c) The physical evidence that not only refutes Sgrena, but displays the exceptional skill of the American military from the report: he fired another burst, walking the rounds from the ground on the passenger's side of the vehicle and towards the car's engine block in an attempt to disable it. The rounds hit the right and front sides of the vehicle, deflated the left front tire, and blew out the side windows He shot at the engine block, and managed to put a round through the windshield and blow out the side windows. Yessir, that's exceptional skill all right.
d) satellites recorded the entire incident... and further exonerate the US military of any wrongdoing. The US government claims it has this data. It's a good thing we all know the government would never ever lie about anything, isn't it? Where can we review this data ourselves, so we don't have to take the word of a party who has a lot riding on the outcome?
f) The fact that no one in the media or public forum seems concerned that Italy is engaged in the deceptive and dangerous practice of rewarding terrorists First, how is that relevant to the question of whether they should have machinegunned that car? Unless your position is, the Italians deserved to die, and the soldiers did it on purpose? Second, I'd agree that rewarding terrorists (or criminals, as the case may be, we all know that the occupying forces have failed to provide an adequate level of security for the population, and kidnapping for profit is rampant) is a bad idea. Third, terrorists? They're all folking terrorists. The guys who kidnap people for profit, the guys on all sides who kidnap people for political reasons (that would include those where the kidnapees end up being tortured in Egypt or transported to Gitmo, no less than the cases where they get their head cut off on-camera), and the guys who machinegun civilian cars.
I don't think big conspiracy here. I just think the Army always tries to protect its own, all the way up the chain of command. You may remember that after the murder of 504 civilians at My Lai, none of the murderers ever did jail time. They're saying none of the responsible officers had any clue what went on at Abu Ghraib (or elsewhere, apparently). That's just not credible. (If it were, the criminals who committed those acts should do long stints appropriate to sex crimes. Sex crimes? That's what they'd call it if I forced your sister to masturbate in public at gunpoint, right? Should it be different if the victim is an Iraqi male?)
The point is there are no laws against what you named. Felon's broke the law and thus are punished.
No, the point was, it doesn't have squat to do with "the rights of others". Selling drugs impacts the rights of others far less than talking on your cell while driving your Hummer. Your point is, "anyone who breaks a rule should be punished". That's a different point, one that I might even agree with, if you could convince me that it would be equally enforced no matter how rich, how powerful, what color, or whether you work for "the government".
BTW, that apostrophe breaks a rule, but I hope they go easy on you.
How exactly would selling drugs to willing buyers (a felony in some circumstances) be ignoring the rights of others.. When one of those buyers is a mothers who then gives birth to a malformed crack-baby. When one of those buyers gets so addicted to meth that his teeth fall out. When one of those buyers looses the will to live and dies in a dim corner. alone, in desperation.
Oh. Like: Selling alcohol to a mother who then gives birth to a fetal-alcohol syndrome baby. Selling tobacco to someone who smokes indoors exposing others to the toxic fumes. Selling Cheetos to a lardbutt who ends up needing a quadruple bypass. Selling a cellphone to someone who talks while driving and kills a family in the process. Selling weapons to a government that uses them to attack third-world countries and kill tens of thousands of people. Selling a TV to somebody who doesn't get enough exercise. Selling a Hummer to someone who pisses away our oil and pollutes our air with it.
I am not likely to trust the company, or my supervisor, with thousands of dollars of my equipment and information.are likely to trust them with thousands of dollars, money owed you in pay, money that they must deposit in your retirement account. You trust them to correctly add up your time, and to pay you for all hours you work for the company. You trust them not to permit the company go belly-up, failing to make payroll, and you trust they will maintain insurance to cover you if you are injured on the job. You trust them not to ask, tell, or pressure you into doing anything illegal or unethical.
Do you really think no worker has ever been stiffed by their employers?
No-one is objecting to credit checks being performed on individual workers.
But would you believe, some would object to workers pulling credit reports on potential supervisors and individuals in management, in order to check their trustworthiness.
Why not concentrate... on vehicles that are actually useful and that normal people might buy, like GM's 2007 GMT-900 platform (Tahoe/Suburban/Yukon/Yukon XL/Escalade)
Eh.. normal people don't buy those trucks (you left out the Hummer, though I'm not positive if it will be the same platform, like it is now). People who buy those a) are advertising their supposed virility, b) tow things like Airstreams, horse trailers, or yachts (same as a., but have more money), or c) use them as work trucks at the local quarry/clearcut operation/ranch.
