And why am I not surprised when the public buys the "think of the children" pitch hook, line and sinker; when previous measures passed on this logic have done little to anything to address the problems they've supposed to have fixed while at the same time introducing new issues?
If only people would seriously think of the children when they consider legislation that would sacrifice liberties: what kind of society do you want to leave to you're children after you're gone? Already I hear parents reminiscing about a time when they could play pickup baseball or hang out by the lake until well after sunset without a care in the world. Even though the activities may be different (e.g. playing Madden 2008 instead of touch football on the street), why can't children today get to enjoy the broad freedom to play that their parents enjoyed? And more directly on this topic, a generation who grew up with a rite of passage of driving around with friends and boyfriends/girlfriends at 16 years (and younger in certain areas) is increasingly pushing to raise the driving age to 18. The hazards of our society haven't changed that dramatically in the past 40 years; on average in the U.S. violent crime rates are signifcantly lower than they were in the early 1970s, a time considered to be the "good old days" by many Baby Boomer parents. Child abduction and pedophila have existed for much longer than the past few decades, and I'm curious to see whether there's really been an increase in incidence of these problems or just an increase of coverage of them.
While some measures like educating children about not getting into a car with strangers and our present Amber Alert system are good, imposing a surveillance society does little to improve actual safety from the ostensible hazards that prompt such measures and at the same time creates new hazards of abuse by government and corporations.
It amazes me that so many a generation that grew up in a time where the defeat of Nazism and fascism were fresh in our collective minds (their parents experienced World War II firsthand) and our freedoms were cherished as our distinguishing feature from totalitarian Communism can turn its back on the values they were raised with and build an increasingly restrictive society for their children. The same holds true of our fiscal values; a generation raised on thrift is now building an unimaginable amount of public and private debt to leave to their heirs.
While not every Baby Boomer is guilty of this type of convenient thinking, apparrently there are enough who do to cause these measures to take effect. When someone says to you "think of the children," you really should think of the next generation. If I ever have children, I'll accept a 1-in-1000 (probably even lower, though I'm too lazy to look it up) chance that they'll be abused by a teacher, priest or any other adult over a much higher chance of being abused by a know-it-all government any day of the week. And even if I don't have my own children, I'll have nieces and nephews and friends' kids to think about.
Stuff about applicants' off-hours activities should not be a factor in employment decisions. Unless there's concern for libel of previous employers or detailed nonpublic technical or financial information from previous jobs (thus raising legitimate concerns about disclosure of proprietary information) appears on a Facebook or Myspace page, it shouldn't be considered as part of a hiring decision. It doesn't matter for employment whether someone's a partier on the weekends, or which political party he belongs to; if it's not work-related a manager should not be judging his or her employees on this information.
There needs to be considerably more employee and applicant protections put in place in the U.S. on discrimination based on factors unrelated to job performance. Facebook and Myspace are the least of my worries in this regard; the potential of abuse medical records (presently protected to some extent), credit reports, and criminal records is much greater.
Medical records should be considered off-limits in regards to hiring, firing, and assignment decisions, period. It's already against the law to discriminate against someone who's blind or requires a wheelchair; it should be against the law to not hire someone for non-obvious medical conditions, such as someone with a history of cancer, or to fire someone because they've had a heart attack or are being treated for a mental disorder.
Unless a position routinely involves dealing with large amount (thousands or more) of cash or goods easily convertible to cash (e.g. jewelry or casino chips), an employer has no reason to look at one's credit report. Even in these cases where there is a potential of theft to pay debts and it's reasonable to pull a credit check, there need to be strict ground rules in place on what can be considered from that report. Nothing over two years old, and that's being generous, is relevant to one's current financial situation. The fact that employers can and some do refuse to hire someone because of a personal bankruptcy, a home foreclosure, or other financial difficulties up to 10 years old or more is a disgrace. Though not present on a credit report, there are ways of discovering bankruptcies even older than 10 years, and it's common to see questions like "Have you EVER declared bankruptcy?" on employment application.
And the check of criminal records is an abuse that the government can very easily rein in for most crimes that don't garner press coverage. Why should someone who completed a jail sentence 5 or 10 years ago for drug possession and has remained clean ever since or while drunk got out of control and ended up with an assault and battery have to be continually haunted by such a mistake? Once someone's served a setence for a crime, that person should be entitled to another chance to become a productive member of society without artificial barriers to success. While it's reasonable for a DA's office or the courts to check someone's priors for the purpose of determining appropriate punishment for an offense, there's no reason it's relevant for an employer that an applicant broke the law in his past. Marginalizing felons and other criminals can lead to further crimes; if someone's mistake dooms them to a McJob for a long time, they may very well be tempted to enter more lucrative and illegal operations. If someone's currently on probation or parole for an offense, that's reasonable to consider. However once the sentence is done, the record on for charge should be sealed to all except for those in the courts with a need to know.
To those who say don't post to Myspace, Facebook, or any other site, that's a reasonable start. But what happens if you decide to go to a friend's wild party and your name and a questionable photo (even if it's just a beer can in your hand and some empties around) pops up on that friend's site when a company does a web search on you? Or you decide to campaign for someone opposing the candidate whom your employer endorsed (and possibly contributed to) and show up as a point of contact for that campaign? There's only so much you can do to limit your web presence, and the only way to keep abuse from happening is to say that one's personal life is off-limits. All of it.
Each time I hear stories like this, it makes me think it's time for a patent moratorium in this country. Look at the the number of patents awarded each year in the U.S. From 1962-77, there were about 1 million patents granted; from 1977-92 there were just over 1 million. Since then, patents have grown seemingly exponentially; it took only 8 years (1992-2000) to get to 6 million and less than 7 to get to 7 million. Extrapolating for the number given for Jan. 1, 2008, the next million will be granted by the end of 2011. Something tells me the number of reviewers at the patent office isn't growing nearly as fast as the number of applications.
I don't think we've gotten that more inventive in the past decade. We're now seeing applications to patent business models, genes, and devices that seem to have ample prior art to deny a patent. I think we're seeing lawyers with too much time on their hands trying to patent anything under the sun. Patents have their purpose in inspiring innovation, but when they are abused as arms in an IP race they become counterproductive. Up-and-coming businesses shouldn't need to worry about hiring a world-class legal team before ramping up their engineering and sales forces just to make sure some minor detail of their generally revolutionary new widget doesn't fall into the purview of XYZ Corp's giant IP repertoire.
I say it's high time to suspend the issue of new patents for a couple of years to let everything that's in the pipeline now get a decent review. And after that make the application more transparent to allow those who see prior art relative to an application to make their beliefs known to the patent office. The way we're going, it won't be long before we see patents awarded for "brand new" materials like oxygen, carbon, and iron.
If the amount of BS in the patent system continues to grow, eventually patents will become useless in terms of truly fostering innovation. Already, some people don't see any moral objection to infringing copyright since they feel the copyright holders aren't living up to their side of the bargain by allowing their IP to become public domain. People will start infringing patents on moral grounds if they're viewed as simply an artificial barrier to entry in a market rather than a means to allow limited-term profit from a truly groundbreaking invention.
So it seems like you don't come out ahead by reporting, you actually lose money...
You come out ahead until you get caught, in which case you're looking at having to pay the tax, interest and penalties on pain of tax evasion charges. If you get caught a second time (i.e. after you've been cited for a previous "underpayment") or the tax in question is large enough, your state's tax authorities might decide to press criminal tax evasion charges right from the get-go.
Don't think you you're going to get caught? That's about to change as a result of the recent passed housing bill. This bill contained a provision to report nearly all online merchants' credit card transactions to the IRS; it's pretty hard to survive as an online business if you're not making more than 200 credit card sales a year or grossing $10,000 in credit card transations. Since the vast majority of Congress represents states that have a sales tax, if this data isn't already being shared with the state governments, expect it to happen in a bill in the next congressional session.
Five years from now, it's going to be very easy for states to find out their residents' out-of-state transactions, confirm the shipping address is within the state, and bill people for unpaid use taxes. If you hate the idea of paying sales and use taxes that much, you can move to one of the handful of states that doesn't have a sales tax. Otherwise, while it's been nice to catch a break from easy enforcement for the past 10 years, it's time to realize that buying online "tax free" in most states is basically tax evasion and that eventually Mr. Taxman will be looking for his cut.
I don't like Bush either; in fact in a reply to another story I indicated that I believed he's been the most aggressive president in U.S. history in attacking our civil liberties. However, I think your post goes way over the line.
Unless you've got evidence to support your claim that the Supreme Court and various Florida election officials were part of a conspiracy to install Bush as a puppet explicitly to support the 9/11 attacks, your post is simply inflammatory and borders on libelious. First of all, treason is pretty well defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. Absent evidence that the justices of the Supreme Court or those designing or counting ballots in Florida were planning to levy war against the United States or knowingly gave comfort to al Qaeda, your allegation that these people committed treason is patently false. Your assertion that the inauguration of Bush "led directly" to the 9/11 attacks is dubious at best. al Qaeda had been openly hostile to the U.S. long before G. W. Bush entered the picture. Using your logic, one can just as easily claim Clinton's election in 1996 led to two U.S. embassies in Africa getting bombed and a destroyer getting attacked in 2000.
While the 2000 election was questionable, only the most far-out conspiracy theorists claim that the 2004 election was materially rigged. Believe it or not, a decent number of people actually liked Bush in 2004; while that portion is smaller now, according to Gallup and other polls more people approve of Bush's current performance (albeit at record-low ratings in the 20s for a president) than that of the now Democrat-led Congress (whose approval rating is in danger of falling into single digits). I'm pretty sure Senator Kerry or another leading Democratic spokesperson (Obama, Clinton, etc.) would have called the Republicans out front-and-center upon discovery of the smallest bit of hard evidence of rigging, particularly after the disputed 2000 election. Haven't heard a peep from them about that. And don't give me any B.S. about censorship from the White House of such a comment from a Democrat; if the White House held such a firm grasp on the press, there's no way casualty numbers or stories of suicide bombings and other negative publicity of the Iraq war would ever be reported on the major networks.
