Has BHO undone anything much of Bush's that benefits you?
Well, he reopened up the archival process and promised to make his office more transparent. He's also pledged to close Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay! No more of this national security crap."
Okay. So he did. Did he end the NSA wiretapping? That seems a little more dangerous to me. What? You say he voted to give the telecoms immunity in that one? Oh the horror!
I know it must be hard for you to bear, having a responsible centrist president. But
fortunately THESE election results were valid, unlike your Mr. Chimp's first election by judge. It
shows your real character, that winning is more important to you than democracy. So I don't feel too
sorry for you. In fact, I'm glad the Republicans have become the marginalized party of the deep
south, religious fanatics, and wingnuts everywhere. Please, please run Palin for president! That
would guarantee another four years of Obama. Seriously, you guys just need to form a new conservative
party. Your current one is deceased.
Centrist!=responsible any more than left/right-wing==irresponsible.
You want responsible? Don't look at BHO. He just ballooned your personal debt to $42521.12 (individual share =
total debt/population). That's debt you can't escape by filing bankruptcy. And if you don't pay it,
<hyperbole>Dog the bounty hunter will come to your door with a Swat team of</hyperbole>
IRS agents and take your freedom.
Bush wasn't particularly responsible in a lot of ways. I most certainly didn't agree with his
actions regarding my freedoms enumerated in the constitution. I didn't agree with a lot of his fiscal
policy, either. Especially towards the end. He wasn't the worst president, but he aslo wasn't the
best. However, this isn't about him. He can never be president again. I wash my hands of him as much
as I can.
Now, let's address your messiah, Obama. Noted in various sources to have been one of the most
liberal senators in office (when he showed up for a vote), he arose out of nowhere in the political
landscape and won his elections by invalidating his opponents' candidacies (not challenging the
election counts, or mudslinging, he literally made himself the only choice).
He promised Hope(tm) and Change(tm) and to Clean Up Washington(tm). And how does he Change(tm)
things? Hmmm, let's see. Looks like a more liberal version of the Clinton administration (complete
with insiders from the original Clinton administration!). Obama also seems to have a distinct
preference for nominating people for his cabinet who have tax issues. Definitely a Change(tm) we can
all Believe(tm) in.
He promised responsibility, but we got a pork-laden "stimulus" package with such gems as more funding for ACORN and MoveOn.org. Certainly these wonderful organizations simply want
to empower you! What's that? You went to ACORN and asked them to help you get out the vote for Ron
Paul? Oh, right. They want to empower you only so long as you vote for their approved candidate. I
knew there was a catch in there.
"But...", I hear you say, "he's upstanding and honest, a real bang up guy who wants to stand up for
me!" O`Rly? That's why his VP is one Joeseph Biden, a known copyright hound. That's why three of his
top appointments to the justice
dept were lawyers for the RIAA. You know, the RIAA that seems to think suing children,
grandmothers, disabled people, state universities, and laser printers is a good business model.
That's why he stands up for more regulation and law like Roe v Wade which purports a right to privacy, but in reality
just usurps state control for the federal government. That must be why he wants to send your money to other
countries to support abortion. Surely that's out of the goodness of his heart.
In reality, college students probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're like welfare recipients. Why? Because they're usually in debt. Debt can make a man do things he wouldn't normally do.
You mean like anyone who's taken out a mortgage? I don't know about you but most people get a 30 year loan on several hundred thousand dollars and are in debt until they're 50 at the earliest and it's for a *lot* more money than college tuition (generally). I think you just axed the overwhelming majority of voters in one fell swoop.
I'm not a lawyer, so I painted with a broad brush. I was also addressing the parent's college-student remark. At the moment, I don't have time to think of every exclusive condition and narrow my classification. Add to that the fact that college students as a collective are extremely irresponsible (disclaimer: guilty) people, and that colors my point. I'm not trying to pick on people for the hell of it.