Why would you pay income taxes on money you spend? An income tax means you pay money on income, not expenses.
do I pay taxes on the amount that the installation of a pool increased the value of my property?
Only when you sell the property. Then it becomes income. Before that, see, it's not income, so no tax.
The point I'm trying to make is that your proposal would only make sense if income were as clear-cut as someone making a salary. It's not.
I own a business. Believe me, I know that not all income is as clear-cut as making a salary.
And the proposal to do it all with a sales tax would only make sense if all purchases were as clear-cut as buying a box of tissues. With a sales tax, you'd pay tax on the $1500 you spent to put in the pool. Your renters would pay tax on their purchase from you (unless residential rent is exempted). And whoever eventually bought your property would pay tax on the whole purchase price. Meanwhile, you'd pay sales tax on that thousand shares of Enron you bought. Because, like you say, it's important to avoid opportunities for the wealthy to game the system. I do agree with you there, I really do. A strict sales tax would also disambiguate the tax code and keep the government's nose out of your business. But I think the proponents of special exemptions are even more vociferous with sales taxes.
You see, many proponents of sales tax claim that some goods, like a share of Enron, or real estate, or a new automobile, or the bill for your corporation's outsourced IT, shouldn't be subject to sales tax. Even though "disambiguation" would require it to apply to all purchases of goods or services.
Eliminating the income tax would eliminate a huge web of corruption.
The problem isn't that it's an income tax. The problem is the vast web of exceptions, special cases, special breaks and privileges, etc. A flat percentage would avoid all that. Not a bogus "flat tax" like the right wingnuts want, that exempts their personal sources of wealth so their personal tax is zero. But a true flat tax that taxes all money coming in from any source whatsoever (wages, tips, dividends, capital gains, interest, inheritances, gifts, profits) to every legal person (both "natural" people and corporations). No exceptions aside from a fixed personal deduction (you get to deduct, say, $8K, or whatever the poverty-line income for a single person is, I get to deduct $8K, BillG gets to deduct $8K, and General Motors gets to deduct $8K).
A sales tax doesn't cut it unless it applies to all sales aside from food and clothing. That would include business services such as lawyers, architects, advertising, accountants, stock purchases, etc.
That's because you've never seen HDTV. Shit me a brick, it is amazing. It's so good, I won't watch a show unless it's in HDTV anymore.
Pretty much all the channels I get on my (lo-res) TV have crap for content. How is it better that the crap be hi-res?
HDTV will cost the consumer more. You're bragging about spending close to $1000 for your HDTV setup (with the card, but not counting the rest of the price of your computer), granted that will come down, but will it come down below the $70 I paid for my current TV? HD programming will cost more to produce, which if anything will mean money stolen from the other things that make up content.
Tell me how HDTV is going to mean better programming, programming with fewer commercials, programming with more diverse points of view than the [rightwing | liberal] corporate POV, and maybe there's something to discuss.
they failed her background check on her name on file with the credit bureaus not matching the name on her application. They also dragged ass fixing the problem
What we need is to hold companies (credit bureaus) that sell personal information legally responsible for both real and consequential damages in the event that the information is untrue, erroneous, or improperly used. No excuses about ineptness. They could protect themselves in the first two cases by requiring that the people they get information from guarantee its accuracy. The credit bureau could protect themselves in the last case by requiring that the people they sell information to guarantee it will not be misused.
But the victim needs a clear party to hold responsible, and the middleman who's making money selling the information is the obvious choice.
Just because you own something, doesn't mean you can control absolutely what happens to it.
Ah, you must be new to the 21st century, sir.
And by the way, that molecule of nitrogen you just inhaled, that's mine. That's the trouble with public places, it's hard to control just where property wanders to, but it's private property just the same, anything else would be to attack the sacred foundations of our society. Seeing as you didn't know I'll let the licensing fee slide just this once.
I'm writing this on a 450MHz P2 with 256M RAM. It's also operating as a (ftp/p2p) file server and uploading at about 900Kb/s into my DSL line. I can burn CDs, do realtime audio recording and editing, and run a music notation program (word processor for printed music) without shutting down the file server. I don't suppose it would do well with modern games, but in a work environment that might even be considered a feature.
The vast majority of work tasks are web, mail, spreadsheet, word processing. Almost any box that lights up will work.
