Kerry voted against Kyoto? Gee, that's pretty amazing considering the Kyoto protocol was never submitted to the Senate for ratification.
Kerry had some problems with that version of the protocol but he definitely recognizes that we have to do something about global warming. That's why he has authored legislation to cut down on greenhouse gases.
Here's a quote from him on Kyoto:
"Bush's abrupt and unilateral decision to abandon discussions with the world community on climate change was early evidence of this Administration's misguided approach to dealing with the community of nations. Dropping out of international implementation of the Kyoto Protocol was foolhardy then, and it is even more obviously foolhardy today."
And here's some info on his legislative efforts regarding global warming:
"Kerry, like Bush, opposed American participation in the current Kyoto treaty. In 1999, he joined in a 95-0 Senate vote that stated that the United States should not ratify the treaty unless China and other rapidly developing countries were also required to reduce greenhouse gases.
But Kerry, who has called pollution a "mortal threat" to the climate, wants to reopen the Kyoto negotiations to refashion an agreement acceptable to the United States.
And even without U.S. participation in the treaty, Kerry has backed mandatory efforts to control carbon dioxide.
His most high-profile effort was a 2002 bill that he and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., submitted to the Senate to force automakers to improve automobile efficiency.
The bill would have required that average fuel economy for autos sold in the U.S. to rise from 24 mpg to 36 mpg by 2015. Lower fuel consumption would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
That bill was opposed by the U.S. automotive industry and automotive unions, which argued that the target was too extreme. It failed to pass the Senate.
Kerry also supports at least modest federal caps on U.S. emissions of greenhouses gases, such as the caps contained in legislation submitted to the Senate last year by McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
That bill seeks to ensure that the overall U.S. emissions in 2010 would be no higher than the overall levels back in 2000.
People on the net have been discussing that for years. Same with the lie he told about seeing the first plane hit. Or the lie that Cheney told that there was a credible threat to Air Force 1, which is why Brave Brave Sir George had to spend the day hiding.
The same talking heads that like to label all criticism of the president as "extremist" and "anti-American" are the people that made their bones trashing Clinton every day, whether we had troops in the field or not. They have no shame or honesty.
Unfortunately, for most Americans, they are the only source of information. People like Greg Pelast, who was writing exposes about the corruption of the 2000 election right after it happened, had to go to other countries to get published.
The American press won't print anything that goes against the business or political interests of the leaders of the handful of corporation that control all American media. And this is the real crisis, one that will last long after the Chimp-in-Chief has left the stage.
What did he do with those crippled kids at Walmart, besides give them a national spotlight to discuss an issue deeply and personally important to them? Both of those kids were exactly where they wanted to be, doing exactly what they wanted to do. When K-Mart responded by ceasing to sell handgun ammunition, they got a result in excess of what they orginally asked for. Quite a thrill for them if you ask me. Where's the exploitation?
Gee, this is the second post I've seen in this thread in the last few minutes saying that Moore is the left-wing version of Ann Coulter. Was this one of Rush's talking points yesterday or something?
Moore is sensational at times but he takes more care with the truth than pretty much any celebrity journalist you see on the air these days, particularly those of the "fair and balanced" variety on Fox.
Moore's critics tend to focus on minutiae while conceding that his larger points are correct. For example, many complained about the scene in Bowling for Columbine where he was given a rifle for opening up a new account. Some say he could not have picked up the gun from the bank immediately, he would have had to wait for it to be delivered. Moore might have got that point wrong, or he might not have, I haven't been convinced either way, but no one disputes that the bank really was giving away guns for opening new accounts. Most of Moore's critics "smoking guns" are of this caliber.
Ann Coulter, on the other hand, has never been caught saying anything that remotely resembles the truth. She's made a living out of appearing regularly on all major political TV shows while complaining that the overwhelming liberal bias of American media prevents conservatives from being heard. She also says liberals can't argue from policy, that all they do is ad hominem attacks, while in the same breath she labels everyone to the left of Joe McCarthy a traitor.