Believe it or not, the debt being in control bit was something I had read a few years back, by the CEO of Heartland Trucking (he goes on about why debt is a bad thing, not just because it's expensive). The essay struck me, as it made all sorts of sense.
I'd like to believe that such an outcome is beyond the realm of possibility, but the RIAA has links into the Obama administration through Biden, so such a swindle could indeed occur all kidding aside. One of the side effects of electing the Democrats this time around is granting the entertainment industry, with all of their special interests, enhanced access to the government pocketbook and the federal prosecutor.
Just as dangerous are the federal judges he has the power to appoint, combined with majority party blind support in both houses.
I wonder if any of the young college students who voted for Obama factored this into their decision. They may soon come to regret Obama's VP choice and his ties to the MAFIAA on a very personal level.
Do you really give them that much credit? I highly doubt 99% considered anything beyond the "four legs good, two legs bad" mentality that they have crammed into their heads.
In reality, college students probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're like welfare recipients. Why? Because they're usually in debt. Debt can make a man do things he wouldn't normally do. So they're more prone to be bought off by promises of "lower tuition!", "more tuition aid!", "easier to obtain loans!", and so on. Don't forget the perennial "your enemies are the corporations!", "their only goal is to make the wealthy wealthier!". Of course, this isn't much different from pandering to pensioners on social security. They party in charge wants to keep a constituency beholden to them in the next election. And if they can get a perpetual "cannot-kill" program that the other party generally disagrees with or wants to change, they can reap the benefits for multiple election cycles. Of course, disenfranchising beholden voters is an effective way to do this, but it foments civil unrest.
On the bright side, I'm seeing far more libertarian support when people aren't forced into a binary choice.
No2ID have the right idea. But... they really, really need to get their PR machine working. There's next to nothing ever mentioned about them anywhere. They need to be organizing much more high profile stuff. They need to be getting in the press regularly and frequently.
That's a major affirmative.
I'm in the US and I've attempted to contact them a couple of times about potentially expanding to help fight similar foolishness in the US. After all, it seems like whatever one idiot English-speaking country does, the rest soon follow, whether or not it's a sensible idea. Noone ever got back to me.
Perhaps No2ID is actually an MI6 honeypot operation.
drugs coming from a bunch of guys in their garages
As long as experts contribute, there shouldn't be a problem. Maybe a registration with credentials would be good.
Minor problem. Who gets to determine that some researcher isn't an expert, as opposed to that biochem college dropout who knows what he's doing, as opposed to the well meaning schmo whose job is construction, but he knows some folk remedies, as opposed to a methamphetamine dealer whose knowledge of how to brew some rocks is exceeded only by his stupidity in smoking around ether?
This week's educational film will be "Groundbreaking Discoveries of the 21st Centuty!" followed "Zinc Oxide and You".
More shocking discoveries of the 21st Century! Science shows that an absolute first post can, in fact, be redundant, despite there being no preceeding posts on, or off, topic!
Plus, most of the material you're removing will end up in orbit...giving our moon a stunning ring system...Who wouldn't want to go there then?
Yeah I know the interaction with the Earth makes setting up a lunar-synchronous orbit very difficult and pretty much precludes any sort of ring system...but just imagine how pretty it'd be!
Actually, it sounds exceptionally dangerous to incoming spacecraft...
They've had rovers on Mars for several years now... a 3 hour tour turned long term expedition. All they need to do is the same thing.... with a shovel.
The moon is closer, and gets the same sunlight as Earth versus less than half on Mars. Other than dealing with several weeks of dark when the moon faces earth there's not much difference as Mars has to shut down for "winter" when sunlight drops below enough to recharge the batteries.
Added advange on Luna: no weather to blow moondust and coat solar cells in dust. They'll stay mostly clean pretty much forever.
If robots could be used in construction this complex, they already would. Right up here in Minnesota, there is a huge need for road repair and construction. If there was any way to automate the process more than it already is, it would be done by now. Any robot that could withstand the punishment of construction work would need to be very heavy, and also have a lot of redundancy built into it. It's one thing to make a little mini-rover with a camera and some sampling equipment. It's quite another to put a Caterpillar, cement truck, and support equipment up there, and expect it not to break. Sorry, but human beings need to be there... There are some things robots just can't do -- like repair themselves automatically. And I mean that in practical real-world terms, not in the laboratory.