If you make under (don't quote me) 2K a year then you don't have a business according to the IRS, you have a hobby.
The (US) IRS is careful to keep the rules fuzzy, so that they can be as arbitrary as they want. However, they will presume that it is a business (and not a hobby) if you show (& report, & pay taxes on) a profit in 3 of the last 5 years. (If you're a member of the horse set, you only need 2 of the last 7.) Google "irs business profit hobby" for more info.
Intellectual property is similar to any other sort of property, ie., ownership.
Nah, it's very different. It is a temporary monopoly granted by the government. Ownership doesn't have an expiration date.
With other property, you own the object. I can't take the object from you (without your permission), but I can copy it without affecting or lessening your possession in any way. The only value of intellectual "property" lies in its artificial monopoly.
MS anti-spyware spotted [Mercora] trying to install the grokster adware bundle. Good catch.
MS anti-spyware is a product in the grand tradition of MSAV. It detects a registry setting for magnet links, and thinks that means you've installed Grokster and its accompanying adware.
Microsoft Antispyware Beta running on it immediately detected an adware bundle (starts with a "G", I forgot the exact name)
Grokster. Mercora. Compare the two. They both have the matching string "er" preceded by an "o". Yup, same thing. And after all, who knows more about insecure programs than MS?
Yeah, it's a false alarm. Try AdAware. Maybe eventually MS will get their antispyware program working properly, or maybe it will follow the path of Microsoft AntiVirus (remember that POS? Granted, it was a while ago, and soon slipped into richly deserved oblivion.)
MS Antispyware isn't ready for prime time yet, it gives false positives (it also flags the open-source P2P program Shareaza, which perhaps coincidently was written by the same guy as Mercora). Could it be MS just doesn't like P2P? (Pest Patrol is another that thinks all P2P programs are spyware.)
n the UK, we have something called the 'Data Protection Act', and part of this means that you have the right to obtain the personal information that a company holds on you
Not in the USA. That might cause some trifling expense or inconvenience to the corporations that compile and sell massive amounts of data upon our citizens. If people could view their data, or know what was being held on them, or correct false data, or hold the corporations liable for damages suffered due to their dissemination of false data, why... it would be anarchy!
The US government didn't have anything to do with shutting off this website.
You know this exactly how?
Of course, you could be right, but it's certainly not clear. The USG is one of the obvious suspects, having both ability and motive.
Mind you, it seems to me that it's kind of asking for trouble for a organization that has political views the USG might disagree with to use a hosting company located in a place susceptible to USG pressure. If I was going to have a Falun Gong website, I probably wouldn't choose a Chinese hosting company.
As soon as the AT&T breakup happened, lots of cheap touch tone phones flooded the market and people upgraded.
Or downgraded. I'd say the peak of landline technology was the touchtone version of the phone in the article. Compared to those, most phones since have just been cheap crap. Cheap crap with lots more features, granted, but show me anything since that equals the reliability, that has as well-designed a handset.
When they just rented the phone to you, and if it didn't work they'd have to send a guy in a truck to your house, they built 'em to last.
It may not be of any real quality, but let's face it, people DO get something... relatively usable... even from Microsoft and Bill Gates... They don't rob people without giving back.
What's your point? When you use a hooker, or bet with the bookie, or buy drugs, or go to a loan shark, or buy a TV out of a guy's van that's cheaper than you'd normally pay, you get something relatively usable (for certain values of "usable") for your money, too.
Saddam Hussein = totalitarian dictatorship not giving anyone any rights only Saddam has power, absolute and totally corrupted power...
True. And Saudi Arabia = totalitarian dictatorship (an "absolute monarchy") without giving anyone any rights (especially women), only the royal family has power, absolute and totally corrupted power... And Burma (only there, it's a military dictatorship), and North Korea (only there, unlike Saddam, they maybe have weapons of mass destruction, and in any case have the ability to flatten Seoul with conventional artillery), and Belarus (a country best known for shooting down and killing the pilots of an off-course hot-air balloon), and any other of a dozen or so countries. What was your point exactly? That the USA should immediately invade all of them?
Slashdot Mirror
c) The physical evidence that not only refutes Sgrena, but displays the exceptional skill of the American military
from the report:
he fired another burst, walking the rounds from the ground on the passenger's side of the vehicle and towards the car's engine block in an attempt to disable it. The rounds hit the right and front sides of the vehicle, deflated the left front tire, and blew out the side windows
He shot at the engine block, and managed to put a round through the windshield and blow out the side windows. Yessir, that's exceptional skill all right.
d) satellites recorded the entire incident... and further exonerate the US military of any wrongdoing.