Really, the only reason she was ever featured on TV was because of her looks. Happily, judging from the recent pictures I've seen of her, this is no longer a factor and hopefully her period of undeserved fame is just about finished.
Fahrenheit 9/11 opened as the highest-grossing movie in the country, something no documentary has ever done before. And if you follow that link you'll see that it did it with approximately one-third the number of screens as any of the other movies in the list. This means that all showings, no matter what time, must be sold out. Have you ever heard of such a thing before? I haven't.
Even in Bush strongholds in the South, this movie has people lined up around the block waiting to see it.
Keep on saying the movie is doing "pretty darn poorly" and that it won't be around in another three weeks if it makes you feel better. Come September 1st, when it's released on DVD, Bushies are going to feel even worse.
It's funny to see right wingers across the nation use every forum available in a desperate attempt to discredit Moore while at the same time saying "This isn't a movie that's actually going to change anyone's mind, after all." I wonder why they don't just ignore it, then?
The first group is divided into those who voluntarily isolate themselves from society and those who are coerced into isolation (e.g., children of Memmonites). Neither the first nor the second group make suitable leaders for a civilization.
There are plenty of people who don't base their worldview on TV and radio, and they're not all social outcasts. Two groups immediately come to mind: those who get their news and entertainment from the internet, and those who participate actively in social groups such as bands, hobbyist societies, charities, and so on. A great many people consider TV to be a total waste of time.
Personally I haven't used my TV for anything except rented DVD's and videotapes for about five years now, and I don't feel like I'm missing a thing.
I was a hardcore mode Diablo addict too. There is a lot to be said for making death a major inconvenience in games. I find that in a lot of games now I reach the "what is the point of this game?" phase a lot more quickly now after playing D2 Hardcore.
If you can just run in and hack away without regard to strategy because you know death is no big deal, where's the fun? If everyone is running around with ultimate items because it's impossible to permanently lose your gear, where's the game economy?
D2 Hardcore was perhaps a bit too severe, because you have to recognize that there are times you will die through absolutely no fault of your own, like a lag death or because some loser is using a hack of some type. They should definitely make it more like hardcore than softcore, though, with very serious penalties for character death.
The abiotic theory on the origin of oil, while politically convenient to certain groups due to it's consequence of almost unlimited oil reserves, is still highly controversial. It is not reasonable to expect it to be taught as fact in textbooks for a long time, if ever.
There's a picture of the soil sample he's talking about, too.
"The best evidence in favour of a single impact, I repeat, is in the K/T record from the US western interior. In numerous outcrops from Alberta in Canada, through Dogie Creek in Wyoming to the Raton Basin in New Mexico an iridium-enriched clay layer occurs in coal swamp deposits at the palynological K/T boundary. This clay layer has a dual nature (Izett, 1990), and consist of two layers: a lower layer that contains spherules (best seen in Dogie creek (Fig. 7) morphologicaly indistinguishable from the Chicxulub spherules from the Gulf.
The upper layer is strongly enriched in iridium and shocked minerals, such as quartz, feldspar and zircons. The shocked zircons are shown (Krogh, 1993) to have the isotopic properties (Sm/Nd) of the pan-African basement of the Chicxulub crater. In all the mentioned localities the two layers are in contact with each other, without an intervening layer. Not even a single layer of one fall season of leaves or plant material occurs between the two layers. If the upper, iridium-rich, layer is from another impact than the Chicxulub impact, they have to be simultaneous, and have to occur on the same pan-African basement - in itself highly unlikely, but not impossible. A 300Ka separation between the two layers in all the localities, as Keller posits for the separation between the Chicxulub impact and the iridium producing impact, is therefore excluded - barring a miracle."
On any Google search, you're going to get some irrelevant results. If your eyes are closed, that's all you'll choose to see. But on the search I gave you, the first three pages also held:
Rumsfeld and his cohorts have repeatedly riffed on the need to put weapons in space. He's even talked about an orbiting fleet of "space bombers". This would allow the USA to bomb any square inch of the planet at any time without any costly deployment phase.
