rest of the industry gets flooded in red ink, he'll be paid for his superior performance.
Most people won't begrudge a truly innovative CEO that provided long-term growth in shareholder value getting paid tens of millions for his performance. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are prime examples of being handsomely rewarded for creating billions of dollars of shareholder value and in the latter case returning Apple to profitability after years of what seemed to be a death spiral. What pisses people off and what capitalism is supposed to discourage is getting paid that kind of money for poor performance as a CEO's company gets clobbered by competitors and kareens towards bankruptcy. An untrained monkey probably could have run Countrywide better than Angelo Mozilo in the past five years. Yet he walked away with over $100 million in stock sales. Countrywide just happened to be in the right place at the right time and when the party ended the company was forced to sell itself at a steep discount to its onetime value under threat of bankruptcy. And was Bob Nardelli really worth almost a quarter billion for having Home Depot have its market share raided by Lowe's and others? The fact that pay packages have continued to grow almost incessantly for decades with little correlation to corporate performance seems to indicate that the invisible hand of capitalism isn't influencing executive compensation committees like it's impacted almost the entire rest of the economy.
American Express' approach may not be perfect, but at least it seems to be a good-faith effort to tie its CEO's pay to quantitative measures of long-term growth. Hopefully they prove to be a model for the rest of corporate America in terms of how and for what a CEO gets paid.
There's a couple of big obstacles you'd need to overcome to make your case. First, libel is more difficult to prove if the forum is not public. It's significantly tougher to win a libel claim if a jury sees that the false information was not intended for public consumption. There is a big difference between John Doe being labeled a terrorist in a database used internally by law enforcement versus a police officer or DA telling the local media that John Doe has been engaging in terrorist activities. The latter, without concrete evidence to support the claim, is clearly libel if the information is written (slander if it's verbal). The former is much harder to build a case on, particularly if the information as presented as something like "John Doe: suspected terrorist -- consult commanding officer before engaging". In this instance, even getting all of the facts required to make a case is easier said than done.
Another huge hurdle is the fact that as far as I know there's no clear definition of terrorism in the law. With our societal climate, a Muslim saying "Allah is great!" can be suspected by many here as a terrorist. Since the laws are so vague, going to a mosque for prayer or buying gas at a Citgo (owned by the Venezuelan government, which has not had many kind words for the U.S. in recent years) could be considered activities that support terrorism by a government official with a grudge against someone. Since there are so many things that can be legally considered terrorism these days, it is very easy for the government to rebut a libel claim by proving that a certain behavior like attending an anti-war protest did happen (in most cases admitted to those in question here) and stretching the anti-terrorism laws as far as necessary to include the act.
There's a lot of issues that the inclusion of these 53 names raises, but libel is pretty far down the list and would be a tough battle to win anyway. It would be a lot more productive to use this example to lobby for more precise definitions of terrorism in future legislation and for outlawing or at least greatly restricting the gathering and usage of databases like this one in the future. Winning a lawsuit only to be sent to jail shortly thereafter on a trumped-up charge related to having filed it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
Of course, if we would let everything and everyone fail outright in a horrific manner, maybe just maybe everyone would learn deep lessons.
Unfortunately the stakes are too big now to allow everything to fall outright. The last time just about everything failed was the 1930s. As badly as the U.S. was hit by the Great Depression, many other countries that relied on trade with the U.S. got hit even worse. Two of those countries were Germany and Italy. Economic turmoil played a large role in allowing Hilter and Mussolini to assume power and wage a war to restore what they considered their rightful role as a world economic and political power. Tens of millions ended up dead as a result. The unprecedented scale of Hitler's genocide and the Americans' introduction of nuclear weapons caused the world to get together afterward and vow to never allow such a scenario to happen again. Today, China's dependence exports to the U.S. and its rapidly growing military and desire to become a world power would be the foremost area of concern in the wake of a U.S. economic collapse; given existing military tension between the U.S. and China over Taiwan and other issues, these two countries creating a World War III scenario becomes a realistic possiblity if everything hits the fan.
Our current problems come from not only missing regulations, but also from half-baked degregulation attempts and ill-formed regulations. Passing new regulations rushed into effect for the sake of winning an election won't fix anything and can in fact make these problems even worse. Making a concerted effort to come up with the right regulations is the proper response.
The current economic situation of these banks is untenable, but the main players need to be either restructured or liquidated in a controlled manner. It may not even be possible to achieve this, but it's unconscionable not to try. It's regrettable to think that we're in a situation where the failure of a couple of major banks can cause a good chunk of the American financial system (and rippling through most of the rest of the world as well) to collapse, but that's where we're at right now. If this legislation is legitimately intended to futher this goal it's worthwhile. The bailout of AIG prior to this act was only for the purpose of keeping the company alive long enough to sell off many or all its assets at decent prices so that AIG didn't take its creditors down with it. I don't know but I hope this reasoning applied to the rest of the financial sector is the rationale behind the bill. If the bailout simply keeps unprofitable companies going indefinitely on the taxpayer's dime, then the bailout will be a failure and will only make the situation worse by pushing the U.S. government itself closer to failure (by running an unsustainable deficit) while not improving the financial health of our private sector.
The most troubling aspect of this bill is the fact that it didn't provide for the creation of a committee of financial experts to examine what parts of financial policy led to our current situation and what reforms would be required to prevent the recurrence of such a scenario. Like the 9/11 Commission, these members would operate with motives other than winning elections and would be tasked to generate a no-punches-pulled report on the flaws in our regulatory system, what policy holders messed up and details on those mistakes, and the measures necessary to correct the regulatory problems. U.S. policymakers did almost nothing in the wake of the savings and loan bailout of the 1980s and make only rudimentary reforms to corporate accounting practices after the accounting shenanigans that took place around the turn of the 21st century. Not only they not learn from these experiences, they actually consciously un-learned lessons from the Depression by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act and other deregulatory measures.
I hope that we haven't passed the point of no return and that we're doomed to a full-scale economic collapse,
what do we do with the date of the election, given these issues?
It's better to have a flawed election rather than none at all. There are mechanisms already in place where a candidate take court action to have an election voided if evidence is presented indicating that malfunctioning equipment and/or fraud significantly altered the results. If a judge voids an election, he or she will order a new one and perhaps specify conditions to better assure a clean revote. Such conditions can involve exclusion of questionable equipment or mandate tried-and-true voting techniques.
Postponing an election for any reason with the possible exception of a weather emergency opens the door to new abuses. Would you want the presidential election delayed because a shipment of paper ballots some small town got lost or ruined, considering how easy it would be to intentionally cause such a situation, and that there's no way to guarantee that the election couldn't be delayed again at the new date?
If anyone present would have voted against it, they would have made a motion for a roll call vote to get their objection on the record. As far as I'm concerned, those who weren't in attendance either supported it (with the exception of Sen. Kennedy and anyone else who may have a medical reason for absence) or didn't care enough to show up to fight it, and everyone that was on the Senate floor when this bill was considered voted "Yea."
And by the way, why is the Senate even considering such legislation right now when apparently most of those on Capitol Hill believes the United States is on the verge of a reprise of the Great Depression or even worse? With the exception of a handful of Republicans, nearly everyone in Congress agrees that the big Wall Street firms need to be bailed out ("rescued" according to the spin doctors); the disagreement is about the specific terms of the companies that accept the aid and who else should be bailed out as well, such as the Big Three carmakers, homeowners, regional banks, and so on. I disagree with the idea that we're on the verge of economic collapse absent a bailout bill. Times may be tough in the next couple of years, but so were the mid 1970s and early 1980s and we as a country got through them with little lasting damage. However, anyone in Congress who legitimately believes we're in such a situation should do everything possible to come up with a solution to resolve it. And "everything possible" doesn't include proposing or advancing irrelevant legislation on copyright or any other policy issue not involving the here-and-now. Any Senator involved in any action to advance this bill in the past week has no business being in office as far as I'm concerned.