The US government claims it has this data. It's a good thing we all know the government would never ever lie about anything, isn't it? Where can we review this data ourselves, so we don't have to take the word of a party who has a lot riding on the outcome?
f) The fact that no one in the media or public forum seems concerned that Italy is engaged in the deceptive and dangerous practice of rewarding terrorists
First, how is that relevant to the question of whether they should have machinegunned that car? Unless your position is, the Italians deserved to die, and the soldiers did it on purpose? Second, I'd agree that rewarding terrorists (or criminals, as the case may be, we all know that the occupying forces have failed to provide an adequate level of security for the population, and kidnapping for profit is rampant) is a bad idea. Third, terrorists? They're all folking terrorists. The guys who kidnap people for profit, the guys on all sides who kidnap people for political reasons (that would include those where the kidnapees end up being tortured in Egypt or transported to Gitmo, no less than the cases where they get their head cut off on-camera), and the guys who machinegun civilian cars.
I don't think big conspiracy here. I just think the Army always tries to protect its own, all the way up the chain of command. You may remember that after the murder of 504 civilians at My Lai, none of the murderers ever did jail time. They're saying none of the responsible officers had any clue what went on at Abu Ghraib (or elsewhere, apparently). That's just not credible. (If it were, the criminals who committed those acts should do long stints appropriate to sex crimes. Sex crimes? That's what they'd call it if I forced your sister to masturbate in public at gunpoint, right? Should it be different if the victim is an Iraqi male?)
The point is there are no laws against what you named. Felon's broke the law and thus are punished.
No, the point was, it doesn't have squat to do with "the rights of others". Selling drugs impacts the rights of others far less than talking on your cell while driving your Hummer. Your point is, "anyone who breaks a rule should be punished". That's a different point, one that I might even agree with, if you could convince me that it would be equally enforced no matter how rich, how powerful, what color, or whether you work for "the government".
BTW, that apostrophe breaks a rule, but I hope they go easy on you.
How exactly would selling drugs to willing buyers (a felony in some circumstances) be ignoring the rights of others..
When one of those buyers is a mothers who then gives birth to a malformed crack-baby.
When one of those buyers gets so addicted to meth that his teeth fall out.
When one of those buyers looses the will to live and dies in a dim corner. alone, in desperation.
Oh. Like:
Selling alcohol to a mother who then gives birth to a fetal-alcohol syndrome baby.
Selling tobacco to someone who smokes indoors exposing others to the toxic fumes.
Selling Cheetos to a lardbutt who ends up needing a quadruple bypass.
Selling a cellphone to someone who talks while driving and kills a family in the process.
Selling weapons to a government that uses them to attack third-world countries and kill tens of thousands of people.
Selling a TV to somebody who doesn't get enough exercise.
Selling a Hummer to someone who pisses away our oil and pollutes our air with it.
I guess I understand.
I am not likely to trust the company, or my supervisor, with thousands of dollars of my equipment and information.are likely to trust them with thousands of dollars, money owed you in pay, money that they must deposit in your retirement account. You trust them to correctly add up your time, and to pay you for all hours you work for the company. You trust them not to permit the company go belly-up, failing to make payroll, and you trust they will maintain insurance to cover you if you are injured on the job. You trust them not to ask, tell, or pressure you into doing anything illegal or unethical.
Do you really think no worker has ever been stiffed by their employers?
No-one is objecting to credit checks being performed on individual workers.
But would you believe, some would object to workers pulling credit reports on potential supervisors and individuals in management, in order to check their trustworthiness.
Your wife and child need to be your #1 priority, not your (nutty, IMO) political beliefs.
Hmm.. would that also hold true for people in (or thinking of joining) the military or national guard?
Why not concentrate... on vehicles that are actually useful and that normal people might buy, like GM's 2007 GMT-900 platform (Tahoe/Suburban/Yukon/Yukon XL/Escalade)
Eh.. normal people don't buy those trucks (you left out the Hummer, though I'm not positive if it will be the same platform, like it is now). People who buy those a) are advertising their supposed virility, b) tow things like Airstreams, horse trailers, or yachts (same as a., but have more money), or c) use them as work trucks at the local quarry/clearcut operation/ranch.