A grand, Kennedy-style "peaceful exploration" space project would free up the funds necessary for the space bomber abomination and would also develop the tech necessary to put it into action.
My contribution to this episode of the Tin Foil Hat Theater:
The article mentioned above, about strange theories behind the disappearance of the Russian Phobos 2 probe, mentions a "highly secret" photo that was the last image taken by this probe. The article speculates it's a shot of the spacecraft that destroyed the probe. I found the picture they're talking about.
If this is a spacecraft it would be about 20 km long, like a Culture GSV in the Iain Banks novels. More likely it's just a streak in an image created by a failing instrument.
It's funny though, there's a whole lot of web pages out there speculating that Phobos is an alien base or spacecraft. It seems to be a nexus for a whole lot of UFO speculation.
I agree with you that Cato doesn't have right-wing positions on all issues. For example, they're against the drug war, against the Iraq war, and against the erosion of civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism.
I wouldn't say that people who don't know this are "terribly, terribly ignorant" though. The reason I say this is because the only time they're in the news is when they're being used as another prop by right-wing extremists to support whatever outrage they're committing that day. Like all Libertarians, they're used by the right-wing to add a veneer of academic respectability when the right-wing agrees with them, and totally ignored when the right-wing does not agree with them.
There's one huge difference: after a no-confidence vote, there's a regular election. Not one with special rules like this California recall fiasco. That is, in a parliamentary system, after a vote of no-confidence Davis could run just like any other candidate and the winner would be declared using the same methods as a normal election.
No-confidence votes are also done by members of parliament, not through the collection of signatures on a petition.
That wasn't too bad an intro for a single sentence that didn't want to give any spoilers. The combats with the successive waves of "Angels" were pretty much the anchors for the series, as far as the writing goes.
There was only one complete recount done, the NORC recount conducted by a consortium of newspapers. They found that in all scenarios where you count all the votes, Gore would have won. The only way Bush wins is if you don't count the votes. The media being what it is, the usually changed their headlines to not fit their own stories. Here's the full scoop:
-PREVAILING STANDARD: County election officials told Florida journalists how they would define votes if required to do a recount and in this scenario the majority standard was imposed statewide. In punch-card counties, ballots with at least one corner of a chad detached counted as votes. In optical scan counties, where voters are required to fill in blanks on a paper ballot - like on a standardized test - ballots with any affirmative marks counted. That means a vote counted even if the oval was not completely filled in or a candidate's name was circled or underlined; so did ballots on which a voter correctly filled in the oval and also wrote the same candidate's name in the space for write-ins.
Result: Gore ahead by 60 votes.
-TWO-CORNER STANDARD: At least two corners of a chad must be detached to count as a vote, a position that had been argued, at times, by Bush supporters. Same as prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.
Result: Gore ahead by 105 votes.
-MOST INCLUSIVE: Ballots with dimpled chads count as votes, an argument often made by Gore supporters. Same as prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.
Result: Gore ahead by 107 votes.
-LEAST INCLUSIVE: Only cleanly punched chads count as valid votes. For optical scan, only fully filled ovals and those ballots on which a voter filled in the oval and wrote in the candidate's name, too.
Result: Gore ahead by 115 votes.
-COUNTY-by-COUNTY: Drawn from the county election officials. It accepts results from Broward and Volusia counties because those counties completed hand counts that were included in state-certified election totals. For those counties that said they would not count overvotes, relies on prevailing standard.
Result: Gore ahead by 171 votes.
-PALM BEACH STANDARD: Based on a standard Palm Beach election officials briefly used, this counts dimpled chads as valid votes if a pattern of dimpled chads exists elsewhere on the same ballot. Same as prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.
Result: Gore ahead by 42 votes.
P.S. Please note that these results do not include the illegal absentee ballots from Republican counties (they only threw out the late military ballots from Democratic counties), the thousands falsely disencranchised (most of whom were black) when the GOP hired a private company to "scrub" the voter's lists or anything at all from the infamous butterfly ballot, "Jews-for-Buchanan" incident.