Build it on Earth first and make it work, then we'll talk about the moon.
Think of this as a way to redistribute the wealth involved in those porkulus packages. After all, it's about creating jobs.
Now, these things reside in their respective spheres. Developing robots to pave Earthbound roads is way more expensive than hiring some semi-skilled out-of-work guys to stand around while the two-lane highway is reduced to one-way traffic.
However, developing something like this for the moon, where not much changes in the course of a day, makes sense.
It also employs downsized engineers and other smart people. And when they get paid, they run right to the store and blow it on a big TV! And that makes the economy go!
It's not like companies can just say, "Wait a minute... if we don't lay people off and/or cut wages... this recession will end!" If that were possible we wouldn't have recessions at all.
Theoretically, they could do exactly that. That's not the problem.
The problem is actually the old "The markets can stay irrational for much longer than you can stay solvent" problem
OK, OK. Looks like a made mistake on that one. Although, I did phrase my point as a question,
as I'm no expert on space science. My mistake.
I understood where you were coming from. These are common beginners' misconceptions.
Here's how it works (you confused a few things). We have things like mass, cross-sectional area
(important in slowing things down), density, etc.
For starters, let's use your ping pong ball, brick, and iron. Furthermore, let's assume a perfect
vacuum. If I fire them all at velocity v, they'll continue forever at velocity v. Mass doesn't make
them slow down (but it does affect how much energy I have to expend to make them go velocity v).
Now, let's get a little deeper as to why this is. All objects have mass (pretty much every
non-quantum mechanical object in existence), which is a measure of what we call inertia. Inertia is
just a fancy word that basically states that an object with mass resists changes to its motion
(Newton's eponymous first law). This means point masses tend to travel in straight lines if they were
already doing that. Or it could simply be stopped (it won't just spontaneously start moving for no
reason). What all this means is that a ton of iron is a hell of a lot harder to stop than a 1/4oz
ping pong ball. (Newton's 2nd law: force required to change something is proportional to its mass,
i.e. the heavier it is, the more ass you have to put into it to move, the "more mass, more ass"
principle) This is where your slowing down question comes in.
Now, let's assume that our thought-experiment space is actually filled with something like air or
water. If you've ever been in a swimming pool, river, or gale, you know that both air and water can
definitely slow you down or move you about. This is called "resistance", and it's basically a form of
Newton's 3rd law (every action has an equal and opposite reacion). Now, let's assume two objects of
equal mass, but one is a really large sheet while the other is compact like a bullet. Moving through
the water/air/solar wind/intergalactic hydrogen medium, this stuff exerts force on our objects as
they pass through. However, the sheet interacts with a lot more of the medium, since it has a larger
cross-sectional area per unit mass, so it slows down more quickly than our compact bullet. This is
why a feather floats to the ground slowly, while a rock simply falls. On a more significant scale, at
sufficient speeds, lots of heat gets generated by friction. This is pretty good for us, since the
atmosphere protects us from debris from space.
This smells of political back-scratching, not a solution to a problem.
That smell...that's the smell of shit. And napalm burning. Oh dear...is our country on fire? I say...we better go smother it with these exceedingly flammable dollars!
so obama did in 30 days what it took dubya three years to do and we're still hearing more about what michelle is wearing on any particular day than where the stimulus money is going. it's going to be a fun next 10 years or more...
Took W a little more than 3 years to blow $2x10^12. He got started with eroding civil liberties about a year in, though.
But then again, Tolkien warned us what power does.
Enlighten us. How did Tolkien warn us about power?