Do I pay taxes on that $1500 or not?
Why would you pay income taxes on money you spend? An income tax means you pay money on income, not expenses.
do I pay taxes on the amount that the installation of a pool increased the value of my property?
Only when you sell the property. Then it becomes income. Before that, see, it's not income, so no tax.
The point I'm trying to make is that your proposal would only make sense if income were as clear-cut as someone making a salary. It's not.
I own a business. Believe me, I know that not all income is as clear-cut as making a salary.
And the proposal to do it all with a sales tax would only make sense if all purchases were as clear-cut as buying a box of tissues. With a sales tax, you'd pay tax on the $1500 you spent to put in the pool. Your renters would pay tax on their purchase from you (unless residential rent is exempted). And whoever eventually bought your property would pay tax on the whole purchase price. Meanwhile, you'd pay sales tax on that thousand shares of Enron you bought. Because, like you say, it's important to avoid opportunities for the wealthy to game the system. I do agree with you there, I really do. A strict sales tax would also disambiguate the tax code and keep the government's nose out of your business. But I think the proponents of special exemptions are even more vociferous with sales taxes.
You see, many proponents of sales tax claim that some goods, like a share of Enron, or real estate, or a new automobile, or the bill for your corporation's outsourced IT, shouldn't be subject to sales tax. Even though "disambiguation" would require it to apply to all purchases of goods or services.
Eliminating the income tax would eliminate a huge web of corruption.
The problem isn't that it's an income tax. The problem is the vast web of exceptions, special cases, special breaks and privileges, etc. A flat percentage would avoid all that. Not a bogus "flat tax" like the right wingnuts want, that exempts their personal sources of wealth so their personal tax is zero. But a true flat tax that taxes all money coming in from any source whatsoever (wages, tips, dividends, capital gains, interest, inheritances, gifts, profits) to every legal person (both "natural" people and corporations). No exceptions aside from a fixed personal deduction (you get to deduct, say, $8K, or whatever the poverty-line income for a single person is, I get to deduct $8K, BillG gets to deduct $8K, and General Motors gets to deduct $8K).
A sales tax doesn't cut it unless it applies to all sales aside from food and clothing. That would include business services such as lawyers, architects, advertising, accountants, stock purchases, etc.
>I don't think HDTV is worth the price.
That's because you've never seen HDTV. Shit me a brick, it is amazing. It's so good, I won't watch a show unless it's in HDTV anymore.
Pretty much all the channels I get on my (lo-res) TV have crap for content. How is it better that the crap be hi-res?
HDTV will cost the consumer more. You're bragging about spending close to $1000 for your HDTV setup (with the card, but not counting the rest of the price of your computer), granted that will come down, but will it come down below the $70 I paid for my current TV? HD programming will cost more to produce, which if anything will mean money stolen from the other things that make up content.
Tell me how HDTV is going to mean better programming, programming with fewer commercials, programming with more diverse points of view than the [rightwing | liberal] corporate POV, and maybe there's something to discuss.
they failed her background check on her name on file with the credit bureaus not matching the name on her application. They also dragged ass fixing the problem
What we need is to hold companies (credit bureaus) that sell personal information legally responsible for both real and consequential damages in the event that the information is untrue, erroneous, or improperly used. No excuses about ineptness. They could protect themselves in the first two cases by requiring that the people they get information from guarantee its accuracy. The credit bureau could protect themselves in the last case by requiring that the people they sell information to guarantee it will not be misused.
But the victim needs a clear party to hold responsible, and the middleman who's making money selling the information is the obvious choice.
Just because you own something, doesn't mean you can control absolutely what happens to it.
Ah, you must be new to the 21st century, sir.
And by the way, that molecule of nitrogen you just inhaled, that's mine. That's the trouble with public places, it's hard to control just where property wanders to, but it's private property just the same, anything else would be to attack the sacred foundations of our society. Seeing as you didn't know I'll let the licensing fee slide just this once.
I'm writing this on a 450MHz P2 with 256M RAM. It's also operating as a (ftp/p2p) file server and uploading at about 900Kb/s into my DSL line. I can burn CDs, do realtime audio recording and editing, and run a music notation program (word processor for printed music) without shutting down the file server. I don't suppose it would do well with modern games, but in a work environment that might even be considered a feature.
The vast majority of work tasks are web, mail, spreadsheet, word processing. Almost any box that lights up will work.
If you make under (don't quote me) 2K a year then you don't have a business according to the IRS, you have a hobby.
The (US) IRS is careful to keep the rules fuzzy, so that they can be as arbitrary as they want. However, they will presume that it is a business (and not a hobby) if you show (& report, & pay taxes on) a profit in 3 of the last 5 years. (If you're a member of the horse set, you only need 2 of the last 7.) Google "irs business profit hobby" for more info.
Maybe you should give it a read too.
:( Watch your back, the Nazgul are on their way.
I would, but it's slashdotted.
Oh christ, we've slashdotted IBM
Intellectual property is similar to any other sort of property, ie., ownership.
Nah, it's very different. It is a temporary monopoly granted by the government. Ownership doesn't have an expiration date.
With other property, you own the object. I can't take the object from you (without your permission), but I can copy it without affecting or lessening your possession in any way. The only value of intellectual "property" lies in its artificial monopoly.
MS anti-spyware spotted [Mercora] trying to install the grokster adware bundle. Good catch.
MS anti-spyware is a product in the grand tradition of MSAV. It detects a registry setting for magnet links, and thinks that means you've installed Grokster and its accompanying adware.
Microsoft Antispyware Beta running on it immediately detected an adware bundle (starts with a "G", I forgot the exact name)
Grokster. Mercora. Compare the two. They both have the matching string "er" preceded by an "o". Yup, same thing. And after all, who knows more about insecure programs than MS?
Yeah, it's a false alarm. Try AdAware. Maybe eventually MS will get their antispyware program working properly, or maybe it will follow the path of Microsoft AntiVirus (remember that POS? Granted, it was a while ago, and soon slipped into richly deserved oblivion.)
Microsoft Antispyware flagged
MS Antispyware isn't ready for prime time yet, it gives false positives (it also flags the open-source P2P program Shareaza, which perhaps coincidently was written by the same guy as Mercora). Could it be MS just doesn't like P2P? (Pest Patrol is another that thinks all P2P programs are spyware.)
n the UK, we have something called the 'Data Protection Act', and part of this means that you have the right to obtain the personal information that a company holds on you
Not in the USA. That might cause some trifling expense or inconvenience to the corporations that compile and sell massive amounts of data upon our citizens. If people could view their data, or know what was being held on them, or correct false data, or hold the corporations liable for damages suffered due to their dissemination of false data, why... it would be anarchy!
The US government didn't have anything to do with shutting off this website.
You know this exactly how?
Of course, you could be right, but it's certainly not clear. The USG is one of the obvious suspects, having both ability and motive.
Mind you, it seems to me that it's kind of asking for trouble for a organization that has political views the USG might disagree with to use a hosting company located in a place susceptible to USG pressure. If I was going to have a Falun Gong website, I probably wouldn't choose a Chinese hosting company.
As soon as the AT&T breakup happened, lots of cheap touch tone phones flooded the market and people upgraded.
Or downgraded. I'd say the peak of landline technology was the touchtone version of the phone in the article. Compared to those, most phones since have just been cheap crap. Cheap crap with lots more features, granted, but show me anything since that equals the reliability, that has as well-designed a handset.
When they just rented the phone to you, and if it didn't work they'd have to send a guy in a truck to your house, they built 'em to last.
It may not be of any real quality, but let's face it, people DO get something... relatively usable... even from Microsoft and Bill Gates... They don't rob people without giving back.
What's your point? When you use a hooker, or bet with the bookie, or buy drugs, or go to a loan shark, or buy a TV out of a guy's van that's cheaper than you'd normally pay, you get something relatively usable (for certain values of "usable") for your money, too.
God forbid a business should make money.
That's ok. They're in business to make money. By the same token, they don't deserve your loyalty or respect unless they've paid you for it.
My loyalty and respect aren't for sale.
Saddam Hussein = totalitarian dictatorship not giving anyone any rights only Saddam has power, absolute and totally corrupted power...
True. And Saudi Arabia = totalitarian dictatorship (an "absolute monarchy") without giving anyone any rights (especially women), only the royal family has power, absolute and totally corrupted power... And Burma (only there, it's a military dictatorship), and North Korea (only there, unlike Saddam, they maybe have weapons of mass destruction, and in any case have the ability to flatten Seoul with conventional artillery), and Belarus (a country best known for shooting down and killing the pilots of an off-course hot-air balloon), and any other of a dozen or so countries. What was your point exactly? That the USA should immediately invade all of them?