P.S.S. The judge assigned to overview the recount if the Supreme Court hadn't stopped the recount has already gone on record saying he would have ordered a full recount, not a partial recount. The original poster had it right. What happened in 2000 was a coup, and it should outrage all Americans regardless of where they fit on the political spectrum.
He was sponsoring it years before any other legislator had even heard of it. I'd lay even money that he was sponsoring it before you heard of it. You were probably still watching Sesame Street when Gore was sponsoring the internet.
As you'll see, Gore made his first proposal to fund a universal version of the internet in 1986. How many other politicians, people not usually known for being up to date with technology, were pushing the internet in 1986? Were you?
This article puts 1986 into perspective:
"That Gore wrote about a national "data highway" as far back as 1986 is extremely significant. It is important to make clear the context of the state of computing at that time. The IBM PC was only four years old. The Apple II computer was still in widespread use. The number of hosts on the Internet numbered, as counted by Mark Lottor's Internet Domain Survey, was 5,089. Entire universities (such as Michigan State University) made their initial connection to the Internet in 1986. In order for Gore to make this kind of speech in 1986, he had to have been conversant with the thinking of computer scientists and Internet pioneers. Such pioneers included such as Vint Cerf, Steven Wolf, and Larry Smarr - then director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), where Mosaic would be born some seven years later."
Did you get that, bunky? Seven years before Mosaic. Is that what you call "riding the wave"?
Speaking of Vinton Cerf, who might be trusted to have an informed opinion on this, this is what he had to say about Gore:
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies t
You must have information that the US Commission on Civil Rights didn't have. You see, they found widespread evidence of voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement, most of it directed at the black community.
This might be the best report because it was written shortly after the election when the outrage was still fresh. Their later reports try to use language as neutral as possible. This report is still prominent on their site so I don't think they've renounced any of it. Here's a quote:
In total, over 100 witnesses testified under oath before the Commission, including approximately 65 scheduled witnesses who were selected for the two hearings due to their knowledge of and/or experience with the issues under investigation. The Commission heard testimony from top elected and appointed state officials, including the Governor, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Director of the Florida Division of Elections and other Florida state and county officials. A representative of Database Technologies, Inc. [Choicepoint], a firm involved in the controversial, state-sponsored removal of felons from the voter registration rolls also testified.
We also heard the sworn testimony of registered voters and experts on election reform issues, election laws and procedures and voting rights. Also, the Chair and Executive Director of the Select Task Force on Election Reforms established by Governor Jeb Bush testified before the Commission. Testimony was also received from the supervisors of elections for several counties, county commission officials, law enforcement personnel, and a states attorney. In addition to the scheduled witnesses, the Commission extended an opportunity for concerned persons, including Members of Congress and members of the Florida State Legislature, to submit testimony under oath that was germane to the issues under investigation. Significantly, the Commission subpoenaed scores of relevant documents to assist with this investigation.
The evidence points to an array of problems, including those in the following categories:
Key officials anticipated before Election Day, that there would be an increase in levels of voter turnout based upon new voter registration figures, but did not ensure that the precincts in all communities received adequate resources to meet their needs;
At least one unauthorized law enforcement checkpoint was set up on Election Day resulting in complaints that were investigated by the Florida Highway Patrol and the Florida Attorney General;
Non-felons were removed from voter registration rolls based upon unreliable information collected in connection with sweeping, state sponsored felony purge policies;
Many African Americans did not cast ballots because they were assigned to polling sites that did not have adequate resources to confirm voting eligibility status;
College students and others submitted voter registration applications on a timely basis to persons and agencies responsible for transmitting the applications to the proper officials, but in many instances these applications were not processed in a timely or proper manner under the National Voter Registration Act ("motor-voter law");
Many Jewish and elderly voters received defective and complicated ballots that may have produced "overvotes" and "undervotes;"
Some polling places were closed early and some polling places were moved without notice;
Old and defective election equipment was found in poor precincts;
Slashdot Mirror
Kerry voted against Kyoto? Gee, that's pretty amazing considering the Kyoto protocol was never submitted to the Senate for ratification.