I think a fitting quote, from John Dalberg, Baron of Acton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
The problem you really seem to have is that somehow you believe you whole country comes to a stop when a president dies. They are just another elected official, they whole idea of commander in chief is crazy. The whole power base should be distributed with clear areas of responsibility and liability, less focus on the president and much more focus on all the other positions, positions which in reality should be by individuals who have been elected to a position of trust by the people.
The whole idea of random political appointments with only limited oversight is not really all that healthy and is readily abuses. At the very least all major positions within the administration should be filled by sitting members from the house of representatives, you are already paying them enough, why employ additional political hanger ons.
All decisions by the administration should be subject to to continual review by the supposedly 'representative' houses and in reality should reflect the views of many people rather than just one. You are no electing a King or Queen and in many countries the 'president' is just a figure head whose power is basically limited to ensuring that the rest of governments sticks to the legislated rules.
So lose a president should basically be just a 'whoops', replace them with another and the system keeps ticking along fine, where one person can have such a profound influence over everybody else's lives even for just eight years is really wrong and people will suffer for it, as the recent past has clearly demonstrated.
Well, technically, congress is supposed to have the keys, not the president. He's just there to keep bad legislation from getting through, even if congress approves it. Really, it should be much more difficult for a president to not veto a bill than it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Addendum:
Has BHO undone anything much of Bush's that benefits you?
Well, he reopened up the archival process and promised to make his office more transparent. He's also pledged to close Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay! No more of this national security crap."
Okay. So he did. Did he end the NSA wiretapping? That seems a little more dangerous to me. What? You say he voted to give the telecoms immunity in that one? Oh the horror!
I know it must be hard for you to bear, having a responsible centrist president. But fortunately THESE election results were valid, unlike your Mr. Chimp's first election by judge. It shows your real character, that winning is more important to you than democracy. So I don't feel too sorry for you. In fact, I'm glad the Republicans have become the marginalized party of the deep south, religious fanatics, and wingnuts everywhere. Please, please run Palin for president! That would guarantee another four years of Obama. Seriously, you guys just need to form a new conservative party. Your current one is deceased.
Centrist!=responsible any more than left/right-wing==irresponsible.
You want responsible? Don't look at BHO. He just ballooned your personal debt to $42521.12 (individual share = total debt/population). That's debt you can't escape by filing bankruptcy. And if you don't pay it, <hyperbole>Dog the bounty hunter will come to your door with a Swat team of</hyperbole> IRS agents and take your freedom.
Bush wasn't particularly responsible in a lot of ways. I most certainly didn't agree with his actions regarding my freedoms enumerated in the constitution. I didn't agree with a lot of his fiscal policy, either. Especially towards the end. He wasn't the worst president, but he aslo wasn't the best. However, this isn't about him. He can never be president again. I wash my hands of him as much as I can.
Now, let's address your messiah, Obama. Noted in various sources to have been one of the most liberal senators in office (when he showed up for a vote), he arose out of nowhere in the political landscape and won his elections by invalidating his opponents' candidacies (not challenging the election counts, or mudslinging, he literally made himself the only choice).
He promised Hope(tm) and Change(tm) and to Clean Up Washington(tm). And how does he Change(tm) things? Hmmm, let's see. Looks like a more liberal version of the Clinton administration (complete with insiders from the original Clinton administration!). Obama also seems to have a distinct preference for nominating people for his cabinet who have tax issues. Definitely a Change(tm) we can all Believe(tm) in.
He promised responsibility, but we got a pork-laden "stimulus" package with such gems as more funding for ACORN and MoveOn.org. Certainly these wonderful organizations simply want to empower you! What's that? You went to ACORN and asked them to help you get out the vote for Ron Paul? Oh, right. They want to empower you only so long as you vote for their approved candidate. I knew there was a catch in there.
"But...", I hear you say, "he's upstanding and honest, a real bang up guy who wants to stand up for me!" O`Rly? That's why his VP is one Joeseph Biden, a known copyright hound. That's why three of his top appointments to the justice dept were lawyers for the RIAA. You know, the RIAA that seems to think suing children, grandmothers, disabled people, state universities, and laser printers is a good business model. That's why he stands up for more regulation and law like Roe v Wade which purports a right to privacy, but in reality just usurps state control for the federal government. That must be why he wants to send your money to other countries to support abortion. Surely that's out of the goodness of his heart.
