Did it dawn on you that I use my complete name as my signature? Might that suggest to you that I'm not as concerned about anonymity on the internet as you are?
And what's so unfortunate about the pro-gun voting block? I happen to be one of them.
I apologize for the slant of that comment. I did not mean to speak derisively of people that are pro-guns. I am pro-guns. I think it's unfortunate that it's a strong voting block because, as I was mentioning, I think the gun issue is used to manipulate voters. I think the Democratic threat to guns is exagerrated by the Republicans. I have friends who are liberal wackos and very rarely do they talk about how they want to see guns banned. That seems to be at the absolute bottom of the 'liberal agenda' from what I can tell. But for many Republicans, defense of the second ammendment seems to be at the top of their agenda. It would be great if the two groups could get together and recognize they aren't as divided as they thought on this issue. From there, they could unite to campaign on more important issues like protecting our forests and wetlands which are enjoyed by both groups in different ways.
Unfortunately, in America, the pro-gun voting block is incredibly strong. A national politician has a difficult time getting elected if the opponent can say he's anti-guns. That's why major democrats promote themselves as hunters (Kerry, Ann Richards, etc.)-- to defuse potential FUD that they're going to take away people's weapons.
Hunters are not opposed to the Endangered Species Act. Hunters and fishermen appreciate government regulations that provide them with more animals to catch or kill. Check out Ducks Unlimited, for example. The biggest opponents of the ESA are developers and polluters. Both of these groups are very friendly to the GOP when it comes to fundraising.
The phone book for your town is not likely printed in your town. The people publishing your phone book probably live in a different town where their number may or may not be listed.
I was responding to the assertion that in order to publish information about a public campaign official the publisher must make the same information available.
Actually this is a free speech issue. Does free speech cover the right to anonymity? That's still being hashed out in the courts through many test cases. Groups like EPIC and the ACLU have supported the concept of anonymous free speech. From EPIC's site:
Appeals Court Upholds Anonymous Online Speech. In the first appellate decision to address the issue, a New Jersey appeals court has established stringent procedural and evidentiary standards that must be met before the identity of an anonymous online poster can be disclosed through litigation. Those protections have long been urged by EPIC and other public interest groups. The court recognized the constitutional right to communicate anonymously and refused to order the identification of a "John Doe" speaker who had posted comments on a Yahoo! message board.
Arguments against Indymedia printing this information without revealing the author are arguments against anonymous free speech.
As someone who might have
chosen to be in the Republican Party, don't you think it might be helpful to be able to contact your delegate before they ratify the party platform or nominate their candidates? In Texas, the GOP ratified its state party platform containing the following planks:
p.17: "The Party supports the termination of bilingual education programs..."
p.15: "We call for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education and the prohibition of the transfer of any of its functions to any other federal agency."
p.10: Celebrating Traditional Marriage calls for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and opposes the legalization of "sodomy" ie homosexuality.
p. 2 #18: "We oppose the Endangered Species Act."
p.8, Christian Nation: "The Republican Party of Texas affirms the United States of America is a Christian Nation..."
Upon finding out that you might agree or disagree with some of these elements, you probably would like to contact your national delegate to urge that person to listen to your input before the national party platform is finalized. The Indymedia list seems to be a valuable reference for doing so.
The people posting this information are not representing constituencies. They don't have accountability. That's like saying the people who publish the phone book must also print their own home phone numbers in the phone books.
This is very true. Check eBay for the resell prices of even the dog products that weren't big sellers-- the
Apple Cube, for example. You can sell your three-year-old Cube for a quarter of the cost of this new iMac. I don't see anyone getting more than $150 for a three-year-old Dell.
I would talk to those headhunter companies in Washington, DC, and they would hand me all these job descriptions. Hal Kinion was one of them, I think. They would want 10 years of Java programming experience. I would tell them that Java was only invented two years ago. They would just give me a blank stare like, "Well, this one goes to eleven."
I read the Boston Globe piece you referenced. Anyone claiming that Sen. John Kerry was involved in an assasination plot based on that information is desperately grabbing at threads to build conspiracy theories.. You're trying to hold him accountable for what some other guy might have said at a single meeting. The other members of that group describe Kerry as a moderate who eventually left because of his inability to work with the radical members in the group. I attended a protest of George Sr. in Dallas in 1992. One of the folks at that protest held a sign that read, "Execute the plutocrat" on one side and "Give Hinkley a second chance" on the other side. Was I involved in an assassination plot?