Kerry had some problems with that version of the protocol but he definitely recognizes that we have to do something about global warming. That's why he has authored legislation to cut down on greenhouse gases.
Here's a quote from him on Kyoto:
"Bush's abrupt and unilateral decision to abandon discussions with the world community on climate change was early evidence of this Administration's misguided approach to dealing with the community of nations. Dropping out of international implementation of the Kyoto Protocol was foolhardy then, and it is even more obviously foolhardy today."
And here's some info on his legislative efforts regarding global warming:
Compare Kerry and Bush's environmental policies
Kerry and Bush sharply divided on response to global warming
Excerpt from the Seattle Times article:
"Kerry, like Bush, opposed American participation in the current Kyoto treaty. In 1999, he joined in a 95-0 Senate vote that stated that the United States should not ratify the treaty unless China and other rapidly developing countries were also required to reduce greenhouse gases.
But Kerry, who has called pollution a "mortal threat" to the climate, wants to reopen the Kyoto negotiations to refashion an agreement acceptable to the United States.
And even without U.S. participation in the treaty, Kerry has backed mandatory efforts to control carbon dioxide.
His most high-profile effort was a 2002 bill that he and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., submitted to the Senate to force automakers to improve automobile efficiency.
The bill would have required that average fuel economy for autos sold in the U.S. to rise from 24 mpg to 36 mpg by 2015. Lower fuel consumption would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
That bill was opposed by the U.S. automotive industry and automotive unions, which argued that the target was too extreme. It failed to pass the Senate.
Kerry also supports at least modest federal caps on U.S. emissions of greenhouses gases, such as the caps contained in legislation submitted to the Senate last year by McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
That bill seeks to ensure that the overall U.S. emissions in 2010 would be no higher than the overall levels back in 2000.
I want to see the numbers on the Battle.net forums.
Should make Slashdot look a lot better.
Check this out. He wasn't very cordial.
A letter he wrote to a Jewish encylopaedia that said he was a Jew
People on the net have been discussing that for years. Same with the lie he told about seeing the first plane hit. Or the lie that Cheney told that there was a credible threat to Air Force 1, which is why Brave Brave Sir George had to spend the day hiding.
The same talking heads that like to label all criticism of the president as "extremist" and "anti-American" are the people that made their bones trashing Clinton every day, whether we had troops in the field or not. They have no shame or honesty.
Unfortunately, for most Americans, they are the only source of information. People like Greg Pelast, who was writing exposes about the corruption of the 2000 election right after it happened, had to go to other countries to get published.
The American press won't print anything that goes against the business or political interests of the leaders of the handful of corporation that control all American media. And this is the real crisis, one that will last long after the Chimp-in-Chief has left the stage.
What did he do with those crippled kids at Walmart, besides give them a national spotlight to discuss an issue deeply and personally important to them? Both of those kids were exactly where they wanted to be, doing exactly what they wanted to do. When K-Mart responded by ceasing to sell handgun ammunition, they got a result in excess of what they orginally asked for. Quite a thrill for them if you ask me. Where's the exploitation?
Gee, this is the second post I've seen in this thread in the last few minutes saying that Moore is the left-wing version of Ann Coulter. Was this one of Rush's talking points yesterday or something?
Moore is sensational at times but he takes more care with the truth than pretty much any celebrity journalist you see on the air these days, particularly those of the "fair and balanced" variety on Fox.
Moore's critics tend to focus on minutiae while conceding that his larger points are correct. For example, many complained about the scene in Bowling for Columbine where he was given a rifle for opening up a new account. Some say he could not have picked up the gun from the bank immediately, he would have had to wait for it to be delivered. Moore might have got that point wrong, or he might not have, I haven't been convinced either way, but no one disputes that the bank really was giving away guns for opening new accounts. Most of Moore's critics "smoking guns" are of this caliber.