I could go o
In reality, college students probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're like welfare recipients. Why? Because they're usually in debt. Debt can make a man do things he wouldn't normally do.
You mean like anyone who's taken out a mortgage? I don't know about you but most people get a 30 year loan on several hundred thousand dollars and are in debt until they're 50 at the earliest and it's for a *lot* more money than college tuition (generally). I think you just axed the overwhelming majority of voters in one fell swoop.
I'm not a lawyer, so I painted with a broad brush. I was also addressing the parent's college-student remark. At the moment, I don't have time to think of every exclusive condition and narrow my classification. Add to that the fact that college students as a collective are extremely irresponsible (disclaimer: guilty) people, and that colors my point. I'm not trying to pick on people for the hell of it.
Believe it or not, the debt being in control bit was something I had read a few years back, by the CEO of Heartland Trucking (he goes on about why debt is a bad thing, not just because it's expensive). The essay struck me, as it made all sorts of sense.
Why does Santa Claus have a pair of katanas?
He's referring to xkcd, not Robot Chicken.
I'd like to believe that such an outcome is beyond the realm of possibility, but the RIAA has links into the Obama administration through Biden, so such a swindle could indeed occur all kidding aside. One of the side effects of electing the Democrats this time around is granting the entertainment industry, with all of their special interests, enhanced access to the government pocketbook and the federal prosecutor.
Just as dangerous are the federal judges he has the power to appoint, combined with majority party blind support in both houses.
I wonder if any of the young college students who voted for Obama factored this into their decision. They may soon come to regret Obama's VP choice and his ties to the MAFIAA on a very personal level.
Do you really give them that much credit? I highly doubt 99% considered anything beyond the "four legs good, two legs bad" mentality that they have crammed into their heads.
In reality, college students probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're like welfare recipients. Why? Because they're usually in debt. Debt can make a man do things he wouldn't normally do. So they're more prone to be bought off by promises of "lower tuition!", "more tuition aid!", "easier to obtain loans!", and so on. Don't forget the perennial "your enemies are the corporations!", "their only goal is to make the wealthy wealthier!". Of course, this isn't much different from pandering to pensioners on social security. They party in charge wants to keep a constituency beholden to them in the next election. And if they can get a perpetual "cannot-kill" program that the other party generally disagrees with or wants to change, they can reap the benefits for multiple election cycles. Of course, disenfranchising beholden voters is an effective way to do this, but it foments civil unrest.
On the bright side, I'm seeing far more libertarian support when people aren't forced into a binary choice.
there might be some nuiances I'm unaware of that would allow them to weasel-out of the intended process.
You mean like promoting the janitor to the position in question and telling him to "Go get 'em, tiger!"?
No2ID have the right idea. But... they really, really need to get their PR machine working. There's next to nothing ever mentioned about them anywhere. They need to be organizing much more high profile stuff. They need to be getting in the press regularly and frequently.
That's a major affirmative.
I'm in the US and I've attempted to contact them a couple of times about potentially expanding to help fight similar foolishness in the US. After all, it seems like whatever one idiot English-speaking country does, the rest soon follow, whether or not it's a sensible idea. Noone ever got back to me.
Perhaps No2ID is actually an MI6 honeypot operation.
drugs coming from a bunch of guys in their garages
As long as experts contribute, there shouldn't be a problem. Maybe a registration with credentials would be good.
Minor problem. Who gets to determine that some researcher isn't an expert, as opposed to that biochem college dropout who knows what he's doing, as opposed to the well meaning schmo whose job is construction, but he knows some folk remedies, as opposed to a methamphetamine dealer whose knowledge of how to brew some rocks is exceeded only by his stupidity in smoking around ether?
That's right folks. You read it here first!
This week's educational film will be "Groundbreaking Discoveries of the 21st Centuty!" followed "Zinc Oxide and You".
More shocking discoveries of the 21st Century! Science shows that an absolute first post can, in fact, be redundant, despite there being no preceeding posts on, or off, topic!
Plus, most of the material you're removing will end up in orbit...giving our moon a stunning ring system...Who wouldn't want to go there then? Yeah I know the interaction with the Earth makes setting up a lunar-synchronous orbit very difficult and pretty much precludes any sort of ring system...but just imagine how pretty it'd be!
Actually, it sounds exceptionally dangerous to incoming spacecraft...
They've had rovers on Mars for several years now... a 3 hour tour turned long term expedition. All they need to do is the same thing.... with a shovel.
The moon is closer, and gets the same sunlight as Earth versus less than half on Mars. Other than dealing with several weeks of dark when the moon faces earth there's not much difference as Mars has to shut down for "winter" when sunlight drops below enough to recharge the batteries.
Added advange on Luna: no weather to blow moondust and coat solar cells in dust. They'll stay mostly clean pretty much forever.
I even have Idle set to NO, but still this showed up. Ug.
And yet, even you came to the dark side, and posted...for shame.
This is one of those guys that was navel gazing back in the 60's and figured out how to get a PHD out of it.
It looks like he somehow beat Darwin's odds and achieved that...
I wish I'd managed to get a PhuD out of that. Easiest A++ ever!
If robots could be used in construction this complex, they already would. Right up here in Minnesota, there is a huge need for road repair and construction. If there was any way to automate the process more than it already is, it would be done by now. Any robot that could withstand the punishment of construction work would need to be very heavy, and also have a lot of redundancy built into it. It's one thing to make a little mini-rover with a camera and some sampling equipment. It's quite another to put a Caterpillar, cement truck, and support equipment up there, and expect it not to break. Sorry, but human beings need to be there... There are some things robots just can't do -- like repair themselves automatically. And I mean that in practical real-world terms, not in the laboratory.
Build it on Earth first and make it work, then we'll talk about the moon.
Think of this as a way to redistribute the wealth involved in those porkulus packages. After all, it's about creating jobs.
Now, these things reside in their respective spheres. Developing robots to pave Earthbound roads is way more expensive than hiring some semi-skilled out-of-work guys to stand around while the two-lane highway is reduced to one-way traffic.
However, developing something like this for the moon, where not much changes in the course of a day, makes sense.
It also employs downsized engineers and other smart people. And when they get paid, they run right to the store and blow it on a big TV! And that makes the economy go!
First post, from a small robot, on the moon!
That small anonymous robot should be FIRED
from a CANNON
into the SUN!
That's right folks. You read it here first!
This week's educational film will be "Groundbreaking Discoveries of the 21st Centuty!" followed "Zinc Oxide and You".
It's not like companies can just say, "Wait a minute... if we don't lay people off and/or cut wages... this recession will end!" If that were possible we wouldn't have recessions at all.
Theoretically, they could do exactly that. That's not the problem.
The problem is actually the old "The markets can stay irrational for much longer than you can stay solvent" problem
OK, OK. Looks like a made mistake on that one. Although, I did phrase my point as a question, as I'm no expert on space science. My mistake.
I understood where you were coming from. These are common beginners' misconceptions.
Here's how it works (you confused a few things). We have things like mass, cross-sectional area (important in slowing things down), density, etc.
For starters, let's use your ping pong ball, brick, and iron. Furthermore, let's assume a perfect vacuum. If I fire them all at velocity v, they'll continue forever at velocity v. Mass doesn't make them slow down (but it does affect how much energy I have to expend to make them go velocity v).
Now, let's get a little deeper as to why this is. All objects have mass (pretty much every non-quantum mechanical object in existence), which is a measure of what we call inertia. Inertia is just a fancy word that basically states that an object with mass resists changes to its motion (Newton's eponymous first law). This means point masses tend to travel in straight lines if they were already doing that. Or it could simply be stopped (it won't just spontaneously start moving for no reason). What all this means is that a ton of iron is a hell of a lot harder to stop than a 1/4oz ping pong ball. (Newton's 2nd law: force required to change something is proportional to its mass, i.e. the heavier it is, the more ass you have to put into it to move, the "more mass, more ass" principle) This is where your slowing down question comes in.