You actually consider Afghanistan a success? To date we have not captured or killed the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. We have replaced the admittedly horrible Taliban with a shaky government which is beseiged by warlords. The largest export from Afghanistan continues to be opium. Our War on Drugs seems to be taking a back seat to our War on Terrorism. Neither of which have impressed me with their effectiveness.
There is a concept called the "Dover Test" for a war. Will Americans accept or reject the justification for war when they see the flag draped coffins returning to Dover? Bush (well, more than likely Cheney made this judgement call) doesn't think Americans will support the Iraq war if they're reminded of how many soldiers are killed over there. Yes, these images would inflame emotions, but since the emotions are not the patriotic feel-good emotions promoted by the Fox News Service, does that make them less valid? Your support for dispensing with the Dover Test acknowledges that the Bush administration is manipulating people's emotions for political gain. I'm surprised that a 'journalist' (albeit not a print journalist) would prefer to have information held away from public consumption because the resulting emotions would not be in check with the Bush agenda. Before you run a story, do you typically check it with the White House Press Secretary to make sure it doesn't conflict with their talking points for the day?
On the foreign front, as far as attacking organized terror worldwide, he is the only viable candidate.
And what are Bush's qualifications for this? What are his demonstrated successes? John Kerry has killed a man with his own hands. If I was choosing someone who understood the rigors of warfare, I would choose Kerry, not Bush.
I am very suspicious of people who actively participated in radical causes during the late 60's and early 70's.
John Kerry volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He recognized it for the bullshit we all agree on now. He returned to America and criticized the war. How is that seditious? Am I committing sedition by criticizing W now? Do soldiers returning from war lose their right to free speech? Would it be seditious to publish photos of the flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force base? We certainly have found ourselves in a Brave New World.
Admittedly, I was talking out of my ass regarding cross-state purchases to avoid sales tax. He's able to do that on small purchases, but not large ones. A car, for example, is taxed when it is registered, not when it's bought.
As for all the stuff on those pages you linked to, that doesn't indicate the rate at which different earners are taxed. It just shows what the burden is per capita in each state.
I was working on a virus the other day. I thought it would be cool to write a virus that would replace the Intellimouse USB driver with a full-blown scanner and OCR combination. I was going to have this virus then post any text the mouse was hovering over on peoples' desks to an IRC channel. You know, it would be interesting / valuable to see what documents people had laying on the surface of their desks.
So I was disassembling the Intellimouse USB driver just to see if I would have to build mine from scratch or if I could patch into the existing binary.
Well, to my extreme surprise, I was late to market with my innovation: Microsoft has already built this into their driver! Somewhere in Redmond, there's got to be a room with guys staring at screens going, "Goddamnit Cheney! Push the mouse a little more to the left! We still need three more digits of the nuclear launch codes!"
In other words, we have a whole new country to show for our work. Pretty damn impressive!
We have a pit into which we're throwing money and the lives of American soldiers. In the end, we will have freed the world's second largest oil reserve from UN sanctions. This will make the US less dependent on the Saudi's production rate whims.
Bosnia had no oil. We had no other interest than to stop the ethnic cleansing that was taking place. For the other poster to say Milosovik's abuses were less than Saddam's is ridiculous. That's comparing serial rapists and murderers and saying one isn't as bad as another.
Has it affected me, personally? No, not particularly. But then, I lead a life where I minimize places where the government can intrude into my life, in any aspect.
When you are getting your patriotic handjob from Fox News, doesn't it irk you the least bit to hear the hollowness of the phrase 'land of the free' in reference to America?
Growing up in America, I used to naively think that the nuclear standoff with the USSR was based on the other country not recognizing how sincere we are. "Well, we've got all these nuclear weapons pointed at them because they've got theirs pointed at us. Given the chance, we'd gladly discard ours. We're a country that can be trusted. Why won't they trust us and put away their weapons." Well, we won the cold war and we were put in the position of being able to demonstrate our trustworthiness. What did our leadership do? America promptly violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missle Treaty. Given that our country has also demonstrated a willingness to premtively attack another country (Iraq) no country should assume that our ABM program won't be used to protect America during a US first-strike scenario.