Ann Coulter, on the other hand, has never been caught saying anything that remotely resembles the truth. She's made a living out of appearing regularly on all major political TV shows while complaining that the overwhelming liberal bias of American media prevents conservatives from being heard. She also says liberals can't argue from policy, that all they do is ad hominem attacks, while in the same breath she labels everyone to the left of Joe McCarthy a traitor.
Really, the only reason she was ever featured on TV was because of her looks. Happily, judging from the recent pictures I've seen of her, this is no longer a factor and hopefully her period of undeserved fame is just about finished.
Fahrenheit 9/11 opened as the highest-grossing movie in the country, something no documentary has ever done before. And if you follow that link you'll see that it did it with approximately one-third the number of screens as any of the other movies in the list. This means that all showings, no matter what time, must be sold out. Have you ever heard of such a thing before? I haven't.
Even in Bush strongholds in the South, this movie has people lined up around the block waiting to see it.
Keep on saying the movie is doing "pretty darn poorly" and that it won't be around in another three weeks if it makes you feel better. Come September 1st, when it's released on DVD, Bushies are going to feel even worse.
It's funny to see right wingers across the nation use every forum available in a desperate attempt to discredit Moore while at the same time saying "This isn't a movie that's actually going to change anyone's mind, after all." I wonder why they don't just ignore it, then?
The first group is divided into those who voluntarily isolate themselves from society and those who are coerced into isolation (e.g., children of Memmonites). Neither the first nor the second group make suitable leaders for a civilization.
There are plenty of people who don't base their worldview on TV and radio, and they're not all social outcasts. Two groups immediately come to mind: those who get their news and entertainment from the internet, and those who participate actively in social groups such as bands, hobbyist societies, charities, and so on. A great many people consider TV to be a total waste of time.
Personally I haven't used my TV for anything except rented DVD's and videotapes for about five years now, and I don't feel like I'm missing a thing.
I was a hardcore mode Diablo addict too. There is a lot to be said for making death a major inconvenience in games. I find that in a lot of games now I reach the "what is the point of this game?" phase a lot more quickly now after playing D2 Hardcore.
If you can just run in and hack away without regard to strategy because you know death is no big deal, where's the fun? If everyone is running around with ultimate items because it's impossible to permanently lose your gear, where's the game economy?
D2 Hardcore was perhaps a bit too severe, because you have to recognize that there are times you will die through absolutely no fault of your own, like a lag death or because some loser is using a hack of some type. They should definitely make it more like hardcore than softcore, though, with very serious penalties for character death.
The abiotic theory on the origin of oil, while politically convenient to certain groups due to it's consequence of almost unlimited oil reserves, is still highly controversial. It is not reasonable to expect it to be taught as fact in textbooks for a long time, if ever.
Check out his reply to the original article.
There's a picture of the soil sample he's talking about, too.
"The best evidence in favour of a single impact, I repeat, is in the K/T record from the US western interior. In numerous outcrops from Alberta in Canada, through Dogie Creek in Wyoming to the Raton Basin in New Mexico an iridium-enriched clay layer occurs in coal swamp deposits at the palynological K/T boundary. This clay layer has a dual nature (Izett, 1990), and consist of two layers: a lower layer that contains spherules (best seen in Dogie creek (Fig. 7) morphologicaly indistinguishable from the Chicxulub spherules from the Gulf.
The upper layer is strongly enriched in iridium and shocked minerals, such as quartz, feldspar and zircons. The shocked zircons are shown (Krogh, 1993) to have the isotopic properties (Sm/Nd) of the pan-African basement of the Chicxulub crater. In all the mentioned localities the two layers are in contact with each other, without an intervening layer. Not even a single layer of one fall season of leaves or plant material occurs between the two layers. If the upper, iridium-rich, layer is from another impact than the Chicxulub impact, they have to be simultaneous, and have to occur on the same pan-African basement - in itself highly unlikely, but not impossible. A 300Ka separation between the two layers in all the localities, as Keller posits for the separation between the Chicxulub impact and the iridium producing impact, is therefore excluded - barring a miracle."