Now, let's assume that our thought-experiment space is actually filled with something like air or water. If you've ever been in a swimming pool, river, or gale, you know that both air and water can definitely slow you down or move you about. This is called "resistance", and it's basically a form of Newton's 3rd law (every action has an equal and opposite reacion). Now, let's assume two objects of equal mass, but one is a really large sheet while the other is compact like a bullet. Moving through the water/air/solar wind/intergalactic hydrogen medium, this stuff exerts force on our objects as they pass through. However, the sheet interacts with a lot more of the medium, since it has a larger cross-sectional area per unit mass, so it slows down more quickly than our compact bullet. This is why a feather floats to the ground slowly, while a rock simply falls. On a more significant scale, at sufficient speeds, lots of heat gets generated by friction. This is pretty good for us, since the atmosphere protects us from debris from space.
Hopefully that helps you.
To whom it concerns
We are giving you notice that you, BadAnalogyGuy, will be the subject of a subpoena. You have 14 days to respond.
- Maryland Supreme Court
P.S. And you're gayer.
On second thought, maybe he should've posted AC.
As with yesterday's story we now begin to see the reality of the 'stimulus bill' - endless pork, pandering to special interests, and earmarks.
Ironically, I prefer the smell of real swine to this shit. Pig shit I can stand. Political shit is just nasty.
This smells of political back-scratching, not a solution to a problem.
That smell...that's the smell of shit. And napalm burning. Oh dear...is our country on fire? I say...we better go smother it with these exceedingly flammable dollars!
so obama did in 30 days what it took dubya three years to do and we're still hearing more about what michelle is wearing on any particular day than where the stimulus money is going. it's going to be a fun next 10 years or more...
Took W a little more than 3 years to blow $2x10^12. He got started with eroding civil liberties about a year in, though.
But then again, Tolkien warned us what power does.
Enlighten us. How did Tolkien warn us about power?
I think a fitting quote, from John Dalberg, Baron of Acton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
BO rocks!
Actually, America has a BO problem at the moment. Don't be fooled. Adding a lump of sugar to the poison doesn't make any less poisonous.
FYI, GW did this as well. Every president is going to do some things right, and a lot of them wrong.
Never forget, the goal of the presidents since the USA were founded has been to expand their own power. BHO will be no different in this respect.
I'm curious to know what critical cyber security projects or activities are "shovel ready" and awaiting funding...
Hopefully, "shovel-ready" means those projects are ready to be dead and buried, for a change.
The problem you really seem to have is that somehow you believe you whole country comes to a stop when a president dies. They are just another elected official, they whole idea of commander in chief is crazy. The whole power base should be distributed with clear areas of responsibility and liability, less focus on the president and much more focus on all the other positions, positions which in reality should be by individuals who have been elected to a position of trust by the people.
The whole idea of random political appointments with only limited oversight is not really all that healthy and is readily abuses. At the very least all major positions within the administration should be filled by sitting members from the house of representatives, you are already paying them enough, why employ additional political hanger ons.
All decisions by the administration should be subject to to continual review by the supposedly 'representative' houses and in reality should reflect the views of many people rather than just one. You are no electing a King or Queen and in many countries the 'president' is just a figure head whose power is basically limited to ensuring that the rest of governments sticks to the legislated rules.
So lose a president should basically be just a 'whoops', replace them with another and the system keeps ticking along fine, where one person can have such a profound influence over everybody else's lives even for just eight years is really wrong and people will suffer for it, as the recent past has clearly demonstrated.
Well, technically, congress is supposed to have the keys, not the president. He's just there to keep bad legislation from getting through, even if congress approves it. Really, it should be much more difficult for a president to not veto a bill than it is.