Of everything that you list that Bush has done, only the Iraq war can be validly attributed to him as a personal misdeed during his term of office. The subprime (and the broader financial crisis) and our rotting infrastructure are the result of the federal government overall being asleep at the wheel for the past 25 years or more. President Carter was the last president to seriously look at our energy policy. Since then, both the White House and Capitol Hill have basically nixed every major proposal to come their way. Continually improving CAFE standards, alternative fuels, recommitting to nuclear power, drilling off the U.S. coastline and in Alaska? Any or all of these could have been passed in the 15 years before G.W. Bush even set foot in the White House, and we as a country have dropped the ball. Alan Greenspan probably had a much bigger role in getting the country into its private-sector financial mess than any of the presidents under which he served (Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton). If you blame Bush for the subprime problems, to be fair you have to blame Clinton for the dot-com bubble and resulting crash.
Yes, this country is in a mess, and we'll almost certainly be better off as soon as the current resident of the White House returns home to rural Texas. However, B.S. allegations and vapid invective won't do anything to help clean it up, and will most likely compound the problem.
The no-fly list is also nothing compared to the rest of what the Bush administration had pushed through with the help of a Congress that either supports him or too spineless to stand up to him.
I don't know of people that were held indefinitely overseas without access to counsel or even a description of what they've been charged with as a result of alleged drug dealing. The Reagan and Clinton administration actually appeared to respect the anti-domestic spying laws passed in the wake of Nixon's abuses; now on top of spying laws that appear to be unconstitutional on their face, Bush's people are stepping beyond the modest limits set by their own laws.
Bush may not have opened the action, but he's certainly raised the stakes with the PATRIOT Act, his watered-down FISA law, and signing statements effectively saying he's not going to obey certain sections of laws that show up on his desk. It's not like he could have vetoed those laws and asked Congress to draft versions that Bush approved -- oh wait, he could have.
Now we've got the Nixon-era racketeering laws (not specifically drug-related, though he was certainly opposed to illicit drugs), the asset forfeiture you mentioned, the extremely harsh and internally inconsistent drug laws, and now a return of domestic spying and indefinite detention. The last, which before Bush hadn't been seen in earnest since WWII, is an especially troubling development. Now it's conceivable to spend the rest of your life in a military camp without trial if you're judged to be an enemy combatant.
Invasion of privacy and property are bad, but infringing on someone's physical freedom is much, much worse. And unfortunately, I agree that many judges don't even seem to care what the Constitution says; it wouldn't shock me at all if despite the 13th Amendment some federal court decided slavery was once again legal.
Just because his predecessors infringed liberties doesn't give G. W. Bush or his successors the right to do so. And I would argue that our current president has been the most aggressive in history, with Nixon a close second.
We now have "wars" against terrorism, drugs, child pornography, drunk driving, and probably some other domestic causes; in addition to two actual wars and possibly two more on the horizon (Iran and Georgia). Why can't some general come out and say that if you spend all your time and money starting wars, you won't win any of them? I guess our recent commanders-in-chief don't seem to grasp that concept.
I didn't see the routines, so I don't know if there were other major errors in Li Shanshan's routine. However, according to the Code of Points a fall counts as a 0.8 point deduction, and your link gave Li's B-score as 8.3. So if she performed the rest of the routine comparably to most of the other entrants, she very easily could have had a 9.1-0.8 = 8.3 B-score.
The little of the gymnastics I saw on NBC could have benefited from explanations of minor flaws and degree of difficulty. Being almost completely ignorant of gymnastics, I don't know the difference between simply difficult maneuvers that most world-class gymnasts can usually perform (the stuff that will get someone a start value in the low 6's) versus the truly state-of-the art maneuvers that only the best of the finalists can pull off (the routines that get a start value of 7 or higher). Also, to the casual observer, it can be difficult to differentiate between routines with an execution score of 9.1 versus one that scores 9.3; without an explanation of what the judges are looking for the scoring can seem capricious.
The scoring rule that bothered me more was the tiebreaking procedures. Not the rule itself, but the fact that virtually no one was aware of how ties were to be broken. At the outset, not even the gymnasts with the same score seemed to know why He Kexin beat Nastia Liukin. Especially at the Olympics, the officials need to make it clear to all contestants about how the event will be scored and how any ties will be broken. And the fact that the IOC directed the FIG to break ties after the Atlanta Games doesn't help; everything I've seen indicates that the FIG would have awarded dual golds at any other world-level competition to gymnasts making the same score. Ironically, Liukin's father tied for first in 1988; dual golds were awarded in those Games. Why wasn't an arcane tiebreaking procedure invoked in the womens 100m race this year, where two Jamaican women tied for silver?
Let me highlight some ideas for future complaints:
"As has been reported around the net today, we can confirm that [Duke Nukem Forever] has indeed passed final certification with Microsoft on Friday the 15th of August (on our first try, no less). That means the game is done â" it is now in the hands of Microsoft."
At least in the US, there's a big difference in the training that an average police officer gets versus the professions of medicine and law. Except for the largest departments (the ones in major cities), often what's required is simply passing a general-knowledge civil service exam and a few months in the police academy. Surgeons, other doctors, and lawyers go through several years of school before starting a de facto apprenticeship (residency for doctors, being a "gopher" for an established law firm, though at least the latter is paid decently). Only after they have shown they have mastered their profession are they allowed to work on their own.
There is also an oversight board for these professions that at least nominally upholds ethical and performance standards in each profession. For instance doctors are responsible to the AMA and state licensing boards; lawyers to their state(s)' bar. At best, police departments are accountable to their city officials and the courts. In practice, many cities look the other way on their police's actions, and the court system is hit-or-miss in allowing a plaintiff a chance to state his case.
If a surgeon commits a fundamental error like leaving a tool inside a patient, he's at the least facing a major lawsuit and possibly dismissal from his job. If a lawyer violates client-attorney privilege, he's going to have his work cut of for him in regards to convince the bar to keep him on board. Typically when the press finds out about major misconduct (e.g. taking cash to ignore a big drug deal, beating up people in handcuffs) by the police, the punishment consists of reassignment to a desk job or possibly a short (30 day or less) suspension.
There's a huge difference between law and medicine and our police forces. If it took two or three years of training to become a police officer and they could be reliably trusted to understand citizens' constitutional and other rights, you'd have a point. However, by and large the training requirements are much lower in most of the US and there's usually much less accountability than there is in the professions you named.
This reminds me of the Fight Club when Ed Norton's character is explaining to the woman on the plane that if the total legal liability is less than the cost of recalling all the defective cars, a recall is not issued.
If only that mindset were restricted to the realm of fiction. I think "Fight Club" was alluding to the Ford Pinto fiasco. I'm sure there's countless other instances where people's safety has been knowingly or negligently disregarded in regards to the bottom line.
Not being paid for overtime sucks, but if you're making $80K a year and working an average of 50 hours a week, you're still a lot better off than the majority of the U.S. population. Many blue-collar workers are lucky to reach $50K doing 60 or 70 hours a week (this typically involves 2 jobs, as many companies now cap employees' hours at 40 to avoid paying time-and-half). Unless you made the mistake of signing some ridiculous non-compete upon taking your position, there's a variety of ways of dealing with your situation.
In terms of protecting employees, think the Department of Labor needs to focus on OSHA violations first (safety and health concerns should always trump concerns over pay), and then FLSA starting with employees making the least amount of money (e.g. fast food and retail workers). The "Fight Club" concern of defective products is the responsibility of another department (Dept. of Commerce and/or DoJ), but warrants equal concern as enforcing OSHA. Someone making $13/hr. that's denied time-and-a-half or is falsely classified as a "manager" making $28K for working 60 hours a week is much more affected by these abuses than those working IT. In many places, $13/hr. ($26K/yr.) is enough for an OK living living for one person, and barely enough for a family of three to survive (parent and 2 kids). Getting $19.50 for each hour over 40 and/or being available to pick up a second job makes a huge difference to these people. Compared to the day-to-day issues those working in the retail sector often face, I'll take my problems over theirs any day of the week.
The big difference between the labor laws and car theft is that law enforcement actively investigates car thefts as they are reported and will make a good-faith effort to arrest someone. And good luck capitalizing on your gains; unless you know all the nooks and crannies of your local black market, trying to sell your stolen car or its parts is liable to drawing further attention by the cops.
As suggested by TFA, employers are often able to settle FLSA cases for less than the amount of back pay in question. This means that it's apparently difficult for an individual employee to win his or her case in court. Also, violating the FLSA will rarely cause someone to end up in jail or cause a Fortune 500 company to wince in pain.
Sometimes I wish I hadn't bought a place in Marlborough in 2005. Shortly afterward, the city council tried to pass the harshest sex-offender law in the state and among the harshest in the country. This law, if enacted, would have barred Level II and III offenders from living, working, or even existing in 98% of the city. The mayor vetoed it, and then a nominally reduced version was passed over her veto a few months later. The 1,000 foot exclusion from any place children congregate (as opposed to 2,500 feet) still bars those on the registry from setting foot in 80% of the city's area for any purpose, including the city's large mall and the vast majority of other businesses. Laws like these imposed on people who often have either committed minor offenses (e.g. urinating on the side of the road) or have been punished rather severely already (e.g. 5 or 10 years in the state's maximum security prison for a rape) discourage people from re-entering society and can inspire more severe crime. If a "Level III" offender is really that much of a risk for finding the closest 7-year old kid and forcing his way on him/her, the proper place for that offender is a 6x10 cell for the rest of his life. Otherwise, once he's served his sentence, give him a chance to start his life over.
And now they go ahead with this kind of crap? I don't care how the stuff was found or how hazardous it was. If it were a genuine hazard, proper response by the FD would have been to give the guy 14 days to get the offending chemicals off of the property. Usually zoning infractions like are handled by a cease-and-desist order that can be challenged in court to determine if the facts of the case really constitute a zoning violation. Ten years ago, that kind of seizure without wouldn't have flown even if the contraband was pure cocaine, and the war on drugs has lasted a lot more than ten years.
I hope the mayor speaks out on the way this went down. When I found out about the sex offender thing just before last year's election, I decided she was worth voting for re-election. (I'm not on this list by the way, I'm just a fierce opponent of it since it's the prime example of the left wing being just as anxious to infringe the Constitution as the right wing in this country).
So the only way federal law will follow California law is with a statute. Even then, it would have to involve interstate commerce. Since non-compete agreements usually have to be limited in geographic scope to be enforceable, the law would basically have application only near interstate borders.
First of all, non-competes need not be necessarily limited geographically to be upheld. They can limited in other ways; state laws vary on what's enforceable and what's not. In many states other than California, a clause along the lines of "Employee shall not compete for companies A, B, and C anywhere within the United States for three years following termination of employment" can be upheld, unless it can be shown that those three companies dominate the employee's market to the point where the employee would have considerable difficulty finding any position in his field.
Second, virtually everything these days is considered interstate commerce. The federal government has managed to void California's marijuana legalization efforts by applying the "interstate commerce" clause, even when the marijuana grown within the state by Californians and sold within the state to other Californians.
In practice, the DEA are unlikely to knock on your door regarding a "dime bag", but if you've got a house full of weed, don't expect the laws of Sacramento to save you. In fact, state and local authorities may very well be coereced into enforcing federal law; if a police department is aware that a certain person is dealing drugs illegally and looks the other way, they face possible liability for obstruction of justice.
The only way to get a reading one way or another at the federal level would be if a person signed a non-compete outside of California, then moved to California for work, and then got sued by his former employer. Such a suit, assuming it's upheld through the other state's court system, would then be virtually guaranteed a trial in some federal court. Until then, you may want to consider avoiding such contracts and/or run them by a lawyer in your jurisdiction to assess what risks you might face after you're done with the company in question.
that it is not the CEO's fault that you or other people have the wrong skills.
In many cases what you're saying is incorrect. How about applying the same logic to companies as you're applying to individuals. Yes, many people can do more to improve their marketability, but large companies can do a heck of a lot more to improve the quality of their workforce rather than offering sub-market wages for jobs and complaining about a shortage of "qualified workers".
Set aside the issue of compensation and focus on skills. It's in a company's best interest to ensure that once employees are on board, that they have the skills and tools available to be as productive as possible. Got a bunch of C programmers on your payroll and want to get into the Java applications business? Teach them Java! If they're proficient at C, they're smart enough to learn Java and become eventually become proficient. It's a lot cheaper to bring in someone to teach a Java course and buy reference material than it is to embark on a search for new employees, especially when sales opportunities are lost during the recruitment effort. To use your turn of phrase: "I know, it costs money. Well duh, its an investment." Instead many companies in this situation turn potentially valuable talent away, even when ambitious employees make their own efforts to improve their skill set. Or worse yet, go to Washington and asked for the rules to be changed.
As far as toys like your "super cell plan" are concerned, there's plenty of fat in the in the corporate world as well. Use of corporate jets for use by executives' families' vacations? Mahogany furniture in thousand-square foot personal offices? A company can pay for a course for dozens of employees to learn a new programming language or technology for what it pays in fuel costs alone for many of their CxO's vacations. Not to mention outrageous pay, perks, and severance packages many CxO's get, regardless of their performance.
I don't have a problem with innovative founders and executives making big money. Many CEO's have brought many millions, and in some cases billions of dollars to their companies and shareholders. I don't take offense I hear about a CEO making $50 million a year that's turned a small business into a Fortune 500 company or turned a large company on the brink of bankruptcy into a profitable concern. I do get PO'd, however, when poor performance is rewarded immensely at the expense of shareholders and employees. Like, the CEO of Home Depot taking home $200 million for having HD's butt handed to him by Lowe's Corp. Or Angelo Mozillo who focused much more in liquidating his 9-figure stake of Countrywide stock in 2006-07 rather than on his company's lending standards that eventually crippled the company. In these cases and many others, the CEO's decisions hurt the company. A CEO of an IT company can very easily say, "we're falling behind because our employes lack skills X, Y, and Z. Let's work on training them and improving our bottom line." When a CEO says "Sorry for the larger-than-expected loss this quarter! There's a skill shortage on the market and there's nothing we can do about it," then he or she IS to blame.
Yes, many people can do more to improve their career, but many companies can do a lot more than bitch and moan about it. Especially considering the assymmetry of options that corporations have that people don't have. When a company offshores an operation to Country X to take advantage of lower labor costs there, do you have the option of moving to Country X and working for that company or in that field? In most cases, the answer is no.
The blame game works both ways, and I'm tired of hearing Corporate America saying that the only answer is "foreign labor," rather than in making private investments and supporting public investments (i.e. improved education) that would allow them to sustainably compete.
From the parent's quote: "...unless that search is based on a reasonable suspicion regarding that person" (empahsis added)
For my tax dollar, the wording has to be a lot stronger than that to be worthwhile, particularly when the owner of such a "device or media" is a U.S. citizen or resident alien. Replacing "reasonable suspicion" with "search warrant" would be ideal; barring that the phrase "probable cause" would be an improvement over the status quo. For non-resident aliens, the only consequence of refusing a search on an official's "reasonable suspicion" should be denial of entry to the U.S.: no seizures, arrests, or any other punitive measure unless the subject has demonstrably engaged in other, unrelated wrongdoing.
Considering that courts have at least implicitly found such border seizures to be "reasonable" by the 4th Amendment standard (I don't know of any case where a court has barred such a search or seizure in a point-of-entry related context), I don't see how this specific language would qualify as an improvement. Such language, if enacted, would just be a matter of putting lipstick on the pig.
I don't see what new information provides this in that regard. It's always been very difficult to win financial damages from the federal government in civil court. Even when a court finds that a person's constitutional rights have been violated, the relief typically involves (a) a cease and desist order enjoining the government from continuing the behavior called out in the lawsuit, and/or (b) at best compensatory damages, for instance when someone's property is seized, the court may order it returned in similar condition or an equivalent payment made in its stead.
People have been wrongly convicted and spent decades in jail, and even when the prosecution probably knew its evidence was bogus or at least dubious, all the "inmate" was granted by the court was a release from jail. Most of them don't get any financial compensation, any support for their re-entry into the community, and many of them don't even get an apology from the agency that sent them to prison. (Some states now allow such lawsuits, but as far as I know the federal government and the majority of states still don't allow these lawsuits to proceed). And with the "war on drugs" and RICO-related legislation, a person can be acquitted of a crime, yet have personal or real property seized afterwards because it allegedly participated in a crime. All the person gets in "compensation" is the admonishment "You may not be guilty of any crime, but you shouldn't have bought a house/car/whatever that's a venue for drug dealing/money laundering/other crime!"
Now if someone brought suit on a 4th Amendment related complaint and got told by a U.S. court: "The federal government is a sovereign entity and neither it nor its employees acting in official capacities can be party to a lawsuit", then we've got a BIG problem. Otherwise, this is just another instance of what most Americans should have known for decades: that it's pretty hard to win cash from the U.S. government in the courtroom.
Just because it's worse in the UK doesn't make it right in the US. The US was founded as a reaction to the abuses of the Crown government, and for 150 years or so the US government actually tended to pay attention to personal rights. How times have changed: the only differences between the surveillance societies on each side of the pond are a combination of timing (if it's not already done in the US, it's coming) and transparency (similar stuff happened covertly by the pre-Watergate FBI and may very well be going on now).
At least there's a public law in the UK stating what can be done with your mobile phone conversations. If the contents of one of your conversations was taken out of context to trump up some bogus charge against you, I would hope your defense attorney can have access to the call for the purpose of exonerating you. The Bush administration could conceivably be doing the exact same thing covertly right now, and there would be no recourse when one of your conversations causes you to be indefinitely detained as an "enemy combatant." Under a covert surveillance program, the fact that a call was recorded would be "officially" false, meaning your defense attorney would be SOL. The mindset I have with these measures is if an abuse can be imagined, it's most likely already being practiced.
Seriously, to say "At least it's not as bad as London" isn't a valid excuse to me. Or when people get sent away for 20 years for having a gram of crack on them (particularly when the sentence for having an equal amount of equipotent powder would be MUCH less) saying: "Well, we're not as bad as China; they'd probably execute you over there for it!" That kind of thinking needs to stop in this country, otherwise we won't even look back to see what freedom was like. For all the liberty that was taken "for the children," I'm not having any kids since I can't imagine how horrendous the US might be in 20 years.
if you don't think so, stick around. the "i have nothing to hide" argument bears out to be no good reason.
If they don't have a reason already, reciting the "nothing to hide" argument can be considered probable cause in itself. If a suspect says he's got nothing to hide, then that means to a cop that the suspect IS hiding something and just trying to use a red herring to divert the cop's attention.
And the Democrats have had 18 months to call President Bush out for the Iraq war that he started on largely false pretenses and the house of cards called the subprime and Alt-A mortgage crisis that he allowed to fester to the point where major firms (e.g. IndyMac, Bear Stearns) have collapsed and many larger ones across the economy are threatened. What have they done to address what they call the evils of Bush's first 6 years in office? Virtually nothing. Speaker Pelosi very easily could have pushed for an impeachment trial, or at least a special investigation of the president's claims leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What happened? Nothing other than some vapid sound bites.
On the energy front, I've heard little serious talk of alternatives to drilling in ANWR proposed by Bush. I can understand the opposition to drilling there, especially since that would be a stopgap measure at best. But simply voting that procedure down isn't going to fix our energy problem. Without a counterproposal, anti-ANWR advocates are just compounding the problem. The reason why we're where we are is because all we've let Congress do is say "No, no, no!" on anything related to energy. Nuclear plants? Those will cause Chernobyls to become a monthly occurrence in the US! CAFE standards with teeth? Only the Japanese know how to build cars that get more than 20 MPG, and we can't risk American manufacturing jobs! Wind farms? Putting 380-foot turbines 10 miles off the coast will destroy our beautiful coastal scenery and damage our tourism industry!
So I suppose you think there's no reason whatsoever that the now-Democratic led Congress has an approval rating that's about 15 points lower than a president who's considered by many to be among the worst in US history?
Any high-ground advantage the Democrats may have had when reclaiming Congress has disappeared. Yeah, the Republicans were on a witch-hunt to try to derail a very popular president with a sex scandal, and wasted time and breath on various other pittances. They had a golden opportunity to advance their agenda against a weakened Republican party, but descended to the same level. Both the Capitol and the White House are covered in the same mud, and Bush and Pelosi are but two of the slimeballs slithering in it. If you think either party is righteous, then you've got a lot of learning to do.
I think all 535 members of Congress have sowed the seeds for a boot up their behinds, and I hope a good portion of them taste the electorate's shoelaces beginning this November. I say: a pox on both their houses.
Amen. I think we need to remind the government of that.
Dare I say it - is it time for another 1776?
Unfortunately, most of the Western countries that secessionist Americans might seek alliances with are on the same side as Washington D.C. or don't like Americans in general any more because of the crap we've pulled in the past 7 years. The UK is at least as far down the surveillance and corporatist society as the U.S.A., and places like Australia and Canada seem willing to follow us in our footsteps. France and most of the rest of Europe wouldn't shed a tear if a major American city got nuked by al Qaeda, and as an American I don't blame them for this attitude.
The only reason why 1776 worked was we had French support. In the 1860's the Confederacy made the mistake of levying war while not being supported by a major world power (although the UK leaned in that direction at the start of the war, the issue of slavery turned the UK away from supporting the CSA as the war progressed). Although they got off to quite a nice start, the Washington D.C.-led army eventually crushed the South to the point where it took nearly a century (until after WWII) for the South to recover.
Violence is called for only when all other options have been exhausted. Otherwise, popular support for a violent act will always fall on the side of the state and against the perpetrator and will cause the movement behind the act to wither and die. When all peaceable options have been exhausted (e.g. criminal trials become farces, election results show the winner taking 98% of a turnout of 125%, demonstrations routinely becoming repeats of the Kent State massacre), then popular opinion will support or at least condone violence against the state. For a couple of examples of groups that challenged the U.S. and are now ridiculed by the majority of the American population, look at the Branch Davidians in Waco or the Michigan Militia. Unless a movement can amass the support of an overwhelming (like 80%+) portion of the American people or the official support of a major world power (China, Russia, UK, France, and maybe a couple others), taking on the U.S. government with head-on violence is pure suicide and will guarantee things will become even worse off for those you leave behind.
There are a lot of things that need to change in this country, but you need to ask yourself: (a) is war the only way left that change can be effected in this country, and (b) if so, is such a war winnable and/or are things so bad off that I'm willing to die in a futile war rather than maintain hope for an alternative solution? The answer to "a" for me is "no", but by the end of 2010 there may be a need for me to rethink my answer.
And a point I attempted to make before, this also makes moves in the direction of enlisting all US (and other) providers of goods and services into government espionage programs which makes spies of these people. It is a dangerous and slippery slope short-sighted-Bush has taken us down and it's time to stop the slide before it starts.
(empahsis added)
You're giving the White House way too much benefit of the doubt. Given the measures Bush's administration took to get Congress to sign on to the Iraq war, his insistence of getting the PATRIOT Act re-upped with little changes other than removal of most of the sunset clauses, and everything else that he's done in the past seven years, I'm not convinced I'd call this short-sighted. He's laying the groundwork to allow McCain to continue the U.S. along the path that Bush started to follow, or to set Obama up for a massive defeat in 2012 for being considered "soft on terrorism" for any measures taken to dismantle Bush's initiatives.
And most Democrats are just as fervent to roll out the surveillance society; they just have different targets for the surveillance. The GOP claims to be after "terrorists" and "drug dealers"; the Democrats seem to want to eliminate "child predators" and "copyright infringers". Over the next 20 years, expect all four quoted terms in the previous sentence to be interpreted increasingly broadly. Ms. Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have had ample time to either block such measures or at least make sure their opposition is widely covered by the press, and have chosen not to do so.
It's time to say F them all. I'm voting against all incumbents this November and voting Libertarian wherever given the option.
If you want to attack the Mass. legislature on something, gay marriage would be a much more valid criticism.
The referendum in question was to roll back the 5.95% tax rate enacted during the state financial crisis of the late 1980s to 5% in 3 steps. The first two rollbacks to 5.6% and 5.3% were allowed to take place; as the recession began, it was decided that it would be fiscally unwise to take the last step to the pre-1988 5%. This was a law, not a constitutional amendment; there is little controversy about the legislature's right to repeal or amend the referendum measure.
Compare that to what happened when the legislature, by use of parliamentary motions, decided to block the progress of the gay marriage ban. If they had the guts, the state constitution would have allowed them to defeat the referendum amendment outright (though they'd need 3/4 of the combined House and Senate to do this). Instead they tried to pull a fast one and brush the amendment under the rug. When the SJC, who started the whole gay marriage business in 2003, insisted that a vote on the amendment take place, barely half the convention actually followed through on the court order. (The majority then voted against the ban, but since over 25% supported it, the amendment is still on track to make it on the 2008 ballot).
Personally, I'm neutral on gay marriage; the biggest problems I have with Mass. gay marriage was the method in which it was enacted (a court decision rather than legislation) and the legislature's refusal to address it. In the past few years, I've welcomed it more, especially since I've seen that gays being married in my state doesn't make me any worse off than before, and Mass. isn't trying to force its marriages onto other less gay-friendly states (a 1913 law actually prohibits out of staters from being married here if such a marriage would be illegal in the parties' home state).
If it does make it onto the ballot, I'm going to vote against the ban. If it's not there when I vote in 2008, I'm going to have a lot of nasty words for those on Beacon Hill and perhaps a desire to run against them in 2010.
I think that people with FEDERALIST leanings are more to blame. Isolated pockets of socialism are not damaging when they are confined. At that point, it becomes a choice, rather than an obligation. For example, if California decided they wanted welfare, excelelnt. It is the nationwide push for such things that cause problems.
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Presumably, there would develop a certain state of homeostasis between locations as like minded individuals move together and learn to inter operate with other groups of unlike minded people.
Unfortunately based on the civil rights history in this country, individual states haven't had a very good track record of making sure all their citizens are afforded basic human rights. We've tried this technique with slavery, and all that accomplished was such resentment between states that embraced slavery versus those that had previously abolished it that nearly half a million people died fighting over it.
It took 80 years for this country to recognize the fact that states had the same duty as the federal government to uphold the rights granted to all citizens in the Constitution and its amendments. It took about another 80 before serious efforts to enforce the 14th amendment were made. In 1950, blatant racism was rampant throughout the South and most Northern cities and prejudice against Catholics, Jews, homosexuals, and other groups was common across the country. It wasn't until the federal courts started to recognize "separate but equal" was a bunch of BS and acted to get states in line that blacks started getting even a modicum of rights in most parts of this country.
Even now, I suspect nothing would have come out of the Rodney King beating, the Charles Stuart case in Boston ("blame it on a black man"), or the Matthew Shepard tragedy if the feds weren't there to enforce people's rights. Many in those areas supported the injustices committed, and DA's and AG's would be unwilling or unable to successfully prosecute such cases.
It's one thing to leave tax policy, welfare, alcohol laws, and most business to the states, provided the laws in theory and in fact treat everyone equally. However, when cities and states fail to respect the rights of citizens, someone needs to hold them accountable. And unfortunately when people really get the shaft, they're incapable of doing much about it. Think not being able to vote because one's polling place ran out of ballots or gets mysteriously closed for "health reasons." Or being denied an education so basic that they're incapable of using the Yellow Pages to look up a job training center or a welfare office. When you've got people that are so poor in these circumstances that they're incapable of affording a $20 ticket on Greyhound, the idea that people will be able to move around to better themselves doesn't go very far.
The balance of power may be somewhat biased towards Washington, but completely stripping the federal government of its powers has its own issues that are equally scary as the the trend we've seen in recent years. Are 50 tyrannies any better than one? Not as far as I'm concerned. The federal government needs to check against the abuses of individual states and the states need to check against abuses of the federal government
And the states do have a method of recourse against the federal government. Contrary to popular belief, Congress is not required to amend the Constitution. If 34 states pass legislation proposing and amendment and 38 state constitutional conventions then ratify it, the amendment is enacted, Pennsylvania Avenue be damned. It's a shame that we haven't been inventive enough yet to use this technique against Washington.
"Against WHO, God damn it? You don't even know who your enemy is. Stop trying to pretend you're fighting a 'war'!"
Crashing a plane into the Pentagon, sailing an explosive-filled boat into a United States destroyer, and detonating truck bombs outside American embassies were overt attacks on the United States. In addition to killing civilians, as ordinary terrorism entails, these attacks sought to directly injure the United States government. Especially when self-described members of al Qaeda use terms like "jihad" and "holy war" to describe these actions, to me that's as clear as war gets.
Using your definition, I guess the Catholic Church could have never embarked in acts of war during the 11th through 14th centuries. After all, by then the Church's de jure power across Europe had nearly vanished. The fact that various kingdoms across the continent who had little in common other than their religious beliefs united to take part in the Crusades must mean that their Church-sanctioned campaigns were only random acts of violence, not war.
Even though al Qaeda is not a sovereign state per se does not disqualify them as being a legitimate enemy of the United States. Many people, especially those opposed to the war in Iraq, find it easy to get that most of the world, including Russia and Pakistan, initially backed the American action in Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks as a justified military operation. It wasn't until after the U.S. started its hissy fit and later open hostilities against Saddam Hussein that the majority of the world began disapproving American policy ostensibly against terrorism.
Its sad that the Bush administration has gotten so sidetracked. If he had stayed the original course, I think the (Western) world really would be safer than terrorism than it is today.
What these rules do is reduce the advantage that the majority culture has, not to give an advantage to minorities. Sure, it feels bad to have that happen, but this is like someone being given a 30 meter advantage in a 100 meter dash and complaning because they used to get a 40 meter advantage.
Apparently you haven't seen American white males compete in the track events of the Olympics recently. If you did, then it would be pretty clear that the minimum head start one of them would need to take home a medal would be 35 meters.:)
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And why am I not surprised when the public buys the "think of the children" pitch hook, line and sinker; when previous measures passed on this logic have done little to anything to address the problems they've supposed to have fixed while at the same time introducing new issues?
If only people would seriously think of the children when they consider legislation that would sacrifice liberties: what kind of society do you want to leave to you're children after you're gone? Already I hear parents reminiscing about a time when they could play pickup baseball or hang out by the lake until well after sunset without a care in the world. Even though the activities may be different (e.g. playing Madden 2008 instead of touch football on the street), why can't children today get to enjoy the broad freedom to play that their parents enjoyed? And more directly on this topic, a generation who grew up with a rite of passage of driving around with friends and boyfriends/girlfriends at 16 years (and younger in certain areas) is increasingly pushing to raise the driving age to 18. The hazards of our society haven't changed that dramatically in the past 40 years; on average in the U.S. violent crime rates are signifcantly lower than they were in the early 1970s, a time considered to be the "good old days" by many Baby Boomer parents. Child abduction and pedophila have existed for much longer than the past few decades, and I'm curious to see whether there's really been an increase in incidence of these problems or just an increase of coverage of them.
While some measures like educating children about not getting into a car with strangers and our present Amber Alert system are good, imposing a surveillance society does little to improve actual safety from the ostensible hazards that prompt such measures and at the same time creates new hazards of abuse by government and corporations.
It amazes me that so many a generation that grew up in a time where the defeat of Nazism and fascism were fresh in our collective minds (their parents experienced World War II firsthand) and our freedoms were cherished as our distinguishing feature from totalitarian Communism can turn its back on the values they were raised with and build an increasingly restrictive society for their children. The same holds true of our fiscal values; a generation raised on thrift is now building an unimaginable amount of public and private debt to leave to their heirs.
While not every Baby Boomer is guilty of this type of convenient thinking, apparrently there are enough who do to cause these measures to take effect. When someone says to you "think of the children," you really should think of the next generation. If I ever have children, I'll accept a 1-in-1000 (probably even lower, though I'm too lazy to look it up) chance that they'll be abused by a teacher, priest or any other adult over a much higher chance of being abused by a know-it-all government any day of the week. And even if I don't have my own children, I'll have nieces and nephews and friends' kids to think about.
Stuff about applicants' off-hours activities should not be a factor in employment decisions. Unless there's concern for libel of previous employers or detailed nonpublic technical or financial information from previous jobs (thus raising legitimate concerns about disclosure of proprietary information) appears on a Facebook or Myspace page, it shouldn't be considered as part of a hiring decision. It doesn't matter for employment whether someone's a partier on the weekends, or which political party he belongs to; if it's not work-related a manager should not be judging his or her employees on this information.
There needs to be considerably more employee and applicant protections put in place in the U.S. on discrimination based on factors unrelated to job performance. Facebook and Myspace are the least of my worries in this regard; the potential of abuse medical records (presently protected to some extent), credit reports, and criminal records is much greater.
Medical records should be considered off-limits in regards to hiring, firing, and assignment decisions, period. It's already against the law to discriminate against someone who's blind or requires a wheelchair; it should be against the law to not hire someone for non-obvious medical conditions, such as someone with a history of cancer, or to fire someone because they've had a heart attack or are being treated for a mental disorder.
Unless a position routinely involves dealing with large amount (thousands or more) of cash or goods easily convertible to cash (e.g. jewelry or casino chips), an employer has no reason to look at one's credit report. Even in these cases where there is a potential of theft to pay debts and it's reasonable to pull a credit check, there need to be strict ground rules in place on what can be considered from that report. Nothing over two years old, and that's being generous, is relevant to one's current financial situation. The fact that employers can and some do refuse to hire someone because of a personal bankruptcy, a home foreclosure, or other financial difficulties up to 10 years old or more is a disgrace. Though not present on a credit report, there are ways of discovering bankruptcies even older than 10 years, and it's common to see questions like "Have you EVER declared bankruptcy?" on employment application.
And the check of criminal records is an abuse that the government can very easily rein in for most crimes that don't garner press coverage. Why should someone who completed a jail sentence 5 or 10 years ago for drug possession and has remained clean ever since or while drunk got out of control and ended up with an assault and battery have to be continually haunted by such a mistake? Once someone's served a setence for a crime, that person should be entitled to another chance to become a productive member of society without artificial barriers to success. While it's reasonable for a DA's office or the courts to check someone's priors for the purpose of determining appropriate punishment for an offense, there's no reason it's relevant for an employer that an applicant broke the law in his past. Marginalizing felons and other criminals can lead to further crimes; if someone's mistake dooms them to a McJob for a long time, they may very well be tempted to enter more lucrative and illegal operations. If someone's currently on probation or parole for an offense, that's reasonable to consider. However once the sentence is done, the record on for charge should be sealed to all except for those in the courts with a need to know.
To those who say don't post to Myspace, Facebook, or any other site, that's a reasonable start. But what happens if you decide to go to a friend's wild party and your name and a questionable photo (even if it's just a beer can in your hand and some empties around) pops up on that friend's site when a company does a web search on you? Or you decide to campaign for someone opposing the candidate whom your employer endorsed (and possibly contributed to) and show up as a point of contact for that campaign? There's only so much you can do to limit your web presence, and the only way to keep abuse from happening is to say that one's personal life is off-limits. All of it.
Each time I hear stories like this, it makes me think it's time for a patent moratorium in this country. Look at the the number of patents awarded each year in the U.S. From 1962-77, there were about 1 million patents granted; from 1977-92 there were just over 1 million. Since then, patents have grown seemingly exponentially; it took only 8 years (1992-2000) to get to 6 million and less than 7 to get to 7 million. Extrapolating for the number given for Jan. 1, 2008, the next million will be granted by the end of 2011. Something tells me the number of reviewers at the patent office isn't growing nearly as fast as the number of applications.
I don't think we've gotten that more inventive in the past decade. We're now seeing applications to patent business models, genes, and devices that seem to have ample prior art to deny a patent. I think we're seeing lawyers with too much time on their hands trying to patent anything under the sun. Patents have their purpose in inspiring innovation, but when they are abused as arms in an IP race they become counterproductive. Up-and-coming businesses shouldn't need to worry about hiring a world-class legal team before ramping up their engineering and sales forces just to make sure some minor detail of their generally revolutionary new widget doesn't fall into the purview of XYZ Corp's giant IP repertoire.
I say it's high time to suspend the issue of new patents for a couple of years to let everything that's in the pipeline now get a decent review. And after that make the application more transparent to allow those who see prior art relative to an application to make their beliefs known to the patent office. The way we're going, it won't be long before we see patents awarded for "brand new" materials like oxygen, carbon, and iron.
If the amount of BS in the patent system continues to grow, eventually patents will become useless in terms of truly fostering innovation. Already, some people don't see any moral objection to infringing copyright since they feel the copyright holders aren't living up to their side of the bargain by allowing their IP to become public domain. People will start infringing patents on moral grounds if they're viewed as simply an artificial barrier to entry in a market rather than a means to allow limited-term profit from a truly groundbreaking invention.
So it seems like you don't come out ahead by reporting, you actually lose money...
You come out ahead until you get caught, in which case you're looking at having to pay the tax, interest and penalties on pain of tax evasion charges. If you get caught a second time (i.e. after you've been cited for a previous "underpayment") or the tax in question is large enough, your state's tax authorities might decide to press criminal tax evasion charges right from the get-go.
Don't think you you're going to get caught? That's about to change as a result of the recent passed housing bill. This bill contained a provision to report nearly all online merchants' credit card transactions to the IRS; it's pretty hard to survive as an online business if you're not making more than 200 credit card sales a year or grossing $10,000 in credit card transations. Since the vast majority of Congress represents states that have a sales tax, if this data isn't already being shared with the state governments, expect it to happen in a bill in the next congressional session.
Five years from now, it's going to be very easy for states to find out their residents' out-of-state transactions, confirm the shipping address is within the state, and bill people for unpaid use taxes. If you hate the idea of paying sales and use taxes that much, you can move to one of the handful of states that doesn't have a sales tax. Otherwise, while it's been nice to catch a break from easy enforcement for the past 10 years, it's time to realize that buying online "tax free" in most states is basically tax evasion and that eventually Mr. Taxman will be looking for his cut.
I don't like Bush either; in fact in a reply to another story I indicated that I believed he's been the most aggressive president in U.S. history in attacking our civil liberties. However, I think your post goes way over the line.
Unless you've got evidence to support your claim that the Supreme Court and various Florida election officials were part of a conspiracy to install Bush as a puppet explicitly to support the 9/11 attacks, your post is simply inflammatory and borders on libelious. First of all, treason is pretty well defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. Absent evidence that the justices of the Supreme Court or those designing or counting ballots in Florida were planning to levy war against the United States or knowingly gave comfort to al Qaeda, your allegation that these people committed treason is patently false. Your assertion that the inauguration of Bush "led directly" to the 9/11 attacks is dubious at best. al Qaeda had been openly hostile to the U.S. long before G. W. Bush entered the picture. Using your logic, one can just as easily claim Clinton's election in 1996 led to two U.S. embassies in Africa getting bombed and a destroyer getting attacked in 2000.
While the 2000 election was questionable, only the most far-out conspiracy theorists claim that the 2004 election was materially rigged. Believe it or not, a decent number of people actually liked Bush in 2004; while that portion is smaller now, according to Gallup and other polls more people approve of Bush's current performance (albeit at record-low ratings in the 20s for a president) than that of the now Democrat-led Congress (whose approval rating is in danger of falling into single digits). I'm pretty sure Senator Kerry or another leading Democratic spokesperson (Obama, Clinton, etc.) would have called the Republicans out front-and-center upon discovery of the smallest bit of hard evidence of rigging, particularly after the disputed 2000 election. Haven't heard a peep from them about that. And don't give me any B.S. about censorship from the White House of such a comment from a Democrat; if the White House held such a firm grasp on the press, there's no way casualty numbers or stories of suicide bombings and other negative publicity of the Iraq war would ever be reported on the major networks.
Of everything that you list that Bush has done, only the Iraq war can be validly attributed to him as a personal misdeed during his term of office. The subprime (and the broader financial crisis) and our rotting infrastructure are the result of the federal government overall being asleep at the wheel for the past 25 years or more. President Carter was the last president to seriously look at our energy policy. Since then, both the White House and Capitol Hill have basically nixed every major proposal to come their way. Continually improving CAFE standards, alternative fuels, recommitting to nuclear power, drilling off the U.S. coastline and in Alaska? Any or all of these could have been passed in the 15 years before G.W. Bush even set foot in the White House, and we as a country have dropped the ball. Alan Greenspan probably had a much bigger role in getting the country into its private-sector financial mess than any of the presidents under which he served (Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton). If you blame Bush for the subprime problems, to be fair you have to blame Clinton for the dot-com bubble and resulting crash.
Yes, this country is in a mess, and we'll almost certainly be better off as soon as the current resident of the White House returns home to rural Texas. However, B.S. allegations and vapid invective won't do anything to help clean it up, and will most likely compound the problem.
The no-fly list is also nothing compared to the rest of what the Bush administration had pushed through with the help of a Congress that either supports him or too spineless to stand up to him.
I don't know of people that were held indefinitely overseas without access to counsel or even a description of what they've been charged with as a result of alleged drug dealing. The Reagan and Clinton administration actually appeared to respect the anti-domestic spying laws passed in the wake of Nixon's abuses; now on top of spying laws that appear to be unconstitutional on their face, Bush's people are stepping beyond the modest limits set by their own laws.
Bush may not have opened the action, but he's certainly raised the stakes with the PATRIOT Act, his watered-down FISA law, and signing statements effectively saying he's not going to obey certain sections of laws that show up on his desk. It's not like he could have vetoed those laws and asked Congress to draft versions that Bush approved -- oh wait, he could have.
Now we've got the Nixon-era racketeering laws (not specifically drug-related, though he was certainly opposed to illicit drugs), the asset forfeiture you mentioned, the extremely harsh and internally inconsistent drug laws, and now a return of domestic spying and indefinite detention. The last, which before Bush hadn't been seen in earnest since WWII, is an especially troubling development. Now it's conceivable to spend the rest of your life in a military camp without trial if you're judged to be an enemy combatant.
Invasion of privacy and property are bad, but infringing on someone's physical freedom is much, much worse. And unfortunately, I agree that many judges don't even seem to care what the Constitution says; it wouldn't shock me at all if despite the 13th Amendment some federal court decided slavery was once again legal.
Just because his predecessors infringed liberties doesn't give G. W. Bush or his successors the right to do so. And I would argue that our current president has been the most aggressive in history, with Nixon a close second.
We now have "wars" against terrorism, drugs, child pornography, drunk driving, and probably some other domestic causes; in addition to two actual wars and possibly two more on the horizon (Iran and Georgia). Why can't some general come out and say that if you spend all your time and money starting wars, you won't win any of them? I guess our recent commanders-in-chief don't seem to grasp that concept.
I didn't see the routines, so I don't know if there were other major errors in Li Shanshan's routine. However, according to the Code of Points a fall counts as a 0.8 point deduction, and your link gave Li's B-score as 8.3. So if she performed the rest of the routine comparably to most of the other entrants, she very easily could have had a 9.1-0.8 = 8.3 B-score.
The little of the gymnastics I saw on NBC could have benefited from explanations of minor flaws and degree of difficulty. Being almost completely ignorant of gymnastics, I don't know the difference between simply difficult maneuvers that most world-class gymnasts can usually perform (the stuff that will get someone a start value in the low 6's) versus the truly state-of-the art maneuvers that only the best of the finalists can pull off (the routines that get a start value of 7 or higher). Also, to the casual observer, it can be difficult to differentiate between routines with an execution score of 9.1 versus one that scores 9.3; without an explanation of what the judges are looking for the scoring can seem capricious.
The scoring rule that bothered me more was the tiebreaking procedures. Not the rule itself, but the fact that virtually no one was aware of how ties were to be broken. At the outset, not even the gymnasts with the same score seemed to know why He Kexin beat Nastia Liukin. Especially at the Olympics, the officials need to make it clear to all contestants about how the event will be scored and how any ties will be broken. And the fact that the IOC directed the FIG to break ties after the Atlanta Games doesn't help; everything I've seen indicates that the FIG would have awarded dual golds at any other world-level competition to gymnasts making the same score. Ironically, Liukin's father tied for first in 1988; dual golds were awarded in those Games. Why wasn't an arcane tiebreaking procedure invoked in the womens 100m race this year, where two Jamaican women tied for silver?
Let me highlight some ideas for future complaints:
"As has been reported around the net today, we can confirm that [Duke Nukem Forever] has indeed passed final certification with Microsoft on Friday the 15th of August (on our first try, no less). That means the game is done â" it is now in the hands of Microsoft."
Enough said. ;)
At least in the US, there's a big difference in the training that an average police officer gets versus the professions of medicine and law. Except for the largest departments (the ones in major cities), often what's required is simply passing a general-knowledge civil service exam and a few months in the police academy. Surgeons, other doctors, and lawyers go through several years of school before starting a de facto apprenticeship (residency for doctors, being a "gopher" for an established law firm, though at least the latter is paid decently). Only after they have shown they have mastered their profession are they allowed to work on their own.
There is also an oversight board for these professions that at least nominally upholds ethical and performance standards in each profession. For instance doctors are responsible to the AMA and state licensing boards; lawyers to their state(s)' bar. At best, police departments are accountable to their city officials and the courts. In practice, many cities look the other way on their police's actions, and the court system is hit-or-miss in allowing a plaintiff a chance to state his case.
If a surgeon commits a fundamental error like leaving a tool inside a patient, he's at the least facing a major lawsuit and possibly dismissal from his job. If a lawyer violates client-attorney privilege, he's going to have his work cut of for him in regards to convince the bar to keep him on board. Typically when the press finds out about major misconduct (e.g. taking cash to ignore a big drug deal, beating up people in handcuffs) by the police, the punishment consists of reassignment to a desk job or possibly a short (30 day or less) suspension.
There's a huge difference between law and medicine and our police forces. If it took two or three years of training to become a police officer and they could be reliably trusted to understand citizens' constitutional and other rights, you'd have a point. However, by and large the training requirements are much lower in most of the US and there's usually much less accountability than there is in the professions you named.
This reminds me of the Fight Club when Ed Norton's character is explaining to the woman on the plane that if the total legal liability is less than the cost of recalling all the defective cars, a recall is not issued.
If only that mindset were restricted to the realm of fiction. I think "Fight Club" was alluding to the Ford Pinto fiasco. I'm sure there's countless other instances where people's safety has been knowingly or negligently disregarded in regards to the bottom line.
Not being paid for overtime sucks, but if you're making $80K a year and working an average of 50 hours a week, you're still a lot better off than the majority of the U.S. population. Many blue-collar workers are lucky to reach $50K doing 60 or 70 hours a week (this typically involves 2 jobs, as many companies now cap employees' hours at 40 to avoid paying time-and-half). Unless you made the mistake of signing some ridiculous non-compete upon taking your position, there's a variety of ways of dealing with your situation.
In terms of protecting employees, think the Department of Labor needs to focus on OSHA violations first (safety and health concerns should always trump concerns over pay), and then FLSA starting with employees making the least amount of money (e.g. fast food and retail workers). The "Fight Club" concern of defective products is the responsibility of another department (Dept. of Commerce and/or DoJ), but warrants equal concern as enforcing OSHA. Someone making $13/hr. that's denied time-and-a-half or is falsely classified as a "manager" making $28K for working 60 hours a week is much more affected by these abuses than those working IT. In many places, $13/hr. ($26K/yr.) is enough for an OK living living for one person, and barely enough for a family of three to survive (parent and 2 kids). Getting $19.50 for each hour over 40 and/or being available to pick up a second job makes a huge difference to these people. Compared to the day-to-day issues those working in the retail sector often face, I'll take my problems over theirs any day of the week.
The big difference between the labor laws and car theft is that law enforcement actively investigates car thefts as they are reported and will make a good-faith effort to arrest someone. And good luck capitalizing on your gains; unless you know all the nooks and crannies of your local black market, trying to sell your stolen car or its parts is liable to drawing further attention by the cops.
As suggested by TFA, employers are often able to settle FLSA cases for less than the amount of back pay in question. This means that it's apparently difficult for an individual employee to win his or her case in court. Also, violating the FLSA will rarely cause someone to end up in jail or cause a Fortune 500 company to wince in pain.
Sometimes I wish I hadn't bought a place in Marlborough in 2005. Shortly afterward, the city council tried to pass the harshest sex-offender law in the state and among the harshest in the country. This law, if enacted, would have barred Level II and III offenders from living, working, or even existing in 98% of the city. The mayor vetoed it, and then a nominally reduced version was passed over her veto a few months later. The 1,000 foot exclusion from any place children congregate (as opposed to 2,500 feet) still bars those on the registry from setting foot in 80% of the city's area for any purpose, including the city's large mall and the vast majority of other businesses. Laws like these imposed on people who often have either committed minor offenses (e.g. urinating on the side of the road) or have been punished rather severely already (e.g. 5 or 10 years in the state's maximum security prison for a rape) discourage people from re-entering society and can inspire more severe crime. If a "Level III" offender is really that much of a risk for finding the closest 7-year old kid and forcing his way on him/her, the proper place for that offender is a 6x10 cell for the rest of his life. Otherwise, once he's served his sentence, give him a chance to start his life over.
And now they go ahead with this kind of crap? I don't care how the stuff was found or how hazardous it was. If it were a genuine hazard, proper response by the FD would have been to give the guy 14 days to get the offending chemicals off of the property. Usually zoning infractions like are handled by a cease-and-desist order that can be challenged in court to determine if the facts of the case really constitute a zoning violation. Ten years ago, that kind of seizure without wouldn't have flown even if the contraband was pure cocaine, and the war on drugs has lasted a lot more than ten years.
I hope the mayor speaks out on the way this went down. When I found out about the sex offender thing just before last year's election, I decided she was worth voting for re-election. (I'm not on this list by the way, I'm just a fierce opponent of it since it's the prime example of the left wing being just as anxious to infringe the Constitution as the right wing in this country).
So the only way federal law will follow California law is with a statute. Even then, it would have to involve interstate commerce. Since non-compete agreements usually have to be limited in geographic scope to be enforceable, the law would basically have application only near interstate borders.
First of all, non-competes need not be necessarily limited geographically to be upheld. They can limited in other ways; state laws vary on what's enforceable and what's not. In many states other than California, a clause along the lines of "Employee shall not compete for companies A, B, and C anywhere within the United States for three years following termination of employment" can be upheld, unless it can be shown that those three companies dominate the employee's market to the point where the employee would have considerable difficulty finding any position in his field.
Second, virtually everything these days is considered interstate commerce. The federal government has managed to void California's marijuana legalization efforts by applying the "interstate commerce" clause, even when the marijuana grown within the state by Californians and sold within the state to other Californians.
In practice, the DEA are unlikely to knock on your door regarding a "dime bag", but if you've got a house full of weed, don't expect the laws of Sacramento to save you. In fact, state and local authorities may very well be coereced into enforcing federal law; if a police department is aware that a certain person is dealing drugs illegally and looks the other way, they face possible liability for obstruction of justice.
The only way to get a reading one way or another at the federal level would be if a person signed a non-compete outside of California, then moved to California for work, and then got sued by his former employer. Such a suit, assuming it's upheld through the other state's court system, would then be virtually guaranteed a trial in some federal court. Until then, you may want to consider avoiding such contracts and/or run them by a lawyer in your jurisdiction to assess what risks you might face after you're done with the company in question.
that it is not the CEO's fault that you or other people have the wrong skills.
In many cases what you're saying is incorrect. How about applying the same logic to companies as you're applying to individuals. Yes, many people can do more to improve their marketability, but large companies can do a heck of a lot more to improve the quality of their workforce rather than offering sub-market wages for jobs and complaining about a shortage of "qualified workers".
Set aside the issue of compensation and focus on skills. It's in a company's best interest to ensure that once employees are on board, that they have the skills and tools available to be as productive as possible. Got a bunch of C programmers on your payroll and want to get into the Java applications business? Teach them Java! If they're proficient at C, they're smart enough to learn Java and become eventually become proficient. It's a lot cheaper to bring in someone to teach a Java course and buy reference material than it is to embark on a search for new employees, especially when sales opportunities are lost during the recruitment effort. To use your turn of phrase: "I know, it costs money. Well duh, its an investment." Instead many companies in this situation turn potentially valuable talent away, even when ambitious employees make their own efforts to improve their skill set. Or worse yet, go to Washington and asked for the rules to be changed.
As far as toys like your "super cell plan" are concerned, there's plenty of fat in the in the corporate world as well. Use of corporate jets for use by executives' families' vacations? Mahogany furniture in thousand-square foot personal offices? A company can pay for a course for dozens of employees to learn a new programming language or technology for what it pays in fuel costs alone for many of their CxO's vacations. Not to mention outrageous pay, perks, and severance packages many CxO's get, regardless of their performance.
I don't have a problem with innovative founders and executives making big money. Many CEO's have brought many millions, and in some cases billions of dollars to their companies and shareholders. I don't take offense I hear about a CEO making $50 million a year that's turned a small business into a Fortune 500 company or turned a large company on the brink of bankruptcy into a profitable concern. I do get PO'd, however, when poor performance is rewarded immensely at the expense of shareholders and employees. Like, the CEO of Home Depot taking home $200 million for having HD's butt handed to him by Lowe's Corp. Or Angelo Mozillo who focused much more in liquidating his 9-figure stake of Countrywide stock in 2006-07 rather than on his company's lending standards that eventually crippled the company. In these cases and many others, the CEO's decisions hurt the company. A CEO of an IT company can very easily say, "we're falling behind because our employes lack skills X, Y, and Z. Let's work on training them and improving our bottom line." When a CEO says "Sorry for the larger-than-expected loss this quarter! There's a skill shortage on the market and there's nothing we can do about it," then he or she IS to blame.
Yes, many people can do more to improve their career, but many companies can do a lot more than bitch and moan about it. Especially considering the assymmetry of options that corporations have that people don't have. When a company offshores an operation to Country X to take advantage of lower labor costs there, do you have the option of moving to Country X and working for that company or in that field? In most cases, the answer is no.
The blame game works both ways, and I'm tired of hearing Corporate America saying that the only answer is "foreign labor," rather than in making private investments and supporting public investments (i.e. improved education) that would allow them to sustainably compete.
From the parent's quote: "...unless that search is based on a reasonable suspicion regarding that person" (empahsis added)
For my tax dollar, the wording has to be a lot stronger than that to be worthwhile, particularly when the owner of such a "device or media" is a U.S. citizen or resident alien. Replacing "reasonable suspicion" with "search warrant" would be ideal; barring that the phrase "probable cause" would be an improvement over the status quo. For non-resident aliens, the only consequence of refusing a search on an official's "reasonable suspicion" should be denial of entry to the U.S.: no seizures, arrests, or any other punitive measure unless the subject has demonstrably engaged in other, unrelated wrongdoing.
Considering that courts have at least implicitly found such border seizures to be "reasonable" by the 4th Amendment standard (I don't know of any case where a court has barred such a search or seizure in a point-of-entry related context), I don't see how this specific language would qualify as an improvement. Such language, if enacted, would just be a matter of putting lipstick on the pig.
I don't see what new information provides this in that regard. It's always been very difficult to win financial damages from the federal government in civil court. Even when a court finds that a person's constitutional rights have been violated, the relief typically involves (a) a cease and desist order enjoining the government from continuing the behavior called out in the lawsuit, and/or (b) at best compensatory damages, for instance when someone's property is seized, the court may order it returned in similar condition or an equivalent payment made in its stead.
People have been wrongly convicted and spent decades in jail, and even when the prosecution probably knew its evidence was bogus or at least dubious, all the "inmate" was granted by the court was a release from jail. Most of them don't get any financial compensation, any support for their re-entry into the community, and many of them don't even get an apology from the agency that sent them to prison. (Some states now allow such lawsuits, but as far as I know the federal government and the majority of states still don't allow these lawsuits to proceed). And with the "war on drugs" and RICO-related legislation, a person can be acquitted of a crime, yet have personal or real property seized afterwards because it allegedly participated in a crime. All the person gets in "compensation" is the admonishment "You may not be guilty of any crime, but you shouldn't have bought a house/car/whatever that's a venue for drug dealing/money laundering/other crime!"
Now if someone brought suit on a 4th Amendment related complaint and got told by a U.S. court: "The federal government is a sovereign entity and neither it nor its employees acting in official capacities can be party to a lawsuit", then we've got a BIG problem. Otherwise, this is just another instance of what most Americans should have known for decades: that it's pretty hard to win cash from the U.S. government in the courtroom.
Just because it's worse in the UK doesn't make it right in the US. The US was founded as a reaction to the abuses of the Crown government, and for 150 years or so the US government actually tended to pay attention to personal rights. How times have changed: the only differences between the surveillance societies on each side of the pond are a combination of timing (if it's not already done in the US, it's coming) and transparency (similar stuff happened covertly by the pre-Watergate FBI and may very well be going on now).
At least there's a public law in the UK stating what can be done with your mobile phone conversations. If the contents of one of your conversations was taken out of context to trump up some bogus charge against you, I would hope your defense attorney can have access to the call for the purpose of exonerating you. The Bush administration could conceivably be doing the exact same thing covertly right now, and there would be no recourse when one of your conversations causes you to be indefinitely detained as an "enemy combatant." Under a covert surveillance program, the fact that a call was recorded would be "officially" false, meaning your defense attorney would be SOL. The mindset I have with these measures is if an abuse can be imagined, it's most likely already being practiced.
Seriously, to say "At least it's not as bad as London" isn't a valid excuse to me. Or when people get sent away for 20 years for having a gram of crack on them (particularly when the sentence for having an equal amount of equipotent powder would be MUCH less) saying: "Well, we're not as bad as China; they'd probably execute you over there for it!" That kind of thinking needs to stop in this country, otherwise we won't even look back to see what freedom was like. For all the liberty that was taken "for the children," I'm not having any kids since I can't imagine how horrendous the US might be in 20 years.
if you don't think so, stick around. the "i have nothing to hide" argument bears out to be no good reason.
If they don't have a reason already, reciting the "nothing to hide" argument can be considered probable cause in itself. If a suspect says he's got nothing to hide, then that means to a cop that the suspect IS hiding something and just trying to use a red herring to divert the cop's attention.
And the Democrats have had 18 months to call President Bush out for the Iraq war that he started on largely false pretenses and the house of cards called the subprime and Alt-A mortgage crisis that he allowed to fester to the point where major firms (e.g. IndyMac, Bear Stearns) have collapsed and many larger ones across the economy are threatened. What have they done to address what they call the evils of Bush's first 6 years in office? Virtually nothing. Speaker Pelosi very easily could have pushed for an impeachment trial, or at least a special investigation of the president's claims leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What happened? Nothing other than some vapid sound bites.
On the energy front, I've heard little serious talk of alternatives to drilling in ANWR proposed by Bush. I can understand the opposition to drilling there, especially since that would be a stopgap measure at best. But simply voting that procedure down isn't going to fix our energy problem. Without a counterproposal, anti-ANWR advocates are just compounding the problem. The reason why we're where we are is because all we've let Congress do is say "No, no, no!" on anything related to energy. Nuclear plants? Those will cause Chernobyls to become a monthly occurrence in the US! CAFE standards with teeth? Only the Japanese know how to build cars that get more than 20 MPG, and we can't risk American manufacturing jobs! Wind farms? Putting 380-foot turbines 10 miles off the coast will destroy our beautiful coastal scenery and damage our tourism industry!
So I suppose you think there's no reason whatsoever that the now-Democratic led Congress has an approval rating that's about 15 points lower than a president who's considered by many to be among the worst in US history?
Any high-ground advantage the Democrats may have had when reclaiming Congress has disappeared. Yeah, the Republicans were on a witch-hunt to try to derail a very popular president with a sex scandal, and wasted time and breath on various other pittances. They had a golden opportunity to advance their agenda against a weakened Republican party, but descended to the same level. Both the Capitol and the White House are covered in the same mud, and Bush and Pelosi are but two of the slimeballs slithering in it. If you think either party is righteous, then you've got a lot of learning to do.
I think all 535 members of Congress have sowed the seeds for a boot up their behinds, and I hope a good portion of them taste the electorate's shoelaces beginning this November. I say: a pox on both their houses.
Amen. I think we need to remind the government of that. Dare I say it - is it time for another 1776?
Unfortunately, most of the Western countries that secessionist Americans might seek alliances with are on the same side as Washington D.C. or don't like Americans in general any more because of the crap we've pulled in the past 7 years. The UK is at least as far down the surveillance and corporatist society as the U.S.A., and places like Australia and Canada seem willing to follow us in our footsteps. France and most of the rest of Europe wouldn't shed a tear if a major American city got nuked by al Qaeda, and as an American I don't blame them for this attitude.
The only reason why 1776 worked was we had French support. In the 1860's the Confederacy made the mistake of levying war while not being supported by a major world power (although the UK leaned in that direction at the start of the war, the issue of slavery turned the UK away from supporting the CSA as the war progressed). Although they got off to quite a nice start, the Washington D.C.-led army eventually crushed the South to the point where it took nearly a century (until after WWII) for the South to recover.
Violence is called for only when all other options have been exhausted. Otherwise, popular support for a violent act will always fall on the side of the state and against the perpetrator and will cause the movement behind the act to wither and die. When all peaceable options have been exhausted (e.g. criminal trials become farces, election results show the winner taking 98% of a turnout of 125%, demonstrations routinely becoming repeats of the Kent State massacre), then popular opinion will support or at least condone violence against the state. For a couple of examples of groups that challenged the U.S. and are now ridiculed by the majority of the American population, look at the Branch Davidians in Waco or the Michigan Militia. Unless a movement can amass the support of an overwhelming (like 80%+) portion of the American people or the official support of a major world power (China, Russia, UK, France, and maybe a couple others), taking on the U.S. government with head-on violence is pure suicide and will guarantee things will become even worse off for those you leave behind.
There are a lot of things that need to change in this country, but you need to ask yourself: (a) is war the only way left that change can be effected in this country, and (b) if so, is such a war winnable and/or are things so bad off that I'm willing to die in a futile war rather than maintain hope for an alternative solution? The answer to "a" for me is "no", but by the end of 2010 there may be a need for me to rethink my answer.
And a point I attempted to make before, this also makes moves in the direction of enlisting all US (and other) providers of goods and services into government espionage programs which makes spies of these people. It is a dangerous and slippery slope short-sighted-Bush has taken us down and it's time to stop the slide before it starts.
(empahsis added)
You're giving the White House way too much benefit of the doubt. Given the measures Bush's administration took to get Congress to sign on to the Iraq war, his insistence of getting the PATRIOT Act re-upped with little changes other than removal of most of the sunset clauses, and everything else that he's done in the past seven years, I'm not convinced I'd call this short-sighted. He's laying the groundwork to allow McCain to continue the U.S. along the path that Bush started to follow, or to set Obama up for a massive defeat in 2012 for being considered "soft on terrorism" for any measures taken to dismantle Bush's initiatives.
And most Democrats are just as fervent to roll out the surveillance society; they just have different targets for the surveillance. The GOP claims to be after "terrorists" and "drug dealers"; the Democrats seem to want to eliminate "child predators" and "copyright infringers". Over the next 20 years, expect all four quoted terms in the previous sentence to be interpreted increasingly broadly. Ms. Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have had ample time to either block such measures or at least make sure their opposition is widely covered by the press, and have chosen not to do so.
It's time to say F them all. I'm voting against all incumbents this November and voting Libertarian wherever given the option.
If you want to attack the Mass. legislature on something, gay marriage would be a much more valid criticism.
The referendum in question was to roll back the 5.95% tax rate enacted during the state financial crisis of the late 1980s to 5% in 3 steps. The first two rollbacks to 5.6% and 5.3% were allowed to take place; as the recession began, it was decided that it would be fiscally unwise to take the last step to the pre-1988 5%. This was a law, not a constitutional amendment; there is little controversy about the legislature's right to repeal or amend the referendum measure.
Compare that to what happened when the legislature, by use of parliamentary motions, decided to block the progress of the gay marriage ban. If they had the guts, the state constitution would have allowed them to defeat the referendum amendment outright (though they'd need 3/4 of the combined House and Senate to do this). Instead they tried to pull a fast one and brush the amendment under the rug. When the SJC, who started the whole gay marriage business in 2003, insisted that a vote on the amendment take place, barely half the convention actually followed through on the court order. (The majority then voted against the ban, but since over 25% supported it, the amendment is still on track to make it on the 2008 ballot).
Personally, I'm neutral on gay marriage; the biggest problems I have with Mass. gay marriage was the method in which it was enacted (a court decision rather than legislation) and the legislature's refusal to address it. In the past few years, I've welcomed it more, especially since I've seen that gays being married in my state doesn't make me any worse off than before, and Mass. isn't trying to force its marriages onto other less gay-friendly states (a 1913 law actually prohibits out of staters from being married here if such a marriage would be illegal in the parties' home state).
If it does make it onto the ballot, I'm going to vote against the ban. If it's not there when I vote in 2008, I'm going to have a lot of nasty words for those on Beacon Hill and perhaps a desire to run against them in 2010.
I think that people with FEDERALIST leanings are more to blame. Isolated pockets of socialism are not damaging when they are confined. At that point, it becomes a choice, rather than an obligation. For example, if California decided they wanted welfare, excelelnt. It is the nationwide push for such things that cause problems.
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Presumably, there would develop a certain state of homeostasis between locations as like minded individuals move together and learn to inter operate with other groups of unlike minded people.
Unfortunately based on the civil rights history in this country, individual states haven't had a very good track record of making sure all their citizens are afforded basic human rights. We've tried this technique with slavery, and all that accomplished was such resentment between states that embraced slavery versus those that had previously abolished it that nearly half a million people died fighting over it.
It took 80 years for this country to recognize the fact that states had the same duty as the federal government to uphold the rights granted to all citizens in the Constitution and its amendments. It took about another 80 before serious efforts to enforce the 14th amendment were made. In 1950, blatant racism was rampant throughout the South and most Northern cities and prejudice against Catholics, Jews, homosexuals, and other groups was common across the country. It wasn't until the federal courts started to recognize "separate but equal" was a bunch of BS and acted to get states in line that blacks started getting even a modicum of rights in most parts of this country.
Even now, I suspect nothing would have come out of the Rodney King beating, the Charles Stuart case in Boston ("blame it on a black man"), or the Matthew Shepard tragedy if the feds weren't there to enforce people's rights. Many in those areas supported the injustices committed, and DA's and AG's would be unwilling or unable to successfully prosecute such cases.
It's one thing to leave tax policy, welfare, alcohol laws, and most business to the states, provided the laws in theory and in fact treat everyone equally. However, when cities and states fail to respect the rights of citizens, someone needs to hold them accountable. And unfortunately when people really get the shaft, they're incapable of doing much about it. Think not being able to vote because one's polling place ran out of ballots or gets mysteriously closed for "health reasons." Or being denied an education so basic that they're incapable of using the Yellow Pages to look up a job training center or a welfare office. When you've got people that are so poor in these circumstances that they're incapable of affording a $20 ticket on Greyhound, the idea that people will be able to move around to better themselves doesn't go very far.
The balance of power may be somewhat biased towards Washington, but completely stripping the federal government of its powers has its own issues that are equally scary as the the trend we've seen in recent years. Are 50 tyrannies any better than one? Not as far as I'm concerned. The federal government needs to check against the abuses of individual states and the states need to check against abuses of the federal government
And the states do have a method of recourse against the federal government. Contrary to popular belief, Congress is not required to amend the Constitution. If 34 states pass legislation proposing and amendment and 38 state constitutional conventions then ratify it, the amendment is enacted, Pennsylvania Avenue be damned. It's a shame that we haven't been inventive enough yet to use this technique against Washington.
"Against WHO, God damn it? You don't even know who your enemy is. Stop trying to pretend you're fighting a 'war'!"
Crashing a plane into the Pentagon, sailing an explosive-filled boat into a United States destroyer, and detonating truck bombs outside American embassies were overt attacks on the United States. In addition to killing civilians, as ordinary terrorism entails, these attacks sought to directly injure the United States government. Especially when self-described members of al Qaeda use terms like "jihad" and "holy war" to describe these actions, to me that's as clear as war gets.
Using your definition, I guess the Catholic Church could have never embarked in acts of war during the 11th through 14th centuries. After all, by then the Church's de jure power across Europe had nearly vanished. The fact that various kingdoms across the continent who had little in common other than their religious beliefs united to take part in the Crusades must mean that their Church-sanctioned campaigns were only random acts of violence, not war.
Even though al Qaeda is not a sovereign state per se does not disqualify them as being a legitimate enemy of the United States. Many people, especially those opposed to the war in Iraq, find it easy to get that most of the world, including Russia and Pakistan, initially backed the American action in Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks as a justified military operation. It wasn't until after the U.S. started its hissy fit and later open hostilities against Saddam Hussein that the majority of the world began disapproving American policy ostensibly against terrorism.
Its sad that the Bush administration has gotten so sidetracked. If he had stayed the original course, I think the (Western) world really would be safer than terrorism than it is today.
What these rules do is reduce the advantage that the majority culture has, not to give an advantage to minorities. Sure, it feels bad to have that happen, but this is like someone being given a 30 meter advantage in a 100 meter dash and complaning because they used to get a 40 meter advantage.
:)
Apparently you haven't seen American white males compete in the track events of the Olympics recently. If you did, then it would be pretty clear that the minimum head start one of them would need to take home a medal would be 35 meters.