On any Google search, you're going to get some irrelevant results. If your eyes are closed, that's all you'll choose to see. But on the search I gave you, the first three pages also held:
US investigates space bomber
Pentagon planning for space bomber
Bush plans 'space bomber'
Pentagon planning for space bomber;
Documents show how X-plane could be used by military
NASA Brings Back Plans To Fly X-37 Demonstrator In Orbit for 270 Days
A Defense Agenda for 21st Century Warfare
Check them out, Mr. Coward.
Rumsfeld and his cohorts have repeatedly riffed on the need to put weapons in space. He's even talked about an orbiting fleet of "space bombers". This would allow the USA to bomb any square inch of the planet at any time without any costly deployment phase.
Google space bombers if you don't believe me.
A grand, Kennedy-style "peaceful exploration" space project would free up the funds necessary for the space bomber abomination and would also develop the tech necessary to put it into action.
My contribution to this episode of the Tin Foil Hat Theater:
The article mentioned above, about strange theories behind the disappearance of the Russian Phobos 2 probe, mentions a "highly secret" photo that was the last image taken by this probe. The article speculates it's a shot of the spacecraft that destroyed the probe. I found the picture they're talking about.
If this is a spacecraft it would be about 20 km long, like a Culture GSV in the Iain Banks novels. More likely it's just a streak in an image created by a failing instrument.
It's funny though, there's a whole lot of web pages out there speculating that Phobos is an alien base or spacecraft. It seems to be a nexus for a whole lot of UFO speculation.
I agree with you that Cato doesn't have right-wing positions on all issues. For example, they're against the drug war, against the Iraq war, and against the erosion of civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism.
I wouldn't say that people who don't know this are "terribly, terribly ignorant" though. The reason I say this is because the only time they're in the news is when they're being used as another prop by right-wing extremists to support whatever outrage they're committing that day. Like all Libertarians, they're used by the right-wing to add a veneer of academic respectability when the right-wing agrees with them, and totally ignored when the right-wing does not agree with them.
There's one huge difference: after a no-confidence vote, there's a regular election. Not one with special rules like this California recall fiasco. That is, in a parliamentary system, after a vote of no-confidence Davis could run just like any other candidate and the winner would be declared using the same methods as a normal election.
No-confidence votes are also done by members of parliament, not through the collection of signatures on a petition.
They actually decreased when Reagan gave his tax cut for the rich.
Table of tax collections in the 80's given in current and constant dollars
This data is from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Budget of the U.S. Government, FY 1996.
That wasn't too bad an intro for a single sentence that didn't want to give any spoilers. The combats with the successive waves of "Angels" were pretty much the anchors for the series, as far as the writing goes.
There was only one complete recount done, the NORC recount conducted by a consortium of newspapers. They found that in all scenarios where you count all the votes, Gore would have won. The only way Bush wins is if you don't count the votes. The media being what it is, the usually changed their headlines to not fit their own stories. Here's the full scoop:
-PREVAILING STANDARD: County election officials told Florida journalists how they would define votes
if required to do a recount and in this scenario the majority standard was imposed statewide. In
punch-card counties, ballots with at least one corner of a chad detached counted as votes. In optical
scan counties, where voters are required to fill in blanks on a paper ballot - like on a standardized
test - ballots with any affirmative marks counted. That means a vote counted even if the oval was not
completely filled in or a candidate's name was circled or underlined; so did ballots on which a voter
correctly filled in the oval and also wrote the same candidate's name in the space for write-ins.
Result: Gore ahead by 60 votes.
-TWO-CORNER STANDARD: At least two corners of a chad must be detached to count as a vote, a position
that had been argued, at times, by Bush supporters. Same as prevailing standard for optical scan
ballots.
Result: Gore ahead by 105 votes.
-MOST INCLUSIVE: Ballots with dimpled chads count as votes, an argument often made by Gore supporters.
Same as prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.
Result: Gore ahead by 107 votes.
-LEAST INCLUSIVE: Only cleanly punched chads count as valid votes. For optical scan, only fully filled
ovals and those ballots on which a voter filled in the oval and wrote in the candidate's name, too.
Result: Gore ahead by 115 votes.