In states like Texas which have no income tax, I don't believe that the rich cover 96% of the tax burden necessary to run our schools, fire stations, and pay our police officers. It's property and sales tax. A dude like Michael Dell cleverly builds his house outside the city limits to avoid paying property tax. He buys his expensive cars and such across state lines so he doesn't pay sales tax. He's got an army of accountants that leverage every income tax loophole they possibly can find for him. Most poor people don't have such effective tax assistance.
So, no, I don't believe that the lower 50% of taxpayers pay under 4% of all income tax.
oh yeah. this post needs to have some connection to TFA. I hope they drop the charges against the bike protester guy.
I was in Houston during the RNC at the Astrodome. The protesters were coralled in a 'free speech zone' that was so far away from the Superdome that it looked like a glow on the horizon. Here's a blog entry from someone else
reminiscing.
No arrests were made because they've been categorized as
enemy combatants. If they were arrested, then they'd have the same protections as civilians under the bill of rights.
As if we had any rights left that were worth a clampdown....
The war on terror is just like the war on drugs. Job security for politicians and a huge transferral of wealth from the federal govt. to the corporate cronies of those in power (i.e. Halliburton).
Looks to me like the patient is coughing up blood, the replacement heart has been dropped on the floor, and the guy in charge is saying, "We got that wine stain out of your blue jeans!"
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise, why would you have bothered to reply back?
Time to kill before I get off work, I suppose.
Bye for now, my anonymous internet friends!
Looks like we're on the same page regarding guns.
Did it dawn on you that I use my complete name as my signature? Might that suggest to you that I'm not as concerned about anonymity on the internet as you are?
And what's so unfortunate about the pro-gun voting block? I happen to be one of them.
I apologize for the slant of that comment. I did not mean to speak derisively of people that are pro-guns. I am pro-guns. I think it's unfortunate that it's a strong voting block because, as I was mentioning, I think the gun issue is used to manipulate voters. I think the Democratic threat to guns is exagerrated by the Republicans. I have friends who are liberal wackos and very rarely do they talk about how they want to see guns banned. That seems to be at the absolute bottom of the 'liberal agenda' from what I can tell. But for many Republicans, defense of the second ammendment seems to be at the top of their agenda. It would be great if the two groups could get together and recognize they aren't as divided as they thought on this issue. From there, they could unite to campaign on more important issues like protecting our forests and wetlands which are enjoyed by both groups in different ways.
You have a really annoying posting style.
Would you prefer I post anonymously and not use links or any concrete examples to back up my assertions? Would that be less annoying?
I read the Boston Globe piece you referenced. Anyone claiming that Sen. John Kerry was involved in an assasination plot based on that information is desperately grabbing at threads to build conspiracy theories.. You're trying to hold him accountable for what some other guy might have said at a single meeting. The other members of that group describe Kerry as a moderate who eventually left because of his inability to work with the radical members in the group. I attended a protest of George Sr. in Dallas in 1992. One of the folks at that protest held a sign that read, "Execute the plutocrat" on one side and "Give Hinkley a second chance" on the other side. Was I involved in an assassination plot?
You actually consider Afghanistan a success? To date we have not captured or killed the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. We have replaced the admittedly horrible Taliban with a shaky government which is beseiged by warlords. The largest export from Afghanistan continues to be opium. Our War on Drugs seems to be taking a back seat to our War on Terrorism. Neither of which have impressed me with their effectiveness.
There is a concept called the "Dover Test" for a war. Will Americans accept or reject the justification for war when they see the flag draped coffins returning to Dover? Bush (well, more than likely Cheney made this judgement call) doesn't think Americans will support the Iraq war if they're reminded of how many soldiers are killed over there. Yes, these images would inflame emotions, but since the emotions are not the patriotic feel-good emotions promoted by the Fox News Service, does that make them less valid? Your support for dispensing with the Dover Test acknowledges that the Bush administration is manipulating people's emotions for political gain. I'm surprised that a 'journalist' (albeit not a print journalist) would prefer to have information held away from public consumption because the resulting emotions would not be in check with the Bush agenda. Before you run a story, do you typically check it with the White House Press Secretary to make sure it doesn't conflict with their talking points for the day?
Yes, I recognize it's not the same story. That's why I titled my post with reminded me of this other incident.