-COUNTY-by-COUNTY: Drawn from the county election officials. It accepts results from Broward and
Volusia counties because those counties completed hand counts that were included in state-certified
election totals. For those counties that said they would not count overvotes, relies on prevailing
standard.
Result: Gore ahead by 171 votes.
-PALM BEACH STANDARD: Based on a standard Palm Beach election officials briefly used, this counts
dimpled chads as valid votes if a pattern of dimpled chads exists elsewhere on the same ballot. Same as
prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.
Result: Gore ahead by 42 votes.
P.S. Please note that these results do not include the illegal absentee ballots from Republican counties (they only threw out the late military ballots from Democratic counties), the thousands falsely disencranchised (most of whom were black) when the GOP hired a private company to "scrub" the voter's lists or anything at all from the infamous butterfly ballot, "Jews-for-Buchanan" incident.
P.S.S. The judge assigned to overview the recount if the Supreme Court hadn't stopped the recount has already gone on record saying he would have ordered a full recount, not a partial recount. The original poster had it right. What happened in 2000 was a coup, and it should outrage all Americans regardless of where they fit on the political spectrum.
I believe that 2+2=5. And I don't want to hear any intolerant crap from you that I'm wrong, you bigot.
He was sponsoring it years before any other legislator had even heard of it. I'd lay even money that he was sponsoring it before you heard of it. You were probably still watching Sesame Street when Gore was sponsoring the internet.
Is that the right-wing spin of the day? That Gore just "rode the wave" and that 400+ other legislators would have done the same thing?
Check this out. You might learn something.
Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet"
As you'll see, Gore made his first proposal to fund a universal version of the internet in 1986. How many other politicians, people not usually known for being up to date with technology, were pushing the internet in 1986? Were you?
This article puts 1986 into perspective:
"That Gore wrote about a national "data highway" as far back as 1986 is extremely significant. It is important to make clear the context of the state of computing at that time. The IBM PC was only four years old. The Apple II computer was still in widespread use. The number of hosts on the Internet numbered, as counted by Mark Lottor's Internet Domain Survey, was 5,089. Entire universities (such as Michigan State University) made their initial connection to the Internet in 1986. In order for Gore to make this kind of speech in 1986, he had to have been conversant with the thinking of computer scientists and Internet pioneers. Such pioneers included such as Vint Cerf, Steven Wolf, and Larry Smarr - then director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), where Mosaic would be born some seven years later."
Did you get that, bunky? Seven years before Mosaic. Is that what you call "riding the wave"?
Speaking of Vinton Cerf, who might be trusted to have an informed opinion on this, this is what he had to say about Gore:
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies t
Here's the top of their site. Here's their table of contents for the 2000 election. Here's their report on voting irregularities.
This might be the best report because it was written shortly after the election when the outrage was still fresh. Their later reports try to use language as neutral as possible. This report is still prominent on their site so I don't think they've renounced any of it. Here's a quote:
In total, over 100 witnesses testified under oath before the Commission, including approximately 65 scheduled witnesses who were selected for the two hearings due to their knowledge of and/or experience with the issues under investigation. The Commission heard testimony from top elected and appointed state officials, including the Governor, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Director of the Florida Division of Elections and other Florida state and county officials. A representative of Database Technologies, Inc. [Choicepoint], a firm involved in the controversial, state-sponsored removal of felons from the voter registration rolls also testified.
We also heard the sworn testimony of registered voters and experts on election reform issues, election laws and procedures and voting rights. Also, the Chair and Executive Director of the Select Task Force on Election Reforms established by Governor Jeb Bush testified before the Commission. Testimony was also received from the supervisors of elections for several counties, county commission officials, law enforcement personnel, and a states attorney. In addition to the scheduled witnesses, the Commission extended an opportunity for concerned persons, including Members of Congress and members of the Florida State Legislature, to submit testimony under oath that was germane to the issues under investigation. Significantly, the Commission subpoenaed scores of relevant documents to assist with this investigation.
The evidence points to an array of problems, including those in the following categories: